Desperate Housewives, Neuroses and the Domestic Environment, 1945–1970

Ali Haggett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848933101
• eBook ISBN: 9781317321064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Although the figure of the 'desperate housewife' is familiar to us, Haggett suggests that many women in the 1950s and '60s led satisfying lives and that gender roles, while very different, were often seen as equal.

1 REFLECTIONS ON THE DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE

Mother needs something today to calm her down

And although she’s not really ill

There’s a little yellow pill

She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper

And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day

Rolling Stones, Mother’s Little Helper (1966)

The genesis of the so-called ‘second wave’ of feminism is well known. Although multifaceted and fragmented, feminist groups in Britain and the United States sought collectively to gain equal rights and privileges with men and to draw attention to myriad ways in which women continued to be oppressed by a patriarchal society. Betty Friedan’s seminal text The Feminist Mystique, first published in 1963, is widely held as the inspiration that revitalized the feminist movement. At the centre of Friedan’s thesis was a critique of the popular notion that truly ‘feminine’ women could gain complete fulfilment from the domestic role. Friedan noted that ‘millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands good-bye in front of the picture window’.¹ Friedan of course, was by no means the first to confront the stifling confinement of marriage and motherhood. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, described her descent into despair in her autobiographical journal The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1892. In this narrative, she wrote about her experience of nervous depression and the way in which she was prescribed enforced passivity and ‘forbidden to work’ until she was well again.² During the 1950s, Anne Sexton began writing poetry following a psychiatric breakdown. Her therapist was later to note that although Sexton ‘was trying her best to live up to the 1950s image of the good wife and mother, she found the task completely beyond her’.³ Just a few years later in 1963, inspired by Sexton, Sylvia Plath published her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar in which she described the experience of mental illness and psychiatric treatment. Her collection of poems, Ariel, published posthumously in 1965, echoed many of the sentiments put forward by Friedan about motherhood, sexuality and marriage.

There are many excellent texts that examine the key figures and developments within the feminist movement during this period and the remit of this book is not to duplicate such work. Rather, my intention is to explore the various aspects of the domestic role in more depth, in order to provide a more nuanced appraisal of women’s experience. In contrast to the views of Friedan and others, many of the women interviewed for this project found their role as mothers and home-makers enjoyable and rewarding. Those who endured symptoms of anxiety and depression did not locate the cause of their problems in their role as homemakers. Instead, they recounted memories of distressing childhood events, unhappy marital relationships and occasionally a familial predisposition to mental illness. These testimonies were widely supported by case studies published in the contemporary medical press of women who received treatment in primary care or psychiatric outpatient clinics. Such reports often detailed harrowing accounts of spousal abuse or dysfunctional family circumstances, sometimes dating back to childhood. This book, therefore, should be placed within the genre of recent scholarship about post-war women that suggests ‘not all housewives experienced their role simply as exhausting or stultifying’.⁴ Why the views expressed by women in this study were at variance with those put forward by feminist commentators is the other central question explored in this book. As other historians have begun to suggest,⁵ I will argue that Friedan and other highly educated second-wave feminists were politically motivated. Their experiences of suburban housewifery were thus shaped by factors that were perhaps unrepresentative of ordinary middle-class housewives. As Judy Giles has rightly pointed out, ‘those who wrote or spoke about suburbia in Britain or America did so from positions outside the phenomenon they so roundly condemned’.⁶ However, the objective of this book is in no way to challenge the many important initiatives of the women’s liberation movement from the 1960s. Instead, it aims to refine feminist critiques of domesticity that have linked the roles of mothering and homemaking unproblematically with mental illness.

The Housewife, the Home and Feminism

For Friedan, writing in 1963, to women born after 1920, feminism was ‘dead history’.⁷ It ended, she argued, ‘with the winning of that final right: the vote’.⁸ Although women were still actively concerned with the rights of other oppressed groups, ‘no one was much concerned with rights for women: they had all been won’.⁹ In Britain too, the feminist movement went into decline after the passing of the Equal Franchise Act in 1928. Feminist societies were often portrayed as radical, even revolutionary groups of women who wished to transform society and break up the family.¹⁰ Nevertheless, as historians have pointed out, mainstream women’s societies and political organizations continued to expand; however, they broadly represented the interests of wives and mothers working within the home.¹¹ The agenda shifted to give prominence to matters which did not affect the two sexes equally such as family allowances, birth control and housing.¹² Thus, as Judy Giles has noted, interwar feminism did little to challenge the ‘assumptions upon which the sexual division of labour, both within the home and as an organizing feature of society, were founded’.¹³ The challenge for Freidan and her contemporaries who formed the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, was thus to define and articulate an altogether different kind of oppression that was subtly ‘exercised and reinforced through “personal” institutions such as marriage, child-rearing and sexual practices’.¹⁴ Central to this objective was the notion of ‘consciousness-raising’, whereby activists sought to transform the ‘personal’ into the ‘political’.¹⁵

