A decade before women gained the right to vote in the U.S., the women’s rights movement was working hard to claim incremental victories. Most progress came through quiet grit, relentless recruitment, and tireless organizing.
In 1909, there were many factions of the suffrage movement, all with varying perspectives. Some wanted only partial suffrage (victory at the municipal level), while others believed that they must fight for national suffrage. The National Women’s Party was often confrontational, organizing protests and marches. The National American Woman Suffrage Association focused on lobbying. Most work was done at the grass-roots level, with women holding luncheons, lectures, and letter-writing campaigns and traveling to state capitals to make their case.
An article by May K. Warwick from the June 12, 1909, issue of the Post applauded the headway the women’s rights movement had made. In the article, Warwick enumerates the many benefits of giving women the right to vote:
The suffragists assert that their movement has been related to that of higher education for women, and they point with pride to the seven thousand women doctors, three thousand ministers and one thousand lawyers in our country, to the three hundred occupations open to women and to the thousands of women’s organizations.
The author notes that in the four states where women had the right to vote in 1909, regulations protecting women and children were enacted more quickly. This included laws that raised the age of consent, gave women the right to control their own income and property, and established free kindergarten.
Of course, things were still very different in 1909. While Warwick lobbied eloquently for the right to vote, she assured readers that women were not very interested in running for elected office.
The histories of the enfranchised states show that women have not rushed into office and that those they do hold are mainly educational and charitable. They will state that in all the parties women work in harmony with the men.
Warwick notes that if women were able to show equal pluck and determination after getting the right to vote as they did in petitioning for the right, they would prove a formidable force in American politics. Her article ends on an encouraging note:
The people of America have been stirred from their apathy and are thinking about suffrage. The race is indeed not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong; but some kind of worthy success always follows energy and courage.
It’s a good thing that the women had plenty of that energy and courage; the right to vote was still more than a decade away, and the road ahead would be a bumpy one. Protests continued throughout the 1910s. In 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns organized a suffrage parade. Opponents brought the protest to a near riot, and mounted police were called in.
Film of suffragettes marching from Newark, New Jersey to Washington, 1913.
In 1917, 200 suffragists were arrested and half were convicted following a protest at the White House. The harsh treatment of some of the women, including forced feeding in prison, bent public sympathies toward the movement.
After several false starts, the 19th amendment was eventually passed and ratified. The first presidential election in which women were permitted to vote in every state occurred in 1920. Despite this fact, many states took their sweet time ratifying the amendment. Mississippi was the last state to do so — in 1984.
In early 1917, America was still several months away from entering the Great War, but wartime production was already underway. In article from the January 20, 1917, issue of the Post, the author was astonished to find that, when women stepped into factory jobs normally done by men, they performed as well as the men, if not better. Even as he reported anecdotes from various factory managers, he cast doubt on the idea, noting that the claims “seemed incredible and altogether too much to ask readers to believe.”
“If that’s too much for you,” exclaimed this man in authority over hundreds of women workers at lathes, punches and presses, “you certainly can’t stand for a statement of some of the things that have happened right here under my own eyes.”
“Well; tell me the worst,” I replied.
The manager went on to tell the tale of a woman who could put out 51 pieces per hour to her male predecessor’s measly six. On top of that, he paid her only 19 cents an hour compared to the man’s 60 cents. (Women also broke fewer tools.)
The need for women in munitions plants created more demand for “typical” women’s jobs – stenographers and bookkeepers. Workers could be choosey, and wages began to rise; the average pay for a stenographer was $13 a week — 60 cents more than a decade earlier.
Demand was great enough that women could be assured that not even age was a detriment. An employment agent pointed out, “Do not think for a moment that gray hairs are a handicap to a woman applicant for a position of this class and character. If anything gray hairs count as a help.”
The article moves on to average wages for other workers of the era, including railroad station agents ($75/month), grocery clerks ($50/month), and bank executives ($200/month). But the larger issue of women entering the workforce – and perhaps staying – loomed large. As one manager observed, “Both American industry and American workingwomen have found out something by this experience that neither is going to forget.”
Margaret Guroff is the author of The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life (2016), from which her essay “How Bikes Built Our Highways” is adapted.
Ramona Whittaker: How did you become interested in bicycles and their impact on America’s highways?
Margaret Guroff: I saw a brief mention in a history book about how cyclists were instrumental in getting U.S. roads paved in the 1890s. Until then, I hadn’t really been aware of bikes as existing before cars, and when I started to look into the role of the bicycle in American culture, I found its influence all over—not only in the Good Roads Movement, but in the auto industry, the invention of the airplane, the development of consumer culture. The bicycle also influenced the way women dressed and it empowered women during 1890s when they were getting together to advocate for the vote.
RW: The mode of transportation became a game changer?
MG: Exactly. On bicycles, young women could get around without chaperones — which had been frowned upon before — and they could get where they were going under their own steam. Bicycling also helped people understand that exercise was good for you — something many Americans didn’t believe before the bicycle. They thought that if you did something that made your heart rate rise, you would damage your heart. A lot of people really didn’t know that if you exercise, it makes you feel stronger. And many doctors thought that you were born with a certain amount of energy. When you spent it, that was it. Doctors were very likely — particularly as adults got older — to say, “You just have to sit down, just chill.”
RW: Was that true especially for women?
MG: Yes. Proper women wore corsets to help them carry all their clothing — which could add up to 25 pounds of skirts, dresses, and stuff. A corset helped distribute this weight up and down their torsos. But all that weight and the constriction of a corset made it likely that if they stood up or moved too fast, they would faint. This created an illusion that women were weak and shouldn’t exert themselves.
RW: How did the bicycle change women’s fashion, and how did the public react?
MG: Dress reforms were actually proposed in the middle of the 19th century. Women’s rights advocates Amelia Bloomer, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton all decided to wear Turkish-style flowing pants that were weren’t constraining or heavy but were still very modest. They thought it was a much healthier way for women to dress, and they were trying to set a trend. They eventually had to give it up, because they were being harassed. Critics called the outfit a “bloomer costume.” They’d yell at these women and even throw things at them. So, bloomers didn’t catch on in the 1850s. But when the bicycle became popular at the end of the 19th century, women realized they couldn’t ride in their long, flowing skirts, and some of them started wearing the bloomers that had been advocated 40 years earlier. These women also were mocked. It’s not like it was normal for women to wear pants in 1890. A story on the front page of a tabloid called the National Police Gazette in 1893 carried the headline “She Wore Trousers” as if it was shocking that a woman would do this in public. The difference was that even though women wearing bloomers in the 1890s were getting the same kind of harassment as Amelia Bloomer did in the 1850s, they had a new motivation. They were willing to put up with mockery to be able to ride bicycles. Within just a few years, there were so many women riding bicycles that it became much more acceptable to wear pants or shorter skirts to do so.
