Middle Class Women in the 1950s and 1960s


Video

By Matthew Tabrisky

“It was, I guess you could say common knowledge that you could be a secretary, you could be a teacher, you could be an airline stewardess, you could be a nurse. And, you know, that was about it….,”[1] recalls Barbara Leighton, a former nurse and 1957 graduate of Syracuse University who took part in a new Bachelor of Science oriented nursing program. These innovative programs constituted a part of the growing opportunities that American middle-class women were beginning to see in education and careers during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet just as Leighton describes, career options were still limited, and many of these women later moved into domestic life despite professional success. Leighton herself had such a pivotal moment in 1963 with a heart surgeon who, “…asked me to go to New York with him when he went to Mount Sinai as head of cardiac surgery. However, I got married instead,”[2] as Leighton recalls. In H.W. Brand’s book American Dreams: The United States Since 1945, Brand touches on the career restrictions middle-class women faced during the late 1950s, as well as the discontent many women had with their domestic lives as argued in Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Though not directly challenging Brand’s description, and despite a pause in her own career for marriage, Leighton had a negative view of women like Friedan, believing they just complained instead of engaging in nondomestic activities. Leighton’s outlook aligned more with the idea of celebrating women when they could balance both career and homemaking, emphasized in women’s magazines. While Brands highlights the nature of women’s career restrictions and discontent, his narrative lacks the greater complexity and detail regarding middle class women’s access to higher education, career options and developments in fields such as nursing, as well as comment on the stories of women with both careers and domestic life in magazines and the unique perspective held by those like Leighton regarding the dissatisfaction stressed by Friedan.

Nurses preparing for a surgical procedure, Philadelphia General hospital, c. 1960, courtesy of University of Pennsylvania

Women’s education and professional careers saw substantial growth through the 1950s and 1960s, albeit within limits from traditional gender expectations. Though Brands mentions that most middle class wives did not work during the 1950s, he omits details of women’s increasing college attendance and job participation.[3] In the 1950s and 1960s, Women’s college enrollment annually increased 5 and 9 percent respectively, both more than men.[4] This coincided with an increasing percentage of married working women, as the 1960 decennial census found that more than half of working women were married and typically college educated.[5] Universities such as Harvard even creating part time degree programs for older women to become teachers.[6] The nursing profession especially felt this change, with the postwar era marking the rise of college-educated and specialized nurses, including nurse practitioners, anesthetic and cardiac nurses.[7] “At the time open heart surgery was just starting. Not too many nurses that were on the roster wanted to take those cases, and I said I would. I became known as a cardiac nurse,”[8] Leighton recalls in her time at Miami Dade Memorial Hospital.

Yet despite this growth, societal norms limited both the accessibility and type of education middle class women received. Various private colleges and universities had admission rules favorable to men, with institutions like Stanford even placing quotas on women’s admission.[9] These limitations even affected classes for female dominated careers like nursing, as Leighton recalls, “I think there were thirty students in my class. We started out with around fifty in our freshman year, and a number of them obviously dropped out.”[10] Leighton’s tiny nursing class compared to some thousands of students in her year is better contextualized with the few career options and lack of expectation beyond domestic life many had for women.

Throughout the academic world, many educators sought to design homemaking-based curriculums for female students, expecting most women to settle down after some time spent in traditionally female jobs, such as teaching and nursing.[11] From 1953-1962, the ACE’s (American council of education) Commission on the Education of Women conducted research into women’s education and job choice for application to collegiate curriculums across the country. As their research indicated that women’s decisions regarding motherhood and career were highly individual based, some members proposed curriculums centered around homelife and community building, while others still advocated for a more job-oriented curriculum. The commission’s conclusion was thus the need for a broad liberal arts education to satisfy both aims.[12]

