It’s difficult to point out how society shapes people and their beliefs. The pressure to conform is subtle and, often, unintentional —for men, at least. Women, on the other hand, have a great deal of social instruction thrown at them. Moreover, they are usually handed a large pile of expectations in their teen years. The expectations are often reinforced by the media who were heavy users of clichés and stereotype.

Today, the pressure is less obvious, but in the 1950s, the traditional image of women as nurturers and little else was endlessly repeated in new stories, advertising, and popular entertainment. Here, for example, is Peg Bracken in 1958 telling readers “My Husband Ought To Fire Me!” for not being a cost-effective source of domestic help.

If you are at all attuned to the times, you know that a housewife isn’t a housewife any more. She is a versatile expert, a skilled professional business manager, practical nurse, house cleaner, child psychologist, home decorator, chauffeur, laundress, cook, hostess — all this, besides being a gay, well-groomed companion. And she is therefore worth, at prevailing wage rates, about $20,000 a year — or, anyway, a lot more than her husband.

A lot of recent literature has tried to establish this point. Some of it is written by men, and I can’t decide whether they are chivalrous or just cowed. But that quiet tittering you hear in the back row comes from the women, who know different. Housewife, homemaker, it’s still spinach. Women are honest about the important things. This is one of their many lovable qualities.

Well, it is fun to be chucked under the chin, but reaction sets in the minute we housewives — and I think I’ll just continue to use that dirty old world — the minute we housewives really look ourselves in the eye. Practically any housewife who tots up — as I have just totted up — what she’d be worth in today’s labor market is apt to find herself in a nervous condition bordering on the shakes. From my own computations one salient fact emerges loud and clear; all my household skills together wouldn’t earn enough to maintain one small-sized guppy.

In a word, nobody would have me except a husband. What is more, I’d call this a fairly general state of affairs.

Yes, she is being humorous. But humor sits atop reality, and the reality of this article is that the American woman of the 1950s lived with assumptions about her self worth, much of it concerning her ability to cook, clean, raise children, and be pretty happy about the whole deal.

The blunt fact is most housewives are pretty good at a couple of things, fair to middling at a couple of others, and as for the rest, they do them when and if they have to, and lousily. A man never knows which one or two housewifely talents he’s getting when he marries either. No matter what good fudge she made in her bachelor-girl apartment, he can’t be sure! That is one of the things that makes marriage so exciting.

Let’s face it; we housewives are jugglers who, trying to keep a dozen nice big fresh eggs in the air, spend most of our time skidding in the shells. Once in a blue moon, for the fast wink of an eye, all the eggs stay up.

There’s an important item Peg Bracken left out of this article. One of the eggs she juggled was her career as advertising copywriter and free-lance humorist for The Saturday Evening Post. Her article doesn’t mention the pressurs of rewriting, editing, billing, or selling her work. Of the fact that she quietly supported her role as a traditional American woman with a non-traditional job.

There were millions of women like her who tried living within an old-fashioned model of womanhood while taking on un-ladylike work and “mannish” responsibilities. In time, the charade grew tiresome for many women, and they gave up supporting a social role that didn’t support them.

A “women’s liberation movement” arose in the 1960s, offering ideas and demands, some radical and some unarguably sensible. There was resistance, of course, but there were fierce defenders of women’s rights, such as Brigid Brophy who argued “Women Are Prisoners Of Their Sex” in 1963.

So brilliantly has society contrived to terrorize women with [the] threat that certain behavior is unnatural and unwomanly, that it has left them no time to consider – or even sheerly observe — what womenly nature really is. For centuries arrant superstitions were accepted as natural law. The physiological fact that only women can secrete milk for feeding babies was extended to the pure myth that it was women’s business to cook for and wait on the entire family. The kitchen became woman’s “natural” place because, for the first few months of her baby’s life, the nursery really was. To this day a woman may fear she is unfeminine if she can discover in herself no aptitude or liking for cooking.

If a woman who is irked by confinement to the kitchen merely looks around to see what other women are doing and finds they are accepting their kitchens, she may well conclude that she is abnormal and had better enlist her psychoanalyst’s help toward “living with” her kitchen. What she ought to ask is whether it is rational for women to be kept to the kitchen.