RW: Did bicycles offer women a new form of independence and sense of freedom?
MG: Yes, it’s amazing. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said, “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.” She saw clearly that the bicycle was motivating non-activists to take political action. They thought they were just having fun, but really were turning the culture upside down.
RW: What was one of the most surprising things you learned about the bicycle in your research?
MG: One of the coolest things I learned was about the Wright brothers. Everyone knows they were bicycle mechanics, but it always seemed to me a coincidence that bicycle mechanics invented the airplane. What I discovered by reading the work of historians like Tom Crouch, who wrote a great biography of the Wright brothers called The Bishop’s Boys, was that the bicycle gave the Wrights a crucial insight into how to keep an airplane aloft. Many inventors who were working on airplanes were trying to throw something in the air that would know how to go straight on its own. The Wright brothers went at it a different way. They realized that you don’t have to create a machine that knows on its own to go straight, because the pilots can be the brains of the machine. When you’re riding a bike, your body becomes one with the machine, and your sense of balance, and the unconscious corrections you make as you ride, are what balance the machine. The Wrights were able to take that same concept and put it in the air.
RW: Can you tell us more about the history of biking in America versus that of biking in Europe? Did bicycling affect other countries the same way it affected ours?
MG: Though a lot of developments were parallel, there were some interesting divergences. The main one came at the end of the 19th century. There had been a big 1890s bike boom in Europe as well as the U.S., but when that fad ended in the U.S., bike use really dropped off a cliff here. People without horses still rode them get to work or make deliveries, but they became absolutely unfashionable. Nobody rode them for fun. And this is years before the automobile became affordable for anyone other than the super rich. In order to keep the market for American bicycles going, bicycle manufacturers started targeting the youth market. They ended up making bicycles a childhood necessity, but they also made bikes seem like they were only for kids. As soon as you turned 16, you wouldn’t be caught dead on one, and no adult would ride one. That was very much an American phenomenon; it didn’t happen anywhere else as far as I’m aware, and it didn’t really start to turn around until the 1960s. There was a huge bike boom here in the 1970s, and by the 1980s, the United States started exporting styles, like the rugged mountain bike with straight handlebars that you could ride off-road. That was invented in the United States and caught on overseas.
RW: Would you say that biking in the U.S. today is as common as it is in Europe?
MG: It’s not, but in American cities, it can feel like it’s going in that direction. There are many more bike lanes than there were 10 years ago. There are many more people on bikes, including middle-aged people and young parents toting kids around. Where it’s safe to ride and people live near places they need to go, there is a mini-boom, though nationally, bike ridership is going down. Outside of the prosperous parts of cities, many people don’t live near their work, church, or shops, so bicycling is not practical for them. And in many parts of the country, roads are designed to allow cars to go as fast as possible, which makes them too dangerous for cyclists. And it’s no longer the case that every American kid has a bike, because a lot of kids don’t have a safe place to ride or don’t live close enough to the places they’d want to ride to.
RW: Are many people concerned about climate change biking to and from work?
MG: Riding your bike more is certainly one way you can reduce your carbon footprint. But it has to be practical for people. You have to get to work, you have to haul groceries, you have to get your kids to school. If you live in a place where it’s not possible to do those things on a bike or on foot or with public transit, you’re going to have to drive. Cities have a vested interest in making it easier for people to bicycle because bikes don’t pollute the air, they don’t cause wear and tear on the roads, they don’t create the same parking demands.
RW: Bikes are very popular on college campuses.
MG: Colleges are typically places where everything is closer together, so they’re easy to get around by bike. And most students who live on campus don’t have little kids that they need to provide transportation for, or jobs many miles away that they have to commute to. So bikes work well in that environment.
RW: If bicycles became a more popular form of transportation, where would they have the most impact? What would be the effect of more bicycles on the road?
MG: That’s hard to say, because there are changes coming to traffic that could make the roads much safer for bikes and pedestrians, or much less safe. We know that we’re going to have autonomous cars soon. But how are they going to behave? Will they be well programmed and well-regulated to make traffic calmer and more logical, and make it safer for bikes? Or will they be out there like bumper cars, clipping anything that gets in their way? If the roads do become safer for bikes, you’ll see more of them — studies show that the safer it is to ride, the more people ride.
RW: What are the most bike-friendly cities in the U.S.?
MG: Brooklyn is one of the centers of biking in the country. Also Portland, Oregon, is huge for biking. Seattle is really good for biking. I work in D.C., which has one of the highest bike-commuting rates in the country. We have laws that are very helpful, such a leading pedestrian indicator law that gives pedestrians and bikes a few extra seconds to cross the street, so that they clear the intersection before traffic starts moving. It makes everybody safer and makes traffic move better. Chicago is supposed to be great and also Minneapolis, which is amazing to me because it’s so cold up there. But you can bike all winter long, you just have to have the right gear.
One really exciting thing that’s happening all over the country is the rise of bike-share systems. You use your credit card to check out a bike, go where you’re going, and check it back in. That’s an amenity that can make biking accessible to people who can’t necessarily use a bike as their main form of transportation. In New York, for example, if you live in one of the outer boroughs, you can take the subway into Manhattan for work, but then use a bikeshare bike to go across town for lunch or something. Bikeshares are turning American cities into places where you can bike on a whim, where you might not have wanted to or been able to before.
RW: Do you ride your bike to work, and what kind of bicycle do you own?
MG: Yes, I ride a green 1999 Jamis Aurora touring bike. I love it. I ride an hour to work — it’s about half an hour on a woodsy rails-to-trails path — and then across town through traffic. By the time I get to my desk, I feel like a hero.
Read Margaret Guroff’s essay, “How Bikes Built Our Highways,” which appears in the January/February 2016 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, men went off to fight. Women became essential on the factory floor as industrial production soared to support the war effort. Read this excerpt, Surprise! Women Do the Heavy Lifting, from the print publication, Pearl Harbor: 75th Anniversary Special.
Originally published on May 30, 1942
Fuming over the sneak bombing of Pearl Harbor, Mrs. Clover Hoffman, diminutive and spirited mother of Cliff and Charlotte, twins aged 3½, reached a decision important in the task of defeating the Japs and the Nazis. Resigning her job as waitress in a San Diego restaurant, and parking the twins with her mother, Mrs. Hoffman presented herself at the employment office of the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation.
Rosie the Riveter, Norman Rockwell, May 29, 1943
“I want to work on a bomber,” she told Mrs. Mamie Kipple, assistant employment director in charge of hiring the women who work in the company’s two sprawling plants.
“Why do you want to work on a bomber?” asked Mrs. Kipple.
“That’s something I can do to help bring Harry back.”
