Three generations ago the bourgeois wife rarely became aware of
her frustrations. She was largely confined to her home, was kept
too busy with children and housework to find much time for
meditation on her situation or for comparison with other wives or
the outside world generally. Brought up in a male-dominated family,
she was prepared to accept a similar situation in her own life.
This means that her outside contacts and her general picture of the
world came to her through the screen of her husband's vision of
these things.
The decrease in the number of
children in middle-class families and the spread of labor-saving
devices, from vacuum cleaners to frozen foods, gave the bourgeois
wife increasing leisure in the 1920's and 1930'5. Enterprising
editors like Edwin Bok filled that leisure with new slick women's
magazines (like the Ladies' Home Journal). Popular novels
and, to a lesser extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and
spreading women's clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a
fantasy world of romantic love and carefree, middle-class
housewives with dazzling homes and well-behaved and well-scrubbed
children. By 1925 the average bourgeois housewife was becoming
increasingly frustrated because her own life was not that pictured
in the women's magazines. Her increasing leisure gave her time to
think about it, and her more frequent contact with other wives
encouraged her to raise her voice in criticism of her husband whose
financial inability to provide her with the life she came to regard
as her due seemed to her to justify her desire to nag him onward to
greater effort in pursuit of money. To him this became nagging; to
her it was only an occasional reminder of the expectations under
which she had entered upon the marriage relationship.
While this was going on, the
outside world was also changing. Women became "emancipated" as a
consequence of World War I, with considerable urging onward from
the women's magazines. Shorter skirts and shorter hair became
symbols of this process, but even more significant was the
appearance in the outside world of a great increase in the number
of jobs that could be done best, or only, by women. As part of this
process, there took place considerable changes in bourgeois
morality, the ending of chaperonage, greater freedom between the
sexes, and the acceptance of divorce as morally possible in
bourgeois life (a custom that came in from the stage and
cinema).
As part of this whole process,
there occurred a dramatic event of great social significance. This
was the reversal in longevity expectations of men and women in
adult life. A century ago (to be sure, in a largely rural context),
a twenty-year-old man could expect to live longer than a
twenty-year-old wife. In fact, such a man might well bury two or
three wives, usually from the mortality associated with childbirth
or other female problems. Today, a twenty-year-old man has little
expectation of living as long as a twenty-year-old woman. To make
matters worse, a twenty-year-old woman a century ago married a man
considerably older than herself, at least in the middle classes,
simply because future preference required that a man be established
economically before he began to raise a family.
Today, from a series of causes,
such as the extension of the female expectation of life faster than
the male expectation, the increased practice of birth control,
coeducation (which brings the sexes into contact at the same age),
weakening of future preference and of the middle-class outlook
generally, which leads to marriages by couples of about the same
age, husbands now generally die before their wives. Recognition of
this, the increased independence of women, adaptation to taxes and
other legal nuisances, has given rise to joint financial accounts,
to property being put in the wife's name, and to greatly increased
insurance benefits for wives. Gradually the wealth of the country
became female-owned, even if still largely male-controlled.
But this had subtle results; it
made women more independent and more outspoken. Bourgeois men
gradually came to live under a regime of persistent nagging to
become "better providers." To many men, work became a refuge and a
relief from domestic revelations of the inadequacy of their
performance as economic achievers. This growth of overwork, of
constant tension, of frustration of emotional life and of leisure
began to make more and more men increasingly willing to accept
death as the only method of achieving rest. Bourgeois men literally
began to kill themselves, by unconscious psychic suicide, from
overwork, neurotic overindulgence in alcohol, smoking, work, and
violent leisure, and the middle class slowly increased its
proportion of materially endowed widows.
One notable change in this whole
process was a shift, over the past century, from the male-dominated
family to a female-dominated family. The locality in which the
young couple set up their home had an increasing tendency to be
matrilocal rather than patrilocal. In increasing numbers of cases,
where the young couple married before the groom's educational
process was finished, they even lived with her family (but very
rarely with his family). Increasingly part of the burden of
housework was shifted to the husband: washing dishes, buying
groceries, even tending the children. In 1840 a child could cry at
night and would invariably be tended by its mother, while the
father slept peacefully on, totally unaware of what was going on.
By 1960, if a child cried at night, the chances were as likely as
not that the mother would hear nothing while the father took over
the necessary activities. If this were questioned by anyone, the
mother's retort was pointed: "I take care of baby all day; I don't
see why he can't take care of it at night!".
Closely related to this confusion,
or even reversal, of the social roles of the sexes was decreasing
sexual differentiation in child-rearing practices. As recently as
the 1920's girl babies were reared differently from boys. They were
dressed differently, treated differently, permitted to do different
things, and admonished about different dangers. By 1960, children,
regardless of sex, were all being brought up the same. Indeed, with
short cropped hair and play-suits on both, it became impossible to
be sure which was which. This led to a decrease in the personality
differences of men and women, with males becoming more submissive
and females more aggressive.
This tendency was accelerated by
new techniques of education, especially in the first twelve years
of life. The neurological maturation of girls was faster shall that
of boys, especially in regard to coordination, such as in feeding
oneself, talking, dressing oneself, toilet-training, learning to
read, and general adjustment to school. The shift from home to
school in the early grades was adjusted to by girls more easily
than by boys, partly because girls were more self-assured and
gregarious. By the age of ten or twelve, girls were developed
physically, neurologically, emotionally, and socially about two
years in advance of boys. All this tended to make boys less
self-assured, indecisive, weak, and dependent. The steady increase
in the percentage of women teachers in the lower grades worked in
the same direction, since women teachers favored girls and praised
those attitudes and techniques that were more natural to girls. New
methods, such as the whole-word method of teaching reading or the
use of true-and-false or multiple-choice examinations, were also
better adapted to female than to masculine talents. Less and less
emphasis was placed on critical judgment, while more and more was
placed on intuitive or subjective decisions. In this environment
girls did better, and boys felt inferior or decided that school was
a place for girls and not for boys. The growing aggressiveness of
girls pushed these hesitant boys aside and intensified the problem.
As consequences of this, boys had twice as many "non-readers" as
girls, several times as many stutterers, and many times as many
teen-age bed-wetters.
While the outside world was
decreasing its differential treatment of children on a sexual basis
by treating boys and girls more and more alike (and that treatment
was better adapted to girls than to boys) within the middle-class
home, the growing emotional frustrations of the mother were leading
to an increasing distinction on a sexual basis in her emotional
treatment of her children.
The earliest feeling of sensual
reassurance and comfort any child experiences is against the body
of its mother. To a boy baby this is a heterosexual relationship,
while to the girl it is a relationship with the same sex. In most
cases the little girl avoids any undesirable persistence of this
homosexual tendency by shifting her admiration and attention to
some available male, usually her father. Thus by the age of six or
eight, a daughter has become "Daddy's girl," awaiting his return
from work to communicate the news of the day, getting his slippers
and newspaper, and hoping that he will read her a story or share
her viewing of a favorite television program before she must go to
bed. By the age of twelve, in a normal girl, this interest in male
creatures has begun to shift to some boy in her class at school.
With a boy baby the transference is later and less gradual. The
undesirable aspects of his love for his mother are avoided by the
powerful social pressures of the incest taboo, but this merely
means that the sexual element in his concern for the opposite sex
is suppressed and is undeveloped. Thus there is a natural, we might
almost say biological, tendency in our society for the sexual
development of the boy to be delayed and for the girl to be free
from this retarding influence.
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