Though this liberal’s arts education supported some career-oriented women, job choices remained extremely limited, with many educators pushing college women into one of a few careers. In American Dreams, Brands indirectly mentions these limitations, but never explicitly describes the larger forces contributing to them. A 1964 address to the American Association for University women advocated for the nursing profession and highlighted its “…open pathway to a full and useful profession after periods of nonemployment imposed by family obligations.”[13] During the space race, a 1957 national policy report titled Womanpower even recommended that women study more science and languages for teaching high school and thus “free” more men for key positions in higher education and research.[14] Such career limitations and lack of expectation for their professional lives were obvious to women, as Leighton recalls, “…at that time, there were not that many options that we knew about.”[15]

Ladies Home Journal May 1958, courtesy of Internet Archive

Just as liberal arts education for women mixed domestic and professional attitudes, media perceptions of women focused on both domesticity and professional achievement through individual success. Stories of women who had both a career and a family were popular in women’s magazines, including an article in a 1958 Ladies Home Journal article about Frances Olsen, a mother who entered medical school to become a doctor in an “act of sheer self-assertion” to both satisfy her love of medicine and take care of her family.[16] Similarly, a 1954 Coronet article described Sylvia F. Porter, a journalist who turned a small newspaper job into a thriving column, with enough “energy left over to manage her roles as a wife and mother, write popular books on investments and savings and edit a newsletter on government finance.”[17] In these articles and others, professional achieving outside domesticity was even the primary focus, with most praise given to a woman’s career and her domestic life as an added benefit.[18]

Betty Friedan in 1960, courtesy of Wikipedia

This celebration of a woman’s public and professional success lay in stark contrast to the opinions of many other middle-class women. In her 1963 The Feminine Mystique book Second wave feminists like Betty Friedan held a different view of women’s opporuntites in her 1963 book , with Friedan detailing women’s discontent with their lives as homemakers, as well as the pressures they felt from education and the media to settle down and not pursue careers.[19] Friedan was not a lone voice either, as a 1962 Gallup poll stated that around 90 percent of housewives expressed dissatisfaction with their life, wanting their daughters to be better educated and settle down later.[20] While perhaps in the minority, as Brand’s account of women’s reactions to Friedan concurs with description, Leighton disagreed with Friedan’s methods, echoing the individual achievement applauded in women’s magazines, as Leighton recalls about this dissatisfaction, “If you’re not that happy with it, go to school, take classes, and learn, you know…. Some women were rather too loud about their positions in life.  And my thought was, well, go and do something about it. Don’t broadcast it all the time.”[21]

Middle-class women experienced a mix of both increased and limited opportunities for education and careers, adding complexity to Brand’s description of women’s overall career limitations. While women’s participation in higher education and the workforce grew over the decades, expectations of women as homemakers restricted their career options and changed collegiate curriculums to emphasize domestic livelihood. Magazines also brought focus to women who managed both successful careers and domestic lives. The stories of women like Barbara Leighton elucidate these complexities, with Leighton’s view of dissatisfied women like Friedan as complaining instead of solving their problem providing a distinct perspective in relation to Brand’s account of Second Wave feminism. The gradual but substantial changes in education and career, as well as evolving attitudes towards domesticity that middle class women saw in the 1950s and 1960s, lay the foundation for understanding the greater changes in access and opportunity for women in the following decades.

[1] Audio Interview with Barbara Leighton, Pikesville, MD, November 25, 2023

[2] Audio Interview with Barbara Leighton, Pikesville, MD, November 24, 2023.

[3] H.W. Brands, American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 80.

[4] Stacey Jones, “Dynamic Social Norms and the Unexpected Transformation of Women’s Higher Education, 1965–1975.” Social Science History 33, no. 3 (2009): 261.

[5] Jones, 260.

[6] Jones, 265.

[7] Apesoa-Varano, Ester C., and Charles S. Varano. “Nurses and Labor Activism in the United States: The Role of Class, Gender, and Ideology.” Social Justice 31, no. 3 (97) (2004): 87.