“Who is Harry?”
“My husband. He’s machinist’s mate on a destroyer at Pearl Harbor.”
“Have you ever worked in a factory?”
“No; but I can learn, if you’ll give me a chance.”
Like other aircraft manufacturers of Southern California, where half the country’s bombers and fighters first take wing, the Consolidated management, which began employing women for factory work last September, had a soft spot for Pearl Harbor wives and widows. The following day, Mrs. Hoffman, in trim blue jumperalls, was busily sorting and testing small parts in the blister department. A blister is a transparent plastic turret from which gunners aboard the huge
flying boats and heavy-bombardment bombers fight off enemy attackers.
Within a month, with nimble fingers and a will to learn, Mrs. Hoffman was rated as a veteran factory hand among the thousands of “Keep-’Em-Flying girls” helping to build planes in West Coast aircraft plants, strictly a man’s world until eight months ago. When they first appeared on the assembly benches, the women were “the lipsticks” to the men. Workers and bosses alike said, as did hard-boiled Bert Bowler, plant manager for Consolidated, “The factory’s no place for women.”
Airplane Defense Factory, Robert Riggs, June 24, 1944
Now Bowler says, “They’re better than men for jobs calling for finger work. They will stick on a tedious assembly line long after the men quit. Women can do from 22 to 25 percent of the work in this plant as efficiently as men.” At the Inglewood plant of North American Aviation, Inc., with 1,100 women on the payroll, M.E. Beaman, industrial-relations director, goes further than that. “Women can do approximately 50 percent of the work required to construct a modern airplane,” he estimated. Douglas Aircraft, which started late in the employing of women in the factory, expects to have 40,000 on the payrolls of its four plants by the end of 1942. After a study of British plants, Douglas engineers think women may have to do 60 percent of the building of planes before the aircraft plants reach all-out production. Lockheed and Vega, with 2,000 women filtered into groups working on everything from radio wiring to tubing-detail assemblies — plumbing, in plain English — are hiring and training housewives and girls fresh out of school at the rate of 200 a week. Vultee, which pioneered the use of women in aircraft building one year ago, rates them as indispensable. At Seattle, the Boeing Aircraft Company launched courses for women factory hands on the first of the year. In Midwestern cities, all the major Pacific Coast plane builders except Lockheed and Vega are rushing supplementary plants in which approximately 50 percent of the work will be handled by women. By the end of the year, it is estimated that 200,000 housewives will have left their homes for the aircraft factories.
Doing her part for victory: Grace Weaver, a school teacher before the war, now paints the American insignia on repaired Navy plan wings at the Naval Air Base in Corpus, Christi, Texas.
“If they’re not wives when they are hired, they soon will be,” laughed Mrs. Kipple. “Around San Diego the saying is, ‘If you want to find a husband, get a job at Consolidated.’ That’s how I found mine.”
“Work on planes is a natural for women,” a Consolidated engineer explained. “There are more than 101,000 separate and distinct parts in one of our bombers, counting rivets, and most of them are so light in weight that women can assemble and test them as easily as men. Better, in some cases.”
“Every woman we train for some simple step in aircraft work releases a man for a job calling for more experience,” pointed out Aileen Carmichael, assistant personnel director, who started as a clerk on the night shift, learned mechanics in a trade school, then took charge of hiring women for the new Vega factory. “You ought to talk with some of the girls on the assembly lines and see why they are here and what they say about the work. It will give you a lift.”
So I did. I talked with dozens of them above the din of the riveting and stamping machines. It was an eye opener, not only in wartime industrial readjustment but in devotion to purpose. In every plant, foremen who once dreaded the influx of “the lipsticks” told with enthusiasm how mixing women workers in the teams had stepped up both morale and the output of planes.
Kitchen Technique
Attention to detail: A female factory worker makes final adjustments in the wheel well before the installation of the landing gear at a plant dedicated to the production of Vultee “Vengeance” dive bombers in Nashville, Tennessee.
“The main problem with women,” one foreman told me, “is to get them to take it easy for a while and not rush and worry about the work. So I tell ’em, ‘Just imagine you’re in a kitchen baking a cake instead of in a factory building a bomber.’
“Women workers handle the repetitive jobs without losing interest or a letdown in efficiency,” he continued. “I guess it’s because this is win-the-war work for them, while men are eager to get ahead personally. We team the women with the men because they learn faster from men than from women.”
In the Vega sheet-metal department, I watched Mrs. Mary Rozar, barely 5 feet tall, dressed in slacks and blouse, protected by a leather apron, absorbed in smoothing the edges of odd-shaped parts for Flying Fortresses. Mrs. Rozar appeared at the employment office when the Vega management announced it would give preference to wives and widows of men in service at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines.
“I’m not a Pearl Harbor widow,” she told Miss Carmichael, apologetically, “but I’m a Pearl Harbor mother. My Johnny boy lost his life on the Arizona. I have another son, Earl, somewhere in Alaska with the United States Army. I want to help build planes.”
Putting the pieces together: Women workers install fixtures and assemblies in a tail fuselage section of a B-17 bomber at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant in Long Beach, California. Better known as the “Flying Fortress,” the B-17F is a later model of the B-17, which distinguished itself in action in the South Pacific, Germany, and elsewhere. It is a long-range, high-altitude, heavy bomber, with a crew of seven to nine men, and with armament sufficient to defend itself on daylight missions.
Upstairs, where hundreds of girls deftly connect and mark wires for the electrical-control assemblies, I noticed an attractive young woman with much poise who came in with the second shift and hit her stride in nothing flat. The foreman introduced her as “Jerry” Patterson.
“You don’t look like a factory worker,” I said.
“Maybe I don’t, and maybe I’m not, but I can put these assemblies together,” she replied. Her husband, Capt. Russell Patterson, was on Bataan Peninsula under General Wainwright, she said. The young Pattersons were living in Chicago, where he was an attorney when called to the service early in 1941.
“I tried working in a dentist’s office first,” she said. “That gave me no satisfaction, so I came out here, took the tests, and they put me to work on these assemblies. I haven’t heard from Russell, and I can’t get word to him, but every night I write half a page of a letter to tell him what I did that day to help finish a plane. I’m saving the letters for the day when General MacArthur goes back to the Philippines.”
At the Lockheed factory, one of the plant’s best woman spot welders is Mrs. Prisalla Maury. Her father is Col. Paul D. Bunker, in command of a coast-artillery unit at Fort Mills, “topside” of Corregidor. Across the narrow strait on the Bataan Peninsula, her husband, Major Thompson B. Maury III, was in a field-artillery unit that repeatedly hurled back the Japs. To most women, that might seem enough to do to beat the Japs. Not for Prisalla Maury, who, trained as a chemist, goes to the factory each morning, leaving four red-headed young Maurys, Richard, 6, Ann, 5, William, 2½, and Sarah, 1, at home with her mother.