I must add a final note about Peg Bracken, who had never believed that women should like the status quo. In 1960, she published “The I Hate To Cook Book,” a humorous guide to preparing fast, easy meals and saving time for something more rewarding. Her preface announced, “Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them.” This exclusion still left a sizeable number of women: three million readers, in fact.

The book changed her life by making her a celebrity. It produced another, unexpected change when she showed the manuscript to her husband for his opinion. “It stinks,” he said. She decided then that she ought to fire her husband. They were soon divorced.

Read “My Husband Ought to Fire Me!” by Peg Bracken.

Conformity: The Ladies’ Model The Saturday Evening Post

Gropius was mainly concerned with conformity in architecture, but he recognized that buildings reflected society. And the conformity he saw in America’s buildings, and America’s cities, did not bode well for the people living in them.

Our biggest man-made objects—our cities—have steadily grown more chaotic and ugly, despite brilliant individual contributions to planning and design.

In our smaller towns people try hard to preserve a certain regional character and community spirit — a losing struggle against the conformity imposed by mass production… Man is in danger of losing his entity.

Our subservience to our own brain child, the machine, tends to stifle individual diversity and independence of thought and action—two factors which used to be strong components of the American image. We know, after all, that diversity in unity, not conformity, constitutes the fabric of democracy. Unless we can reconcile diversity with unity, we may end up as robots.

Another warning against conformity appeared in 1963 from an author no less surprising than Gropius: Hyman G. Rickover, a four-star admiral in US Navy. Rickover was one of those exceptional career officers who thrived in the regimented world of the military yet maintained a strong independent spirit. He had risen through the ranks to eventually be given the task of brining the Navy into the nuclear age. He had a reputation for being intelligent and dedicated, as well as outspoken, imperious, and intolerant of error.

In “The Decline of the Individual,” he saw conformity eroding the principals of freedom and equality in America. There was, he believed, a considerable threat —

“to individual freedom posed by huge power complexes which dominate our lives but over which we are not able to exercise control. Among these are both public and private organizations…

“In nearly all our large organizations, administration stands apart and above production. The men who do the real work of the organization are placed below the administrators who rule them. Administrators may or may not have competence in the organization’s special field of work; often they do. Unhappily they often do not.

“Nevertheless the individual who must work in a large organization, whether private or public, meets conditions of inequality not found elsewhere in our democratic society. Nor is this inequality necessarily a result of unequal human qualities; it comes because one party has behind him the power of the organization and uses it to prevail over the other. This reminds one uncomfortably of the special rights and privileges which once were enjoyed by men for no other reason than membership in a higher estate—as when society was divided into the nobility, the clergy and the third estate.

We have allowed the freedom of the individual to shrink while permitting the freedom of the organization to expand to a point where it over-shadows human liberties… Many people have been concerned over the danger of our becoming a state dominated by pressure groups.

These powerful organizations, enterprises, and lobbying groups affected many people but answered to very few.

What we must do, I submit, is find ways to curb the illegitimate powers of large organizations, both public and private.  Government bureaucracies should be made more responsive to the wishes of the voters; this means bringing them under closer control of our elective bodies. Nongovernmental organizations—labor unions, professional associations, special-interest groups, even business corporations—ought to be held more strictly to the specific mandate of their charters, as well as to “public policy.”

Unless checked, these organizations would impose standards for citizens, which would shape their lives and their thoughts. It would stifle the creative thinking we needed to solve America’s problems.

All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the “conventional wisdom.” All improvements originate in a critical mind that mistrusts the “image” projected by some powerful organism. The innovator of ideas and the social critic are essential to a free society; they are what make the society free.

Conformity would also turn compliant and rebellious Americans against each other.

Increasingly, Americans seek comfort and security through belonging to a particular segment of society. People… pattern their personal behavior on group standards. What is particularly disturbing is the resentment that tends to be generated in these closed groups against anyone who thinks independently and who must therefore at times differ from approved “group thought.”

It is a sad comment on the decline of individualism in America that the critic has no friend at court. He is tagged “controversial,” the worst that can happen to anyone in a conformist society. The “controversial’ tag makes him by definition a  “flawed” personality, not group-adjusted, one-sided, ill-informed, frustrated and motivated by ill will. Epithets may therefore be thrown at him with impunity; he may be misquoted and misrepresented, and what he says may be contemptuously dismissed as requiring no refutation whatever.

