Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 29, 1994 TAG: 9405220147
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by LUCY LEE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's easy to be nostalgic about the fifties when we remember it as a time of prosperity, hope and optimism.
The glorification of the family provided a sense of security which helped ease memories of the depression and war and fear of encroaching communism. Life seemed simpler, partly because rules and expectations were clearly defined.
For women, these rules and expectations made the fifties a time of severely limited choices. Through interviews with 92 women who came of age during that era, author Brett Harvey reminds us that women were expected to marry and produce children (thus creating a market for material goods and supporting the recovering economy), devote themselves one hundred percent to the family and to give up wartime jobs to returning vets. As one interviewee said, "You simply didn't ask yourself +if+ you wanted marriage and children; the only relevant questions were when and how many? And the answers were, as soon as possible and as many as possible."
In the first half of the book Harvey relates stories about the norm - dating, college, marriage, motherhood. In the last half she focuses on those who deviated from the norm - career women, lesbians, and political liberals. Many of these stories will ring true for women who are now in their fifties and sixties. The informal style and first-hand accounts of the oral history make it easy and interesting reading for anyone.
Fear of women's sexuality is a theme that runs throughout the book. Such chapter titles as "Going All the Way" and "Getting Caught" are telling. The stories of those who did get caught and had to suffer illegal abortions or leave home to bear babies they gave up for adoption, are chilling. The rigid rules that governed women's sexual activity promoted a market place view of sexuality: "Sex was a commodity purchased by marriage." Harvey makes her point with the following account:
"On Thursday, August 27, 1953, two bombshells exploded in the American press: news that the USSR had detonated an H-bomb, and Dr. Alfred Kinsey's report on female sexuality. It may seem ludicrous to equate the news of the Russian bomb with the news that 95 percent of American women had petted before marriage. But in fact the two events were given nearly equal weight by the press, and generated almost equal amounts of anxiety among the public."
The stories Harvey gleans from her subjects testify to the extreme difficulty women who didn't fit the mold faced. Whereas homosexual men were seen as a threat to national security (America needed "strong, manly men" to stand up against communism), homosexual women were even more frightening. "A lesbian not only rejected the sanctified role of wife-and-mother; she was a woman whose sexual satisfaction did not come from a man."
When McCarthyism gripped the nation in the early fifties, anyone who worked for social justice or the common good became suspect. This mind-set coupled with the promotion of marriage and motherhood as the only approved roles for women brought the women's rights movement to a virtual stand-still.
Harvey points out scary parallels between that era and our own and warns that "Feminism is reemerging as the all-purpose scapegoat." The Far Right's agenda of "family values" endorses a fifties role for women and condemns the vast number of nineties women who are single mothers, full-time career women, or lesbians.
Despite these and other setbacks to feminism, Harvey says women's gains are substantial: entry into traditionally male professions, the upper echelons of the corporate world and the political arena, and the autonomy that comes with a pay check and control of our own reproductive lives. Although women "will almost certainly have to fight for these things again and again, ... they will never go back." "The Fifties" is a poignant reminder of what going back would mean for women. For that reason alone it is worth reading.
Lucy Lee is a student of women's history and an advocate for women's rights.
by CNB