“They need planes over there,” she declared. “This is the best thing I can do to help get them there.”
“She’s doing her share all right,” added John Ferguson, group leader of the spot-welding unit to which Mrs. Maury belongs. “She likes to stand on her own. If any man tries to help her, she shoos him off in a hurry.”
Two-Way Whistle
Ship’s Propeller, Fred Ludekens, February 26, 1944
At Douglas, shortly after the first woman appeared on the assemblies, the men began whistling when an attractive young girl in bright-colored slacks and blouse walked down the aisle. The women held an indignation meeting. The following day, as the men spewed out of the plant for lunch, the girls were waiting for them. Every time a handsome young buck came through the door, they whistled and shouted, “Look at Tarzan! Isn’t he wonderful? Oh, Handsome!”
The whistling in the factory ended abruptly.
“Women are in the airplane plants to stay,” predicted Mrs. Kipple at Consolidated. “Our idea at first was they would step into the men’s shoes as the men were called for military service. They would build the planes and they would be the earners, until the men came back. But there will be a lot of jobs in the factory that the men will never get back. The women have demonstrated they can handle them better.”
“There will be no more domestic tranquility in this nation if woman suffrage comes,” said Alabama Congressman J. Thomas Heflin in 1913. “Pandemonium will reign.” To the women fighting for the right to vote in the 1910s, such arguments were not surprising. Men made all sorts of wild claims about the “catastrophe” that would follow an amendment granting women the right to vote.
And so did some women. Anti-suffrage women — anti’s for short — usually came from a background of privilege that didn’t require them to work. They were not only self-serving, though. As social leaders, many of these women were dedicated to philanthropy and promoting reform, but they achieved their results without entering the world of politics and didn’t feel as though they were working against their own self-interest.
Mrs. Josephine Jewell Dodge, for example, established the National Association Opposed to Women Suffrage. But she also set up a free childcare center to serve working mothers in an impoverished section of New York. Mrs. Annie Nathan Meyer was a co-founder of Barnard College. Yet she believed that women, were they allowed to vote, would “lose their womanly qualities” in their pursuit of careers.
Kate Douglas Wiggin, author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, worked to promote the welfare of children and launched the first free kindergarten in San Francisco. But she told a Congressional committee on women’s suffrage, “If woman is as strong as she ought to be, she should be called continually in council to advise, to consult, and cooperate with men wherever her peculiar gifts are valuable. If she enjoys and uses these rights and privileges, she does not need the ballot.”
Opposition to women’s suffrage collapsed when the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. Many of the anti’s moved on to other causes. But some, like Eleanor Franklin Egan, a former war correspondent for the Post, changed their minds about suffrage.
In “Women in Politics to the Aid of Their Party,” Egan admitted she’d been wrong to oppose women’s suffrage. And she’d been wrong about the women who had done the hard work of winning her rights, and who were now working hard to win victory for their political parties.
Women in Politics to the Aid of Their Party
By Eleanor Franklin Egan
Excerpted from an article originally published on May 22, 1920
I happen to be one of the vast majority of women who had nothing whatever to do with the long struggle which is to result in the Nineteenth Amendment. If I had any feeling at all with regard to suffrage for women, it was a feeling of opposition. I did not believe the average woman would accept the responsibilities that go with active and direct participation in government and was afraid the privilege would be exercised chiefly by a few zealots and a class of women whose qualifications for responsible citizenship are too limited to make them desirable as contributing factors in the conduct of the country’s affairs. I thought there were enough undesirables already enfranchised, and permitted my imagination to dwell on the danger of adding to their ranks rather than minimizing this danger, and thinking principally of the good which might be accomplished by providing reinforcements for the ranks of the politically intelligent and righteously inclined. I knew that if the vote were thrust upon me — as my kind of woman was in the habit of saying — that I should use it, but I believed I should do so reluctantly and with a feeling that I was discharging a serious and disagreeable obligation rather than taking advantage of a precious privilege.
The trouble with me was that I did not think far enough. My vision was restricted by old-fashioned conservatism and prejudice, and in common with millions of other women in the country I ran eventually into a blind alley of platitudinous argument on the subject and stayed there while the procession went by.
How Will the Women Vote?
I am not proud of my record of indifference, but on the contrary am inclined to be somewhat regretful when I consider that the women engaged in organized opposition to this most momentous movement in the history of social progress have been able always to use me and my numerous kind as convincing examples to point their contention that women did not want to vote and were being railroaded into politics by a fanatic and clamoring minority. I feel like apologizing to the women of the combat battalions who have done all the fighting and who now bear all the scars.
What I did not observe from my blind alley of conservatism was that the millions who were not being heard from, those of the great mass who never are heard from, were watching the progress of events with a deep concentration of thoughtful attention. If this were not true, the great mass would not now be so intelligently prepared to discharge the duties and so willing to accept the burdens of complete and responsible citizenship. While the doughty old suffs were engaged in storming and undermining the stronghold of man’s most sacred monopoly, they were at the same time lighting up the dark in the minds of their sisters with luminant shafts of political information and inquiry into social conditions which women, given the power, could help to improve — the result being that the average enfranchised woman of today not only rejoices in her new privilege but knows definitely why she rejoices.
To be sure, there are still a few who think in terms of opposition and declare that nothing can ever induce them to go to the polls; but they are a negligible quantity, and so far as my own observation goes are usually of the soft and mentally lazy type which modern progress is very rapidly rendering obsolete. They have few troubles of their own and take very little interest in the troubles of others. The only consciousness they have is class consciousness, and they do their thinking as a rule within the narrowest possible limits. They can never do the great causes of forward-looking humanity any real harm.
When the Nineteenth Amendment goes into effect, there will be 27,000,000 women voters! And there are 17,000,000 of us even now! This being according to the statistics relied upon by the women’s division of the Republican National Committee. Is it any wonder the men want to make a magic that will induce us to line up and declare ourselves? Unless they can gauge the degree of purely partisan allegiance for which we can be counted upon they are likely to make some fatal mistakes in their party management.
I do not mean to imply that women as a rule have not made their choice of party. They have; and it is an interesting fact that, regardless of what her husband’s politics may be, a woman usually begins by declaring adherence to the political faith of her father, the difficulty being that she adheres with reservations which denote in her an incorrigible independence. Very few women failed to register and vote in the 1919 elections, and of course they had to enroll on one side or another. But there is considerable doubt expressed as to whether any woman can be depended upon to stay put and to place party allegiance above personal preference as to candidates and conviction as to policies.