Rickover’s concern seems to have been substantiated in a Post editorial two years later, “Our Threatened Way of Life.”

If a recent poll by Lou Harris is to be believed, a phenomenal number of citizens seem to think that virtually any kind of unusual behavior is a dire peril to the American Way of Life. The question was: “We would like to know whether you think each of these different types of people is more helpful or more harmful to American life, or don’t they help or harm things much one way or the other?”

The number of activities that seem to be considered “harmful” is quite appalling. “People who don’t believe in God,” for example, are condemned as “harmful” by 72 percent, a figure even higher than the one for prostitutes (70 percent). Fully 50 percent condemn “working career women with young children” as harmful, and no less than 36 percent apply the same condemnation to “women who wear bikini bathing suits.” [was 1965 really that far back in history?] As for the younger generation, they catch it both ways — 45 percent rating it harmful to be “more interested in athletics than studies,” while 10 percent consider it harmful for students to “read books all the time.”

It is possible that the American Way of Life consists entirely of neat little people leading neat little lives in neat little houses, but we somehow doubt it. Thomas Jefferson was something less than a steady churchgoer, Henry David Thoreau served time in prison, Mark Twain was a bankrupt, and General Ulysses S. Grant was an alcoholic — to name just a few of the unorthodox men who have helped make our way of life what it is. And it is, among other things, a strong and resilient way of life, capable of absorbing and surviving our oddities, aberrations and misdemeanors.

The Price Of An Organized Society: Conformity in the 1960s The Saturday Evening Post

Even if Americans didn’t feel a troubling malaise, the media certainly made a case for it. Journalists continually wrote of problems in American society, such as racism, alienation, and materialism. They also referred to the problem of “conformity.”

There was no single definition of the term. Popular magazines and television talked of conformity as the desire to fit in: Americans, like their milk, were becoming homogenized. They were abandoning their individual differences to fit in and get ahead. A popular song of 1962, “Little Boxes,” talked of people, their lives, and their “ticky tacky” houses all looking the same. But conformity was more than just the desire to accommodate the mainstream of America.

Between 1959 and 1963, three authors, each highly regarded for his insight and judgment, weighed in on the subject.

Erich Fromm, the renowned psychologist and philosopher, wrote “Our Way Of Life Is Making Us Miserable” in 1964. The need to conform, he said, didn’t arise in Americans but in their organizations, which rewarded people…

who cooperate smoothly in large groups, who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, yet who arc willing to be commanded, to do what is expected to fit into the social machine without friction; men who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without an aim except the aim to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.

Our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucracy in which man becomes a small, well-oiled cog in the machinery. The oiling is done with higher wages, fringe benefits, well-ventilated factories and piped music, and by psychologists and “human-relations” experts; yet all this oiling does not alter the fact that man has become powerless, that he does not wholeheartedly participate in his work and that he is bored with it.

[We should give Fromm credit for recognizing his profession might be enabling the system by helping citizens endure an unfriendly system.]

The ‘organization man’ may be well fed, well amused and well oiled, yet he lacks a sense of identity because none of his feelings or his thoughts originates within himself; none is authentic. He has no convictions, either in politics, religion, philosophy or in love. He is attracted by the “latest model” in thought, art and style, and lives under the illusion that the thoughts and feelings which he has acquired by listening to the media of mass communication are his own.

He has a nostalgic longing for a life of individualism, initiative and justice, a longing that he satisfies by [watching cowboy movies.] But these values have disappeared from real life in the world of giant corporations, giant state and military bureaucracies and giant labor unions.

He, the individual, feels so small before these giants that he sees only one way to escape the sense of utter insignificance: He identifies himself with the giants and idolizes them as the true representatives of his own human powers, those of which he has dispossessed himself.

Such ideas aren’t particularly surprising, coming from a humanist and psychologist. But much of what he says was echoed by other Post contributors in the early 1960s, including a social critic from an unexpected quarter.

Next: The Vice Admiral Speaks His Mind

Did We Mortgage Our Identity? The 1960s Worries About Conformity The Saturday Evening Post