[8] Audio Interview with Barbara Leighton, Pikesville, MD, November 25, 2023.

[9] Jones, 262.

[10] Audio Interview with Barbara Leighton, Pikesville, MD, November 25, 2023.

[11] Jones, 263.

[12] Linda Eisenmann, “A Time of Quiet Activism: Research, Practice, and Policy in American Women’s Higher Education, 1945-1965.” History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2005): 10-11.

[13] Jean Wells, “Women’s Job Prospects.” American Association of University Women Journal 58, (1964): 23, quoted in Stacey Jones, “Dynamic Social Norms and the Unexpected Transformation of Women’s Higher Education, 1965–1975.” Social Science History 33, no. 3 (2009): 263.

[14] National Manpower Council, Womanpower, 1957, in Stacey Jones, “Dynamic Social Norms and the Unexpected Transformation of Women’s Higher Education, 1965–1975.” Social Science History 33, no. 3 (2009): 263.

[15] Audio Interview with Barbara Leighton, Pikesville, MD, November 24, 2023.

[16] Neal Gilkyson Stuart, “Mother Is a Doctor Now!” Ladies Home Journal, 75 (May 1958), 136.

[17] Jana Guerrier, “Wall Street Woman,” Coronet, 35 (Jan. 1954), 26.

[18] Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946- 1958.” The Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (1993): 1460–1461.

[19] Meyerowitz, 1455.

[20] Jones, 265.

[21] Audio Interview with Barbara Leighton, Pikesville, MD, November 24, 2023.

Appendix

“The [middle-class] workers were mostly men, except for the secretaries in the offices, and their wives typically did not work outside the home.” (H.W. Brands, American Dreams, p. 80)

Interview Subject

Barbara Leighton, age 88, is a former nurse who got her license in 1957 from Syracuse and worked in a variety of hospitals along the East Coast before settling in New Hampshire with her family in the mid 1960s. She took a break from nursing to raise her children but then returned to work full-time in the 1970s and retired in 2013.

Interviews

– Audio recording, Pikesville, MD, November 24 2023

– Audio recording, Pikesville, MD, November 25 2023

Selected Transcript

11/24/23

Q: At that time, I believe it was when a lot of medical procedures were just at their inception, such as open heart surgery. Because of  procedures like that, was that what drew you in to like these kind of workplaces, like that opportunity to be a part of something?

A: Yes, very definitely…. We worked at Miami Dade Memorial Hospital. And then I did private duty and got into open heart surgery with one surgeon. And  I worked very hard. And it was brand new.  And, luckily, the surgeon seemed to like what I did, so he asked for me constantly. So I had a really, really good experience there. Nicely enough, he asked me to go to New York with him when he went to Mount Sinai as head of cardiac surgery. However, I got married instead. But the experience was wonderful. 

Q: In the 60s there was this like growing support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, which talked about the dissatisfaction some women felt in their lives as just mothers and homemakers. Did you disagree with this perspective?

A: Probably, Matthew, I can’t pinpoint it at this point. I had a career. I was quite happy with it. I  still pursued it off and on.  And, we did have a you know, a group of friends that they had been to college but hadn’t, hadn’t pursued a career very truthfully. There were some that did not go to college. And, yes, I remember the feminine mystique.  I don’t know that I identified with it very truthfully. Maybe because I had a profession. I knew I could go back to it if I had to. I could support my children if I had to.  And I liked being a homemaker. So, but I also knew that I, you know, I was a good nurse. I could go back to it. So I can’t say that I, you know, I associated with a lot of people that were dissatisfied, a lot of females that were dissatisfied.  Or if they were, I didn’t recognize it because I wasn’t.

Q: Um, did you feel that was like, true in like the media and like what you read? Like,  did you read a lot about women just being viewed as like homemakers and like, uh, caregivers and mothers?