In the city of New York, the women voters enrolled are unequally divided among the Socialist, the Democratic, and the Republican parties, with the Democratic Party considerably in the lead; but the 1919 enrollment offers no assurance to anyone in the present situation. …
Much Work but No Plums
I talked with a number of women who are actively engaged in the service of the party and who devote practically their entire time to the work. When I mentioned the splendid privilege of equal participation with the men in party activities and benefits, I got a shock. It was like touching a live wire which one had every reason to believe was perfectly insulated, only to discover that it was not. I supposed of course that women in close touch with the party organization would at least pretend to be fully satisfied with the position which had been so skillfully outlined for them. But they do not; not among themselves at any rate. I was to learn that when a woman becomes a seasoned politician of the professional type; she is seasoned with the same seasoning that seasons men, and begins to think in terms of control through patronage and all that sort of thing. Some of these women displayed as clear a conception as any man could have of the vast system of rewards by which parties are supposed to be held intact, and it was a sore point with them that, though they were granted equal liberty with the men to work themselves to death for the party if they wanted to, they were not to expect to be among those present when it came to the distribution of its plums. They might help build the fences, but they must keep out of the orchard. All of which line of talk goes to show that the men have made a great mistake. They never should have given in. They should have kept the women where women belong.
It is a fact that the women of New York are not talking about anything now but politics and candidates. For more than four years they kept up a steady flow of conversation about the war, and every woman — from those who shine at the top of the social ladder to those who cling to its bottom-most foothold — was engaged in some kind of war work through which, all unconsciously perhaps, she was developing a sense of personal importance in the general scheme of things. With the war finished, these same women now plunge headlong — and with thankfulness in their hearts, no doubt, for something interesting to do — into the maelstrom of political discussion and competition. The arena of political combat used to be an island of unrighteousness wholly surrounded by brass rails, bottles, bartenders, and beer; but, along with the bottles, politics has been transferred to the home.
It may be that the men of the country are taking some interest in the political situation, but to the casual observer it looks as though the women were assuming the lion’s share of responsibility for it. This may be due to a number of things, but primarily I think it is due to the fact that men are capable of harboring thoughts and beliefs that they can get along without expressing. If political discussion should suddenly be forbidden, women would drop out of politics overnight. It is just that it is so grand to be something definite and effective, not to say dangerous! My, how women do enjoy being dangerous!
Yet curiously enough — make no mistake about it — a vast number of women are intelligently interested in and really anxious to understand the problems that confront us. I said, to begin with, that the women of the great mass — and it would be folly to pretend that the average woman has a trained and analytical mind — the women of the great mass are thoughtful about it all and closely attentive to the serious consideration attending their citizenship. And I believe this. On the other hand, a great many women have all the time there is unless they happen to be terrifically busy doing something equally as unimportant as anything else they might be able to do. And that is another variety.
Take me, for instance, sitting here writing this article, with a political tea which I promised to attend going on at the house of a friend not three blocks away. Every afternoon somebody one knows — or somebody who knows somebody who has met somebody one knows — invites one to a political tea in the interest of some candidate. And as for dinner parties, there is no such thing anymore. A dinner party is just another kind of political meeting. And the way the telephone is kept going makes life one continuous jangle. Perfect strangers call one up at all hours to ask one to sign a petition for this, that, or the other candidate; to contribute to a fund; to attend a meeting; to lend one’s house for a tea; to do a bit of canvassing; to become a member of a committee; to buy a button; to read something or other in some magazine about someone in particular; to write a letter to the newspapers; to do any one of a thousand things.
Trixie Friganza between other suffragettes on top of steps, New York (Image courtesy of The Library of Congress)
The year was 1920 and U.S. politicians were worried.
Women had set aside their differences in income, education, and background to win the right to vote. They’d applied pressure to legislators and built support among the American public. Now, having achieved suffrage with the 19th Amendment, there was no telling what they might do next.
Some men feared women would take over the country’s political system. If women voted together, as a bloc, it would outweigh the male vote that was divided mainly between the Republican and Democratic parties.
To prevent women voters from creating a political party of their own, Republicans and Democrats began recruiting women. They also supported legislation on what we’d call “women’s issues.”
For example, Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 to help reduce maternal and newborn deaths. At the time, one in five infants died in their first year, and childbirth was the second leading cause of death for women. The new law provided federal funds to help states establish maternal and child health centers.
The bill was originally introduced by Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, but in 1921 it was voted down by 39 members, including the only woman holding a seat in Congress in 1921, Alice Mary Robertson.
It soon became apparent there would be no women’s bloc. Having won the right to vote, the women’s coalition broke apart. In subsequent elections, women’s voting patterns were nearly indistinguishable from men’s.
Realizing they didn’t need to pass targeted laws to obtain women’s votes, politicians ended the funding for the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1929.
In the following decades, women seemed to make little progress toward the equality suffragettes thought the vote would bring them.
In 1948, the grandniece of Susan B. Anthony looked back at what women had accomplished politically since women’s suffrage passed and was not impressed. As she concluded in her Post article, “We Women Throw Our Votes Away.”
“Women have frittered away our massive power at the polls,” Susan B. Anthony II wrote. “If we voted together on any issue … we probably could name the next president of the United States. … Our economic, political, and social position is only slightly better now than it was in 1920, when we got the all-powerful vote. The right to vote, in fact, is the only unqualified victory we have gained in a century.”
Because they wouldn’t cast a united vote for their rights, Anthony wrote, America’s women were barely represented in the government and in the workplace.
Much has happened since Anthony’s Post article. While women still don’t enjoy full, legal equality, there have been significant changes.
“Women … form only one-fourth of all American workers,” Anthony wrote in 1948.
There are several explanations for these changes. One would be a gradual shift in thinking about gender roles. For instance, many Americans began to rethink their ideas about women’s capabilities after seeing them take over men’s jobs during two world wars.
Politicians realized they could no longer count on gathering women’s votes with the same appeal that worked for male voters. At least the presidential candidates would need to address women’s concerns.
The gender gap narrowed to 4 percent in 1992, but rose to 11 percent when Bill Clinton ran for re-election. By the 2012 election of President Obama, it had grown to 20 percent.
Today, women are not only becoming more independent in politics, they are also voting in greater numbers than men. But they are still a long way from flexing enough political muscle to obtain legal equality. American society can be highly resistant to change. Keep in mind that all the progress noted above took place over more than 60 years. And while the gender gap in pay continues to shrink, the change is coming at glacial speed. If it continues to narrow at today’s rate, it will take over 120 years before women earn equal pay for equal jobs.
Is it true, as W. C. Fields once said, that “you can’t cheat an honest man”?
A description of the top 10 con games seems to support the notion that dishonesty makes people vulnerable to con artists. In most of these operations, the victim’s greed, shame, or duplicity seem to make him an accomplice in his own swindling.
