What Happened to Rosie?

They were shipyard workers, welders, factory laborers, secretaries and phone operators.  Four million additional workers were needed in industry and the armed forces during World War II, and women fulfilled much of this demand.  Encouraged by war propaganda (especially in magazines), eight million women began working during the War (Halberstam 588).   The Ladies' Home Journal Magazine pictured a woman combat pilot on one of thecovers (Halberstam 588).  Stories described "women secretly but bravely dabbing their eyes and forcing encouraging smiles upon their faces as their husbands and sons, their brothers and lovers march off to war" (Diedrich 3).   Newspapers were full of happy women doing "men's work" in factories, offices and farms.  Rosie the Riveter, a sexually attractive, strong, working woman, became a heroine (Diedrich 4).  But, two years after the War, almost two million women lost their jobs (Halberstam 588).  Some women accepted the return to home readily.  Others protested.   While the country attempted to create a new and exciting future, women's roles also changed, leading to feelings of isolation and worthlessness.  Betty Friedan later identified this changing emotion in The Feminine Mystique as a "problem that has no name."

While some magazines encouraged women during World War II to leave the home front to help the boys on the battlefields by working, government officials and other news sources reminded women that their first duty was to home.  Nancy Brown, the Detroit New Women's Advisor told women in 1940 that their, "children were still of school age.  In spite of your assertion to the contrary, they do need you.  It would not be possible for you to carry on two jobs, one outside your home and one inside" (Cott 371).  Government agencies, social workers, educators and politicians all echoed the idea that working mothers do "enormous psychic harm" to their children.  Working moms were told that "the first responsibility of women with young children in war, as in peace is to give suitable care in their homes to their children" (Cott 371).  In November, 1943, at the height of the employment demand, Governor Harry Kelly made his opinion clear when he said that:

I have yet to find any emergency that should call mothers away from home to the detriment of our youth. For the good of the Michigan of tomorrow, I ask mothers of young children to pause and consider before they seek outside employment . . . Consider your children (Cott 371).
Women generally enjoyed working, despite their difficult tasks.  Now single parents, they ran households during the trying times of food, fuel and electricity rations.  Moms were challenged to devote themselves to the labor force for the war effort, working overtime and evening shifts, and devote themselves to their families.

The government attempted to alleviate some of this stress between two demands--country and home--by creating federally funded daycare centers.  There were about 130,000 children in over 3,000 daycare centers at the height of the War (Altbach 137).  But, most mothers did not use the haphazard and ill run centers.  In January, 1942, Detroit attempted to improve the day care services by creating a committee to oversee the centers.  Thirty-seven other towns in Michigan soon followed Detroit's example.  The Lanham Acts were passed in February 1942 to appropriate funds for the construction and maintenance of daycares (Cott 372-373).  When the War ended, the funds for the daycare centers were cut off (Altbach 137).

Towards the end of the War, new studies and articles began to appear, reminding women that soon they would return joyfully to homemaking.  An article in a shipyard newspaper shortly after V-E day was entitled, "The Kitchen -- Women's Big Post-War Goal."  This article assured Americans that women really wanted to "put aside the welder's torch" and return it to the men (Berkin 67).  Magazines depicted women in work uniforms and tin hats rushing home and changing into the "ruffled apron and high heels" that epitomized 1950's femininity (Berkin 67).  Everyone expected this portrayal to be accurate.  Irene Murphy, the secretary of the Detroit Day Care Committee, observed that Americans "cling to the fantasy that women can always be dispossessed of their jobs -- that they don't need to work" (Anderson 161).  Detroit News suggested that Nature would teach women that their rightful place was indeed the home.

Other surveys showed that most women wanted something entirely different.

With all of these facts and statements, factory owners should not have been surprised that most of their female work force did not quit at the War's end.  Yet, Glenn Martin, one of these owners, asked for voluntary resignations in August, 1945, and was surprised at the low response he received (Anderson 162).  The women that left voluntarily were often pleased to stop working outside of the home.  Genevieve Trofanowski, a Detroit worker who was fired from her job, said that she thinks "a woman's place is in the home--except when there's a war on" (Anderson 162).  Others, like Mrs. Frank Neffe, a worker at the Naval Advance Depot in Tacoma, left because their husbands wanted "a wife, not a career woman"  (Anderson 162).

