{"id":5838,"date":"2022-04-20T18:29:46","date_gmt":"2022-04-20T18:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/?p=5838"},"modified":"2022-07-05T22:11:27","modified_gmt":"2022-07-05T22:11:27","slug":"life-between-extremes-a-housewifes-balance-between-feminism-and-anti-feminism-in-the-late-1960s-and-early-1970s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/2022\/04\/20\/life-between-extremes-a-housewifes-balance-between-feminism-and-anti-feminism-in-the-late-1960s-and-early-1970s\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Between Extremes: A Housewife’s Balance Between Feminism and Anti-Feminism in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Megan Triplett<\/p>\n

In <\/span>American Dreams<\/span><\/i>, H.W. Brands covers second wave feminism as a largely polarizing movement. Spurred by Betty Friedan\u2019s 1963 book <\/span>The Feminine Mystique,<\/span><\/i> second-wave feminists sought sexual liberation, an increased role in the public sphere, and the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would add a prohibition of gender discrimination to the United<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Betty<\/a>

Courtesy of Library of Congress<\/p><\/div>\n

States\u2019s <\/span>Constitution. Brands also describes the reactionary pushback of the anti-feminists. Especially in regard to the feminists calls for greater sexual freedom, members of the Christian right and others who believed in the traditional \u201cnuclear\u201d family, launched an anti-ERA campaign. Yet, Brands only characterizes these two opposing views and neglects to describe a middleground between the two extremes of second-wave feminism.<\/span><\/p>\n

One such person who found themselves identifying with some parts from both movements was Carol Roland, later Carol Triplett, a sociology student at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in the 1960s. Triplett had participated in civil rights activism in her youth, attending protests and walking out of restaurants that refused to serve African American customers. She cites her love of people in her choice to study sociology. \u201cI wanted to get into the adoption industry,\u201d Triplett states as her collegiate idea for an intended career, \u201csort of helping people, helping kids. I really liked people.\u201d[1] Yet, Triplett only studied sociology for two years. \u201cI enjoyed it and I did real well in sociology,\u201d she said, \u201cbut [Lawrence Triplett] and I decided we wanted to get married before he graduated.\u201d[2]<\/span><\/p>\n

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Courtesy of Carol Triplett’s Private Collection<\/p><\/div>\n

Because Carol Triplett chose to get married over finishing college and pursuing a career, she faced backlash that she would not have faced a generation earlier. The attitudes of second-wave feminism had begun to take their hold while Carol Triplett was in college. Her professors found difficulty accepting her decision, as they saw her as a promising sociology student. \u201cSo I know that my professors… and the counselor was very upset that I did not proceed. He (Triplett’s professor) wanted me to even go to grad school to get my masters. So he said that I thought I was brainwashed.\u201d[3] Triplett, however, truly wanted to get married to Lawrence Triplett and start a family. \u201cI think that, had I really wanted to be a sociologist, I would’ve stayed with it, but that wasn’t my main goal,\u201d Triplett explains, \u201cHe (Triplett’s professor) couldn’t convince me otherwise. … I don’t regret it.\u201d[4]<\/span><\/p>\n

Triplett supported her female classmates as they pursued careers, but found herself more drawn to the domestic sphere. Though women of this era grew up in a climate that encouraged them to settle down, get married, have kids, and \u201cdesire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity,\u201d the dictums of second-wave feminism encouraged young women to pursue careers over growing a family.[5] Yet, Triplett did not identify with the thesis<\/span><\/p>\n

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Courtesy of Library of Congress<\/p><\/div>\n

of <\/span>The Feminine Mystique <\/span><\/i>\u2013 that \u201cwell-educated women chronically yearned for more than their domestic lives afforded them\u201d \u2013 though her friends largely did.[6] Triplett found no issue with her female friends who pursued a career path, and had pride in their successes. One of Triplett\u2019s friends even joined NOW, the National Organization for Women, the group that Betty Friedan founded to advocate for women\u2019s rights and to put the tenants of <\/span>The Feminine Mystique <\/span><\/i>into the political arena.<\/span><\/p>\n