But if it’s true con artists can’t cheat honest men, why have they been able to cheat so many honest women? Why, for instance, was Raymond La Raviere so successful?
In the 1940s, La Raviere successfully played confidence games across the country without relying on his victims’ dishonesty. Their only fault, perhaps, was a desire for love and security.
He was arrested at a garage in 1948 when a police detective recognized him as a man wanted on a bigamy charge. Choosing to kill himself rather than face trial, La Raviere swallowed poison. While lying in a hospital, expecting to die, he made a full confession to a police officer. Over the past 10 years, he said, he had married 55 women and stolen $300,000 from them.
Unfortunately, the poison didn’t work. La Raviere was convicted and sentenced to eight years in jail.
As you’ll read in this article, running a romance scam was hard work. La Raviere had to keep moving from state to state, seeking wealthy single women. And, as you’ll read in the article, he had to stay continually in character, playing a wealthy bachelor from Alaska.
Once he had won a woman’s confidence — which never seemed to take long for him — La Raviere had to keep his latest fiancée from sharing the news with her relatives or friends. He swept his victims off their feet, into marriage, then away to the bank so they could open a joint account with her cash. After securing the money, he’d make a quick exit and was off to find a new mark.
Today, the business of wooing money out of women has become much easier and more profitable, thanks in part to the Internet and the $2 billion online dating industry.
Scam artists no longer need to marry to get at a victim’s money; they don’t even need to meet the victim. Instead, crooks can work in their bathrobe from the comfort of home, or in a cyber café in Malaysia. And they can work several victims at the same time.
Online romance scams have risen dramatically. In fact, the number of complaints doubled between 2013 and 2014, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Just between July and December of 2014, phony online admirers cheated Americans out of some $82 million — and these losses are probably underreported.
Of course, women aren’t the only victims — crime has always been an equal opportunity employer. But judging from stories reported in the media, the majority of the victims have been women.
Which raises the question: Are women, by nature, more easily fooled?
According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of Pennsylvania, women aren’t more gullible. But they are more likely to be lied to.
The students told researchers they didn’t think women were more gullible, but they expected men would be more experienced negotiators and better able to spot a lie.
Believing that women had less skill in recognizing lies encouraged students to make false claims, the researchers concluded. “As a result, women are deceived more often than men.”
Which raises a second question. If women are more likely to be deceived, are men more likely to be deceptive? Here the research is less equivocal. Several studies agree that men lie more often than women: 50 percent more according to one British study.
According to these studies, the men don’t lie constantly; they appear to save their falsehoods for what they consider important matters. They are also more likely to justify unethical behavior and ignore the moral consequences of their actions.
While pondering the scope of male mendacity, you might want to know that Raymond La Raviere’s bigamy record was eventually shattered in 1983.
In that year, Giovanni Vigliotto, aka Nikolai Peruskov, aka Fred Jipp, was sentenced to 34 years for fraud and bigamy. In his testimony to the court, he confessed that he’d married and defrauded 105 women.
But given what we’ve been saying about men, should you believe him?
In “The Bravest of the Brave” (The Saturday Evening Post, January 16, 1915), Harris was particularly interested in sharing how the women of Europe were enduring the war. She pitied the Belgian women whose homes and families were torn apart by the German invasion. And she was deeply impressed by the women of France, who refused to be cowed by the Germans.
Many of these women chose not to flee when the German army entered their towns. They stayed in their homes, where every day was a struggle to protect and feed their children. Overall, Harris wrote, they showed a tough, resourceful spirit. They could endure much that the Germans inflicted on their property, but they were particularly angered by the German soldiers’ theft of their preserves.
Harris asked a French housewife about having to share a house with German soldiers (before they were driven back by French troops):
“Of course, they drank all the wine, and they ruined the piano; they played it all night — all night! Such awful thunder they make on the poor thing that now it gives out only a bombardment of noise.”
“The Germans are fond of music?” I suggest.
“Yes; but awful! I do not call it music. I am in the cellar, I put my fingers over my ears, I cannot endure it. And the poor piano, it cannot, either. Its feet” — pedals — “are dead. All that, I can bear; since they did not kill us or burn the house; but why have they stolen my jam — my little, little pots of jam! It is wicked. They did so.” She cupped her fingers and pretended to empty something into her mouth. “One after another, that German he licked out my little pots of jam.”
The story is the same everywhere. They break into the stores and eat all the candy and every sweet cake, even when they do no other damage. … It may be that when men revert to savages they get an abnormal appetite for sugar!
Despite their hardships, the French women devoted themselves to caring for the wounded, both Allies and non-Allies alike. One anecdote Harris gathered from a nurse in Paris shows that as much as the French despised the Germans, they could still admire individual courage:
There is a certain hospital near Paris where every bed in the big ward has a locker in which the patient may keep his few possessions; along with the bullet or fragment of shell that has been taken from his wound. And it is the fancy of these men to stick the flag of the nation to which they belong above their lockers; so that ward is very gay with French and British colors.
Recently a desperately wounded German soldier, in this hospital, lay in the corner bed at the end of a long row. Naturally he had no flag above his locker — not until the pain left him and he was able to perceive his inglorious condition.
Even after the German army was pushed back out of their region of northern France, life was hard for the women who remained there. The Germans had taken all livestock in their retreat, forcing the women to personally replace their missing horsepower. (Library of Congress)
One day, when the nurse came to take his temperature, she was amazed to see an English flag sticking out of his locker. She was scandalized.
“Where did you get it?” she cried, snatching the sacred emblem.
The German only grinned up at her, wan and invincible. He had stolen it sometime during the night from the sleeping Englishman lying next to him.
The following morning he had it again.
Laughing, Mademoiselle explained, “It is very good for him — stealing that flag. We thought he would surely die, so dreadfully wounded was he; but he has kept himself alive just to do that.” There was no spite against this fallen foe; only a whimsical French sense of humor at the situation, a woman’s kindness, so delicate and so intelligent.
Harris slipped past the military checkpoints to interview an exceptional woman — Jeanne Macherez. When the Germans swept through the French town of Soisson, this 61-year-old women saved the town’s food supply by stepping in and assuming the role of mayor. When Harris asked how she had accomplished this, Macherez told her—
Everybody was gone from the town. I was alone, very busy in my house. The door is open. The Germans see it and they come — officers in a big car, with the streets full of their soldiers. They ask for the mayor … I am not willing to tell them that the mayor is absent. So I make some excuse. Then they say they must see a representative of the mayor. If there is no government they will go and break open the shops and take all. They must have food, everything, at once.
Portrait of Jeanne Macherez (Wikimedia Commons)
“I thought of what would happen if no one went with them to save a little perhaps for the women and children, hiding in their cellars. So I said: “I am the Mayor of Soissons. I will go with you.”