Eleven million soldiers returned to the United States after World War II at the same time that the war plants shut down (Diedrich 7).  The number of women in the work force dropped from 20.3 million down to 15.9 million between 1945 and 1947 (Altbach 65).  Those still working moved out of the shipyards and into more traditionally female jobs that were also low-paying.  In 1946, a woman working the night shift in a fruit and vegetable cannery made eighty-five cents an hour, while a man made one dollar an hour because of his "harder duties" (Berkin 68).

This change affected single women even more than it did the married women workers.  As Jean Andresinr, a former shipbuilder, said, "It really makes it tough on us single girls, What are we supposed to do?  I need a job badly.  I'm on my own" (Anderson 163).  A Woman's Bureau survey showed that 22% of the employed women in the Seattle-Tacoma area who lived in family groups and wanted to continue working were the sole support for themselves or their families (Anderson 163).  Many women shared in this plight of being important contributors to their family incomes and yet only being able to find low-paying jobs.

& In September, 1945, 60% of Oregon's unemployment claims were filed by women.  The same was true in March, 1946 when "more women than men from the shipyards are filing claims each week.  This was anticipated, for housewives who worked in the shipyards or aircraft industries have returned to their domestic affairs, but they are not over-looking any checks that may be coming to them (Berkin 68).  Only 40% of these ex-shipyard working women listed their previous occupations as "housewife" (Berkin 69).  Many of these women needed to keep working even after the War.

Because they were no longer allowed to work in industrial jobs, women took advantage of the expansion of clerical and service jobs in Post-WWII America, including waitresses, hairdressers, bank clerks, receptionists, computer-card punchers and secretaries.  The low birth rate of the 1930's meant that there were fewer young people now in the work forces.  And the majority of the young people decided to pursue a higher education rather than work directly after high school.  Older workers also began to retire (Altbach 44).  This left clerical and service jobs open for women who were not highly-skilled.  The jobs did require, however, a high school education, some college and even vocational training.  Sometimes, this work was part time or seasonal, making it ideal for married women as well as single women (Altbach 44).

Some women, rather than feeling the strain of low-financial resources, experienced the affluence of post-war America.  The new middle class did not need the wife's income in order to survive.  They were even able to afford cars and houses! The mass movement to the suburbs and the growth of highways created quite a new environment for women.  Suburban housing separated women from other adults, creating a feeling of isolation (Halberstam 589).  Now, women spent much of their time driving other family members around.  Driving time began to infringe on the time they used to spend at home, and frozen foods become a necessity.  The 1950's was a new world for these homemakers.

This new America continued to address the question of working women, but they now began to question it in the terms of femininity.  In 1947, a magazine article entitled "Modern Woman: The Lost Sex" noted that:

Work that entices women out of their homes and provides them with prestige only at the price of feminine relinquishment, involves a response to masculine strivings . . . She is therefore, in the dangerous position of having to live one part of her life on the masculine level, another on the feminine . . . The plain fact is that increasingly we are observing the masculinization of women and with it enormously dangerous to the children (if any) dependent on it, and to the ability of the woman, as well as her huband, to obtain sexual gratification (Moynihan 238).
A working woman was seen to "seriously damage his [her husband's] sexual capacity" because of her rivalry and competition with him.  This same article said that "the independent woman is a contradiction in terms" and that feminism was " a deep illness."  Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, the article's authors, said that "The psychosocial rule that takes form, then, is this: the more educated a woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe.  The greater the disordered sexuality in a given group of women, the fewer children they have."  They concluded that the government should reward women who have more than one child to combat this detrimental cycle (Moynihan 239).

