From the practicality of no-stick pasta, back to the theoretical life today. I continued my inquiry into the history of feminism by delving into Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. I’m only a chapter or two into the book but what has fascinated me the most so far is Friedan’s own research into the changing tone of women’s magazines from the 1930’s to the 1950’s.
Her research confirms what I have always felt about the women of my grandmother’s generation, those that were born in the early part of the 20th Century and were young women in the 1930’s. They were on the cusp, if they wanted to be and if they had the means; they were making great strides towards finding their place in the world. They were, in many cases, the daughters of the suffragettes, the daughters of the first wave of feminism, and feminists in their own right, with big dreams. They were women like Amelia Earhart who, in her youth, kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in predominantly male-oriented fields, like film, law, advertising, business and engineering.
I’ve always felt akin to the women of this generation and it makes sense; if they were the daughters of the first wave, I am a daughter of the second wave, born as I was in 1966.
But beyond that the similarity starts to fade, because for so many of these women, and their somewhat younger sisters, their dreams and their choices were a casualty of World War II. The men returned from war, a lot of birthin’ babies took place, and the tone of women’s magazines, with men at the editorial helms, changed sharply starting in about 1949. Suddenly all the emphasis was on marriage and home once again. Headlines read, for example:
Have Babies While You’re Young!
Do Women Have to Talk So Much?
Cooking to Me is Poetry.
Are You Training Your Daughter to Be a Wife?
Why GI's Prefer Those German Girls!
Tying all this in with the bigger biological principles at stake, i.e. replenishment of the human species after decimation during world war, and you see a certain evolutionary sense to it all—(much like homosexuality--and increased tolerance to it--seems to make sense when population numbers swell), but I don’t think women of the 1950’s were mere victims of biology, which has its own wise ways and is, as Rayne points out, something to be embraced. I think they were victims of the newly rampant consumer culture which knew that lots of housewives would mean lots of refrigerator sales.
It’s hard to generalize when many intrepid souls make their way and find their happiness in life regardless of which way the world swings, but there’s no doubt that something insidious happened to the vast majority of poor souls who based their life choices on such self-interested misguidance. My mother married at 18 because “that’s just what you did.”
So when I say I feel the Zeitgeist changing, toward a reclaiming of the pleasures of hearth and home, I question strongly where the perception is coming from. It feels like a pure impulse, and deep down, I think it is, but I feel I ought to examine the impulse and articulate the perception a bit better, certainly out of gratitude towards past generations, but even more importantly out of a belief that Santayana was right when he said: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
(Why do those GI's prefer those German girls, anyway? I must know!)
10:40:04 PM 
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