“Were you frightened?” I asked.
“But no, not for myself — for the people who might starve. The bridges had been destroyed — no trains; no more supplies.
“We could not live if they took all we had. So I got into the car with those Germans. We went to every shop. They wanted all of this and all of that; but I said: ‘No—you can’t have all the flour in this shop.’ I laid my hands on the sugar; I held back all I could. And the lard … they want all of that. I could save only a little.
“The next day,” she went on, “they came again. They demanded to know why I had not delivered the stores — 50,000 cigars; 50,000 pounds of flour; 500 pounds of sugar — all the lard. But they were absurd. I told them so. ‘How can I, messieurs? You have killed all the horses which you have not taken. Shall I send the women and children to your trenches with these things? But no; it is too much for them. Besides, they shall not go!’
“They were very angry. They made a great fuss. I was frightened then; but I stood before them. Let them kill me too! At last they agreed that we should place all the stores in the railroad station. We did that.”
She began to smile. It was like sunlight on an old gray wall — that smile.
“The next day they were all gone; the French came and drove them out. Then we went and carried all the stores back to the shops.”
This, however, was only the beginning of her gallant defense of Soissons against the ravages of the war. So far as the food supply was concerned, it was nearly as bad to have the French troops quartered there. …
[Since then] she has somehow managed to secure food and clothes for the people for three months. It is not an easy task, with no railroads, and almost no horses to bring in the provisions for them.
Step into 1915 with a peek at these pages from The Saturday Evening Post January 16, 1915 issue.
Octave Uzanne predicted that fashion would reflect the modern woman’s new interest in mobility and practicality.
The 1900s seem to have been a good decade for predicting. We’ve already reported on two Post authors, Otis Mason and John Elfreth Watkins, who had better-than-average forecasting skills. This week, we introduce another: Octave Uzanne, who showed remarkable foresight in his 1901 Post article “What Women Will Wear in the Twentieth Century.”
In this fashion forecast, Uzanne anticipated the fundamental change in women’s wardrobes that would reflect a changing status. When the young girls of 1901 reached adulthood, he said, they would live quite differently from their mothers. In general, they would be less frivolous. Unlike their mothers, they would be less willing to spend long hours dressing themselves in ornate, impractical clothing: “hours which might be filled with work or pleasure more interesting and no doubt more healthful.”
Even though women wouldn’t be able to vote for another 19 years, Uzanne could see women already taking a more active role in their world.
One artist's idea of how fashions, and an automobile, would look in the future.
And fashion would reflect the modern woman’s new interest in mobility and practicality, and give her a sense “of her force, of her rights, of the less subordinate part which might fall to her in the future.”
Her wardrobe would be built around an active life. Unlike the stay-at-home women of the 1900s, the future woman would be a “traveler and student, a lover of sport, of bicycling, and of motor-driving, in mind more independent than ever.” It would be hard to see in the modern woman the sickly and capricious child she had been in previous generations.
Men, he predicted, would first judge her new, comfortable clothing to be immodest, but they eventually would have to accept it because women were through with the floor-length skirt, the veil, and the corset. “No more tight-laced busts and swelling necks; no more whalebone compression and misshapen chests—instead, free bodies.” In making these predictions, he was not simply stating the obvious. Corsets remained in general use for the next two decades, and girdles until the 1960s.
Dressed for lounging on the moon in 1964 Post article "Designs On Your Future."
To appreciate Uzanne’s predictive skills, you need to move forward 63 years, when decorator Evelyn Jablow tried her hand at forecasting in “Designs On Your Future.” Having just visited the Milan Triennale exhibit of 1964, she gave her predictions of women’s fashions in the 21st century.
Future women, as she imagined then, would wear just one outfit: a one-size-fits-all top made of stretch material and tights. The entire wardrobe, just “three or four pieces of clothing,” would fit into a cylinder the size of a golf bag. Also, women would wear only boots and slippers, and no earrings or bracelets.
Evelyn Jablow wasn't the only one predicting one-piece moon suits. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera showcased similar fashion predictions in The Jetsons.
As for men, they would “abandon tie, shirt, and trousers” to wear a “one-piece stretch moon suit” when traveling (presumably through outer space) and, at home, “long tights and a short toga, reminiscent of the free-swinging styles of the Roman charioteer.”
It must have seemed reasonable in 1964, because William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had pretty much the same idea of fashion in 1962 when they created The Jetsons.
Remember when Washington was running out of money? Just last year, Congress was threatening to shut down the government because no one could find $1.3 Billion needed to meet the annual budget.
Well, those days are gone, we’re glad to report. A fresh breeze is blowing money into town—about $6 Billion’s worth. That’s the amount that will be spent on this year’s elections.
But what will they get for that $6 Billion, beside mountains of flyers and hours of TV ads? Will it change the outcome of a presidential election?
No one can tell for certain. But back in 1948, George Gallup was convinced presidential campaigns didn’t change voters’ choices.
In a very real sense, presidential elections are over before they begin.
They are decided to a great extent by events that have occurred in the entire period between two presidential elections, rather than by the campaign.
In politics it is always later than you think.
Gallup had polled voters before and after the presidential elections of 1940 and 1944. He found very few voters switched their choice of candidates between June and November.
Of course, it would be foolish to claim that campaigns have no effect or change no votes. But they appear to have less effect and to change fewer votes than the average party leader would like to think.
Voters listen to campaigns pretty largely to confirm what they already think.
[Yet] in presidential races today, everything is made to depend on the campaign—as if the voters lived in a mental vacuum for three and a half years, and only snapped out of it between June and November of the fourth year.
The ineffectiveness of presidential campaigns prompted Gallup to ponder—
Is this wise—this pitching of all effort and money into a campaign and then coasting along for four years?
Perhaps all the hullabaloo, the verbal blasts and counterblasts, the rallies, parades, blaring of bands, kissing of babies, the feverish rushing about of stump speakers and the millions of dollars spent are not entirely necessary.
[Could] a political party give up campaigning and win? Probably not. Some kind of campaign would be needed to keep in line the voting intentions of those who do make up their minds early.
Perhaps political leaders could profitably spend more time trying to increase public acceptance of their party between elections.
Is this still true today? Will those billions of dollars and hours of politicking ultimately change no one’s mind in the 2012 presidential election?
One recent study indicates that presidential advertisements could persuade voters, but did little to inform or motivate them to vote. Another study found that campaigns could influence voters “but the nature of this influence appears to be rather complex”—a meager return for such a high cost.
Gallup’s 1948 article— “Do Campaigns Really Change Votes?” — challenged several assumptions cherished by politicians. Party platforms, for example, were useless (“most people don’t read them”) and political speeches had almost no impact on voters (“n the course of thirteen years of polling, covering more than 190 state, local, and national elections, we have found little evidence that one speech or even a series of speeches changes many votes”).