One magazine article's title, "Nearly Half the Women in Who's Who are Single," exemplifies the prevailing attitudes about femininity in the 1950's.  Career women in 1950's short stories are unhappy, emotionally empty, "hard and brittle" (Halberstam 590).  The postwar definition of femininity was simply that the woman does not work.  Working made the woman a competitor of men.  In the process, she became aggressive and lonely.  Studies from the 1950's emphasized the idea that women were prettier and slimmer and even better smelling than their mothers had been (Halberstam 590).  Clothing in the 1950's showed off femininity as much as possible.  The clothes were constraining -- more so than any decade since the late 19th century.  Merry Widow brassieres, tight girdles, and spiked heels all added to the feminine ideal (Matthews 210).

Television and movies also saw significant changes in what was considered feminine.  Katherine Hepburn and Joan Crawford had been the 1940's models.  They were smart, sassy portrayers of office workers (Altbach 58).  In the 1950's, television began to emphasize women like Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy, who wanted to get into her husband's act, but failed weekly.  Her ambitions became ridiculous and silly.  In comparison, happy-stay-at-home-moms such as Donna Stone on the Donna Reed Show were intelligent and sweet -- everything her family needed.  In the movies, Marilyn Monroe emphasized the sexy woman (Matthews 210).  There was no place for the "girl Fridays" of the 1940's anymore.

Since working women were often considered unfeminine, many were concerned about the ambitions that a college education would give to women.  Even when men and women graduated from the same college in the same year with the same grades (although sometimes the women's grades were better), the men got better jobs with higher salaries.  Adlai Stevenson attempted to prepare women for this frustration when he gave the commencement address at Smith College in 1955.  He said that

many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debates for which their education has given them understanding and relish.  Once they read Baudelaire.  Now it is the Consumer's Guide.  Once they wrote poetry. Now it's the laundry list.  Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night.  Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities.  They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age.  But what they do is wash the diapers (Moynihan 241).
Stevenson encouraged the women to remember that the best use of their education was to help her husband.  Dale Carnegie's wife echoed this sentiment: "The two big steps that women must take are to help their husbands decide where they are going and use their pretty heads to help them get there" (Halberstam 591-592).

Other magazines continued this theme of femininity.  Careers such as teaching, nursing and social work were considered acceptable for women because they encompassed nurturing aspects of motherhood (Moynihan 243).  Annes E. Meyer wrote that "women have many careers, but only one vocation -- motherhood."  According to Meyer, the breakdown of society was caused by the "many mothers who neglect their children because they find some trivial job more interesting" (Moynihan 243).

Magazine titles reflected these ideas, including "What's Wrong with American Women," "Let's Stop Blaming Mom," "Shortage of Men?," "Isn't the Woman's Place in the Home?," "Women Aren't Men," "What Women Can Learn From Mother Eve," "Nearly Half the Women in Who's Who are Single" (Weatherford 234).  Magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, McCall's and Mademoiselle were the major reading material for young suburban housewives.  These magazines were edited by men and focused teaching the women how to manage households well and selling appliances.  The magazines seem to idealize the home, rather than addressing real needs (Halberstam 590).  McCall's in 1954 said that women need to strive for togetherness and the families in women's magazines subsequently never seemed to have conflicts.  Most of the pictures of families were taken in the family room.  As a wife in a 1954 advertisement for homes said, "When Jim comes home, our family room seems to draw us closer together"  (Halberstam 590).

While these women's magazines idealized the housewife, men's magazines did not encourage the men to respect their wives.  An add in Playboy in 1963 satirized a housewife's job:

Tired of the Rat Race?
Fed up with Job Routine?
Well, then . . . how would you like to make $8,000, $20,000
-- (as much as $50,000 and more) --
working at home in your Spare Time?
No selling!  No commuting!  No time clocks to punch!
BE YOUR OWN BOSS!!!
Yes, an Assured Lifetime Income can be yours (now),
in an easy, low-pressure, part-time job that will permit you
to spend most of each and everyday as you please.

(Matthews 213)

Men's magazines generally had an "undisguised contempt" for what they considered a housewife's "idleness."