A: Yeah, I read about it and I guess very truthfully I would think well, you know, if you feel this way, go back to school  get a profession or do something about it. Maybe that’s because I had a profession and I was very proud of it and I knew I could go back to it if I had to. But, you know, some, some of it, you know, was a little more whiny than I thought was necessary,  truthfully.  And, sometimes, you know, as this movement continued, there were too many people that I think chimed in and didn’t know what they were talking about half the time. 

Q: Could you, explain more about that?  Like, what do you mean by, like, people who think you didn’t know much about it?

A: Well, there seemed to be a lot of, you know, all I do is take care of my children and wash the dishes and make dinner and stuff like that. And, yeah, if we were housewives, we all did it. And I guess also I was of the generation that, yes, that’s also what you did.  But if you’re not that happy with it, take, you know, go to school, take classes,  learn, you know, you don’t have to get a degree or something, but stimulate your mind. You can, read.  I’m an inveterate reader, as you well know.

Q: You recently mentioned that, like, you know, at the time there weren’t that many career options for women. Did you find a problem with that? Or, did you not, like, think about that at all?

A: It was, I guess you could say common knowledge and that, you know, you could be a secretary, you could be a teacher, meaning women. You could be an airline stewardess. You could be a nurse. And, you know, that was about it. And, I guess I didn’t think too much about it one way or the other because, I had my goal, if I was inviolate, I had to be a nurse. And if the other people wanted to do something else, that was fine. But,  that was basically what, more or less what, uh, at that time, there were not that many options that we knew about, I guess you could put it that way. As there are today, there’s so many more.  That was not the rule at that point. It was starting. I worked with some female doctors, not many, not many at all.

11/25/23

Q: You’ve mentioned that all of these nurses were women. So at Syracuse,  were there a lot of like female students at that time and like people going into the nursing?  Or was it pretty limited?

A: It was quite limited. I think there were like 30 students in my class. And we started out with like 50 odd  in our, in our freshman year. And a number of them obviously dropped out. 

Q: I’ve been doing some research on women’s magazines, like from the fifties and sixties that often highlight women who were both successful mothers and, like, in their careers. Did you, like, read any of those stories or, like, see anything on the TV that you identified with in that sense?

A: Oh, yes. Yeah, it was very popular, you know, whatever I did.  And, good for them. I did not, you know, I did not feel cheated or left out or something like that. Interestingly enough, I also had enough friends who liked my nursing expertise. Let’s put it that way. And, that kept me busy too. But other than that, no, I read the magazines. I did understand.  That, frankly I felt, you know, there were times when I read it and I thought, well, I really should go back. You know I’m a good nurse. I know what I should be doing. But between marriage and the children, I didn’t. 

Further Research

Apesoa-Varano, Ester C., and Charles S. Varano. “Nurses and Labor Activism in the United States: The Role of Class, Gender, and Ideology.” Social Justice 31, no. 3 (97) (2004): 77–104. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768259. [JSTOR]

Linda Eisenmann, “A Time of Quiet Activism: Research, Practice, and Policy in American Women’s Higher Education, 1945-1965.” History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2005): vi–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20461921. [JSTOR]

Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946- 1958.” The Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (1993): 1455–82. https://doi.org/10.2307/2080212. [JSTOR]

Stacey Jones, “Dynamic Social Norms and the Unexpected Transformation of Women’s Higher Education, 1965–1975.” Social Science History 33, no. 3 (2009): 247–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40268002. [JSTOR]

Neal Gilkyson Stuart, “Mother Is a Doctor Now!” Ladies Home Journal, 75 (May 1958), 136-137. https://archive.org/details/ladies-home-journal-v-075-n-05-1958-05/page/136/mode/2up. [Internet Archive]

Jana Guerrier, “Wall Street Woman,” Coronet, 35 (Jan. 1954), 26-29. https://archive.org/details/sim_coronet_1954-01_35_3_0/page/26/mode/2up. [Internet Archive]