He also made this claim:
Don’t worry too much about the women’s vote or “how to win the women over.”
They don’t vote in a bloc and they don’t vote any differently from men.
The division of sentiment among women is almost identical with that among men. Rarely in recent years has it amounted to more than two percentage points. There does not appear to be any such thing as the woman’s viewpoint in politics as distinguished from the male viewpoint when it comes right down to voting on Election Day.
That may have been true in the 1940s, but the granddaughters of those women voters are showing far greater independence in their choice. The “gender gap” has become significant. In 2008, Barack Obama received 49% of his votes from men and 56% from women. Interestingly, 55% of the votes for George W. Bush came from men, 48% from women—again, a 7% difference.
The gap reached 10% in 2000 (43% of women, 53% of men voted for Bush), and in 1996, the difference between men and women voting for Bill Clinton was 11%.
When the gender gap was just 2%, Gallup made several conclusions that—we hasten to add—might have been valid for their time.
Men and women, dissimilar biologically and to some extent emotionally, tend to think almost exactly alike politically.
The reason seems to be that, on political matters, women generally accept the judgment of their men-folk. They take their cue from the opinions or prejudices of a husband, a father, a son or other male member of the family. Of course, this is not true of all women. But in the average household the woman goes on the theory that her man knows more about those things than she does.
This is 1948, remember.
Polls have found that when a change of political sentiment takes place, it almost always starts with the men, not the women. The women catch up with the trend later—after they’ve talked to the boss.
In all fairness, it should be said that there is no real reason why women should vote differently from men, even if they paid no attention to the ideas of the allegedly dominant male. No one would argue that women ought to vote differently just for the sake of being different. The only point here is that one must be cautious in talking about the woman’s viewpoint in politics. Although the average male candidate running for office usually makes quite an effort to win the feminine vote, it may be questioned whether such pains are necessary. If the male voters can be won over, the women will generally come along too.
Presumably, some of those billions of dollars are being spent right now to understand just why women don’t vote the same as men.
If there was pressure to conform — as Fromm, Gropius, and Rickover claimed— where did it come from? What did it sound like? Who was responsible?
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.
Nationally, however, it seems to balance up this way: in war industry, women have been pulling their weight, and still are, though the last few months of 1943 saw a dismaying tendency among job-holding women to quit.
Women do all right in the armed forces when enlisted, but too few bother. In civilian-volunteer work, the situation is healthy only in special lines. In the home they could do better; in general co-operation they are unimaginative. The sum is not impressive. It is easy to see why many women going all-out in topside war-activity jobs admit disgust with their own sex, sometimes heatedly.
The author reported that the WACs (Women’s Army Corps) was having trouble meeting recruitment numbers. Hospitals were short of nurses’ aides. Moreover, women were spending a lot of the money they were earning and not saving precious household wastes.
The favorite general diagnosis for the failure of women to enlist is that fathers’ and boy friends’ disapproval is the catch. In view of how little masculine disapproval affected women’s urge to vote and wear colored nail polish, the theory seems inadequate.
Rosie the Riveter’s detractors like to harp on the fact that, in spite of fair-to-wonderful pay, absenteeism and turnover run higher among women than among men in war jobs.
Fair-to-wonderful was $31 a week doing the same job that paid a man $56 a week. Beyond the unfairness of the pay inequity, there’s also the household budget reality: a women who replaced a man lived on 45% less money.
“When G.I. Joe comes home from the wars, and naturally wants his old job back, will she have to come down from her perch?”
Admirers point to the fleets of planes over Berlin and Micronesia, made in plants where 40 per cent of the pay roll are women, many of whom never had an industrial job before.
The significant point seems to be that, where employers realize that women are not just “little men,” but different creatures, Rosie does very well. In some War-Department plants, handling high proportions of women cleverly, their absenteeism and turnover are better than men’s.
The Moore Dry Dock Company, of Oakland, California, an important shipyard turning to women as manpower dwindled, once had a women’s turnover of 20 per cent every three months… Nowadays. Moore’s newly recruited women go on the job after a full course… to break them in on what men know automatically… It works. The first three months reduced turnover of women so processed to 7.9 per cent.
Rosie’s other troubles may come from the obvious fact that, to quote a sage expert, “Women don’t have wives”—nobody at home to clean the house, get breakfast, pack a hearty lunch and have a hot supper waiting. With a home and often youngsters to look after before, or after, her eight-hours at the plant plus transportation time, Rosie has a job and a half. No wonder so many women quit war jobs in a few weeks from discouragement or, after four to six months, from exhaustion.
The steady rise in the birth rate in the last few years is one thoroughly valid reason, of course, why many young women are not in war work. The nation now has more than 1,500,000 babies and children under four whom it would not have had if the birth rate had stayed at 1937 levels. Taking care of them under wartime shortages of help and safety pins is often a full-time job for a new mother, and always the best possible national service.
Almost 3,000,000 babies born since 1940 were “first births,” meaning inexperienced mothers. The total woman-hours involved in taking care of the 10,300,000 American babies known to have been born in the last four years is no negligible factor in the national situation.
Still, many women accepted these challenges. They took on totally new jobs and continued to hold the old one as homemaker. However they contributed to the war effort, women must have taken a dim view of the armchair experts who questioned their patriotism. They could criticize women’s motives and performance because they were volunteered, not ordered. Men escaped such criticism thanks to the wonderful incentive of the Selective Service Board. Even so, many men found ways to dodge the draft, and the criticism.
An eminent American legislator, asked to wrestle with that problem for purposes of this article, finally muttered something about “Why just talk about women? Too many Americans of both sexes are still trying to sit out the war.”
The author notes that in the four states where women had the right to vote in 1909, regulations protecting women and children were enacted more quickly. This included laws that raised the age of consent, gave women the right to control their own income and property, and established free kindergarten.
Margaret Guroff is the author of The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life (2016), from which her essay “How Bikes Built Our Highways” is adapted.
MG: Yes, it’s amazing. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said, “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.” She saw clearly that the bicycle was motivating non-activists to take political action. They thought they were just having fun, but really were turning the culture upside down.
MG: That’s hard to say, because there are changes coming to traffic that could make the roads much safer for bikes and pedestrians, or much less safe. We know that we’re going to have autonomous cars soon. But how are they going to behave? Will they be well programmed and well-regulated to make traffic calmer and more logical, and make it safer for bikes? Or will they be out there like bumper cars, clipping anything that gets in their way? If the roads do become safer for bikes, you’ll see more of them — studies show that the safer it is to ride, the more people ride.
Is this wise—this pitching of all effort and money into a campaign and then coasting along for four years?
Read “My Husband Ought to Fire Me!” by Peg Bracken.