In, <\/span>On Not Being Women: The 1970s, Mass Culture, and Feminism<\/span><\/i>, Victoria Hesford contextualizes the feminist movement within the mass culture. This contrasts Brands, who focuses primarily on the political timeline of second-wave feminism. Hesford also distances her argument from Brands\u2019s by pointing out that the feminist movement consisted of a collection of different people, with different backgrounds and viewpoints, people like Carol Triplett. According to Hesford, \u201c\u2018women\u2019 and \u2018masses\u2019 are present in our world as images\u2014as representations that picture, however misleadingly, a unity that affectively solicits our identifications or disidentifications.\u201d[7] Thus, Hesford separates her narrative from Brands by refusing to identify the feminist movement as one mass of women.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, Carol Triplett could not acquiesce to her peers\u2019 decisions to get divorced from their husbands in pursuit of this newfound liberation. Divorce became more prevalent and normalized in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Triplett began the process of marrying her husband Lawrence (Larry) Triplett, their priest tried to ask them what they would do in the event of a divorce, but the young couple had never considered divorce an option. \u201cThe priest told us that we were the only ones that he had met that did not believe in divorce,\u201d Triplett explains, \u201cwe said…that wasn’t even going to be in our thought process.\u201d[8] In this way, Triplett identified closer with the views of the American right who saw divorce as \u201ca catastrophic departure that threatens the fabric of American moral identity.\u201d[9] Tilfer cites America\u2019s strong link to Christianity as a foundation for this view. When her friends would seek divorces, Triplett was \u201cvery sad for them.\u201d[10] Drawing on her Catholic faith, Triplett states,\u00a0 \u201cI believe it is between them and God. I never treat them badly.\u201d[11]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After divorcing or simply not getting married in the first place, women who subscribed to the second-wave feminism movement often devoted their full attention to their careers. When Carol Triplett encountered such people, she describes her perception of their thoughts toward her as, \u201c \u2018oh well, we’re not interested in that, you’re not important\u2019 \u201d because she chose to not have a career and to raise her family.[12] She gleaned from her interactions that \u201cif you didn’t have a career you were nothing.\u201d[13] Yet, Betty Friedan, a prompter and preeminent figure in the feminist movement supported women who chose to be mothers. As interpreted by Burke and Seltz, Friedan \u201cimplied that so long as women freely chose motherhood, unmedicated birth was a preferable and empowering option for labor\u2014an extension of women’s bodily health.\u201d[14] Activists for women\u2019s health followed this lead, advocating for natural childbirth as a way to \u201crecapture women’s agency while rejecting narrow, pronatalist visions of women’s identity.\u201d[15] Thus, some feminists, like Friedan, did not reject motherhood, but sought to include it under the women\u2019s liberation movement by advocating for natural birth. Despite distaste and shame from her peers, often shame that did not align with Freidan and other feminists, Triplett remained secure in her choice, as she \u201cloved raising my kids.\u201d[16]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Some took this distaste for domesticity to further levels, following the socialist feminism view that \u201cautonomous structures of gender, race, and class all participated in contrsucting inequality and exploitation.\u201d[17] This group \u201cexpanded the Marxist notion of exploitation to include other relations in which some benefited from the labor of others, as, for example, in household and child-raising labor.\u201d[18] Thus, the struggle for women\u2019s rights was inherently linked to the struggle for class-equality in the eyes of socialist feminists, who viewed content housewives like Triplett as inherently downtrodden laborers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite her convictions to raise her family, Triplett also recognized pressure from her husband Larry to remain within the domestic sphere. \u201cWith… my marriage,\u201d explains Triplett, \u201cwe had definite roles. He did not do any of what was called ‘women’s work.’ He didn’t do any of that. And I felt like, if I wanted to work, I would just be exhausted, having to do all that plus go to work.\u201d[19] Triplett\u2019s husband Larry conformed to traditional ideals and refused to take on more responsibilities in spite of the overall changing attitudes toward gender roles within the family.\u00a0<\/span>While raising her seven children, Triplett remarks that she \u201cdidn’t feel too bad about it [not pursuing a career] … because, actually for daycare … it would’ve cost me more probably than what I could earn.\u201d[20] Though \u201cagitating for affordable child care was a priority of many women\u2019s liberation groups,\u201d Triplett and others found themselves unable to justify pursuing a career against the costs of child care [21].<\/span><\/p>\n

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Courtesy of Carol Triplett’s Private Collection<\/p><\/div>\n

Carol Triplett raised her seven children, six sons and one daughter, differently than her generation had been raised. \u201cMore and more women were working, so I told my boys ‘if your wife is working, you better help her out!’ I taught them how to do their own laundry and how to scrub floors and wash dishes. They would cook.\u201d[22] In contrast to her husband\u2019s attitude, Triplett states, \u201cI felt like they should never feel like any job was below them.\u201d[23] After the last of her seven children went to school, Carol Triplett took on a job as a second grade teacher\u2019s aid. In working, Triplett realized the extent of what working mothers had taken on. \u201cAt that time, I thought ‘oh my goodness, how could they do everything?’ You can’t do everything.\u201d[24] She concluded that \u201cthe man has to take on some of the responsibilities\u201d and reflects that \u201cthings changed that way and for the good.\u201d[25] Regardless of Triplett\u2019s choice to happily raise her family, she raised her sons in the context of second-wave feminism to have a different attitude towards housework than her husband.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tensions heightened after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which legalized abortion throughout the United States. Triplett, who was a faithful Catholic, went \u201cagainst the culture\u201d as she \u201cdidn\u2019t see killing a baby to be God’s best.\u201d[26] The Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade isolated Triplett from the feminist movement, and linked her, on this one issue, with the emerging anti-feminist movement. According to Brands, \u201cPhyllis Schlafly’s conservative Eagle Forum added STOP ERA to its name, and its spokespersons argued that the equal rights amendment would deprive women of traditional distinctive rights, such as the right to be supported by their husbands and the right to be exempt from military service – besides being an affront to states’ rights.\u201d[27] Though Triplett was supported by her husband and had no desire to serve in the military, she did not identify with the Eagle Forum and supported the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet, her Catholic faith compelled her to stand against feminist arguments that sexual liberation and pro-choice objectives were necessary measures for women\u2019s rights. According to Triplett, \u201cmy faith is to be lived whether the crowd agrees or not.\u201d At one point, Triplett worked in a crisis pregnancy center, and so saw the individual struggles that the Roe v. Wade decision affected.[28] \u201cI love these girls and I feel I can help them more to have their child,\u201d Triplett said, \u201cI counseled many and always respected them. I can feel for them very strongly.\u201d[29]<\/span><\/p>\n

Carol Triplett, a devoted wife and mother of seven, found herself aligned with both feminist and anti-feminist viewpoints. She did not pursue a career, instead contently choosing to fulfill household duties and raise her children. Triplett does not regret her decision stating, \u201ca mother, when they\u2019re home, they teach their children so many things.\u201d[30] Though working peers sometimes expressed distaste for her choice, Triplett supported their choices to pursue a career and had hoped that they would support her choice to be a housewife. However, Triplett severed herself from the feminist movement on issues of divorce and abortion due to her Catholic faith. In contrast to Brands\u2019s polarized depiction of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Carol Triplett serves as an example of a real woman whose complicated ideals did not fit the picture of feminism nor the picture of anti-feminism.<\/span><\/p>\n