Simon de Beauvoir had quite a different perspective when he wrote, "cooking, washing, managing her house, bringing up children, woman shows more initiative and independence than men slaving under orders . . . The woman gets more deeply into reality" (Altbach 37).  There seems to be a sharp contrast between the de-valuation of the housewife from men's magazines and the re-valuation of the housewife by studying her tasks and moving towards household industrialization.  From the mid-1930's on, the home began to interest engineers.  Lillian Gilbreth, the production engineer and efficiency expert, studied the kitchen.  She decided that neither industry nor housewives themselves knew what was needed to run a home efficiently (Altbach 35).  Home Economics textbooks in the 1940's and 1950's encouraged students to analyze "work processes, traffic patterns, and appliances in the kitchen" (Altbach 36).  These efforts to industrialize the home let housewives know that their job was important enough to be studied and analyzed.

This same industrialization had a less encouraging effect on the housewives of the 1950's.  As her job was made easier, there were less things for the American housewife to take pride in.  Prepared foods began to replace the many hours that women used to spend making meals.  Instead, they embraced the "cream-of-mushroom-soup school of cuisine," meaning that a can of this soup poured over any non-dessert food made a gourmet meal!  Betty Friedan said that women were confined to stoves in the 1950's.  But, in reality, the convenience foods, canned goods and frozen dinners made for easy cooking.  An issue of the Journal had recipes that called for canned pears, canned sweet potatoes, frozen broccoli, pudding mix, canned salmon and bakery apple pie.  Peg Braken published a cookbook in 1960 entitled I Hate to Cook Book (Matthews 211). The housewife of the 1950's was quite different from the non-industrialized house-wife of previous American history.

Housewives became more dissatisfied with staying home as the skills needed to be a housewife decreased.  They looked for anything to help fill their long days at home and discovered radio soap operas.  An April, 1947 article in the Journal noted that a housewife's day consisted of "many daily activities of a woman which require utter mindlessness."  The content of the radio soap operas did not matter so much as their accessibility to the many women who moved to the new suburbs and subsequently went days without adult conversation (Matthews 209).

Four young mothers, assorted experts and editors met by the arrangements of the Journal  to talk about the problems that housewives were experiencing.  They came up with two answers: housewives had too many demands to face and too much isolation (Matthews 212).  Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique that:

it was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States.  Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.  As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched for slip cover materials, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask of herself the silent question--"Is this all?" (Halberstam 595)
And it was a silent question.  Women of the 1950's were told that if they were unhappy, it was their own fault.  So, they kept their problems to themselves and often slipped into depression.  One psychiatrist called it the "housewife's syndrome."  Another called it the "housewife's blight"  (Halberstam 598).

An article in Life described this syndrome quite differently, though:

If there is such a thing as a 'suburban syndrome,' it might take this form: the wife, having worked before marriage or at least having been educated and soundly conditioned toward the idea that work (preferably some kind of intellectual work in an office, among men) carries prestige may get depressed being "just a housewife" (Moynihan 211).
If she manages to avoid this, she may seek other ways of venting her depression like gossiping and "raising hell at the PTA," and dominating her children.  All in all, she damages her husband and children (Matthews 211).

Rosie the Riveter had now become a depressed housewife.  Confused by the simultaneous messages that being a housewife was valueless and valuable, these women questioned their place in the world.  They made the tv dinners, drove the kids to Cub Scouts and dressed to suit their husbands.  Some women rejoiced in their roles as wives and mothers.  Others longed to know that their education was of real use for something more than advancing her husband's career.  Either way, the women needed a sense of community that the suburbs lacked.  They felt alone in their depression, yet they felt the same isolation as most of the other women in the pretty little houses in the nice little suburbs. While the majority of the women accepted their housewife roles, they trained their daughters differently.  The coming generation grew up listening to mothers who encouraged education and independence (Diedrich 7).  These daughters became the feminine revolutionaries of the 1960's and 1970's -- students of the 1950's Housewives.

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