Friedan’s contribution to this was important because she claimed that her views had been shaped by her experience as an ‘ordinary housewife’.¹⁶ She was able to draw convincingly upon emerging critiques of the mass migration from the city to the suburbs in her description of suburban housing estates as ‘ugly, endless sprawls’ that encouraged millions of women to ‘seek fulfilment in the home’.¹⁷ As Mark Clapson has argued, during the twentieth century, the United States and England evolved into societies that were dominated by the suburbs.¹⁸ Although the move from urban centres was inspired at different times and by different factors, there were many important similarities between the two countries. As the century progressed, the image and appeal of a suburban home became culturally pervasive in both England and the United States.¹⁹ However, Friedan argued that the cities provided more opportunities in education and employment for women; whereas women in the suburbs were vulnerable to the ‘new mystique’ – the notion that they must keep on having babies in order to justify their very existence. Such women, she argued, were increasingly seeking medical help for fatigue, alcohol abuse and boredom.²⁰ In extreme circumstances, she noted, doctors were seeing cases of a strange new medical disorder, ‘housewife’s blight’. This condition had been described to Friedan by a doctor in Pennsylvania who reported that women ‘who bury themselves in their dishpans’ were presenting with ‘great bleeding blisters’ on their hands and arms. He added that the condition was not caused by detergent and could not be cured by cortisone.²¹ The Australian-born academic, Germaine Greer, included a chapter on ‘misery’ in her best-selling book, The Female Eunuch, published in 1970. She argued that women everywhere were lapsing into the apathy and irritability of the housewives’ syndrome: ‘Nagging, overweight and premature ageing are the outward signs of misery, and they are so diffuse among women in our society that they do not excite remark’.²² Both Friedan and Greer reached the best-selling list with their books. However, Greer was criticized for the commercial packaging and promotion of The Female Eunuch which later attracted accusations of ‘hype’.²³ Stephanie Coontz has recently published a study of women’s reactions to The Feminine Mystique in the United States and argues convincingly that the book struck a chord with many women there. However, she also acknowledges that the book was extremely divisive and some claimed that prior to Friedan, middle-class women were ‘living in peace in what they considered to be a normal, traditional, worthwhile lifestyle’.²⁴ As this book will illustrate, women’s lives there differed greatly, and there are a range of social, political and educational factors that account for Friedan’s reception in the United States.

By conflating the housewife’s experience in the suburban home with broader social concerns about new ways of living, Friedan and Greer were able to vitalize their moves to make publicly visible the ways in which women were defined and controlled by existing social structures. Their critique of ‘home’ also drew upon a longer tradition in which homes have often been seen as ambiguous social spaces; at times extolled for the ways in which they fostered mental and physical health and happiness, and at other times, indicted as sites of depression, neurosis and decay.²⁵ During the interwar period, for example, a ‘new’ class of female neurosis was described in 1938 by Stephen Taylor, Senior Resident Medical Officer at the Royal Free Hospital.²⁶ He argued that the ‘mind-numbing’ banality of the new housing estates built across England after the First World War was the cause of much psychological distress in young housewives.²⁷ Although Taylor proposed that the roots of this condition probably lay psycho-dynamically ‘buried in a heap of infantile and adolescent manure’,²⁸ he argued that the stimulus was undoubtedly a failure of environment. Taylor described the disappointment and isolation inherent in suburban living: ‘The small labour-saving home, the small family and the few friends have left women of the suburbs relatively idle. They have nothing to look forward to, nothing to look up to and little to live for’.²⁹ Although Taylor appeared to be discussing a new class of neurotic patient, ‘Mrs Everyman’, he was in fact using a medical case-study as a platform from which to express a number of broader fears about changes affecting interwar British society. Later to become a Labour MP, it is not surprising that Taylor was critical of what he saw as the false values promoted by a materialistic consumer society and the ‘jerrybuilt’ houses constructed by speculative builders. He also articulated more serious concerns about the increasing secularization of society and the loss of traditional values and kinship ties. Published in the Lancet, which had a reputation for controversy, Taylor’s intention was arguably to communicate his concerns to a wide audience, in accordance with the Lancet’s objective which was to ‘inform and reform’.³⁰ Taylor’s ‘Mrs Everyman’ can be seen thus as a rich metaphor for emerging mid-twentieth social, economic and political concerns.

Evidence from research undertaken twenty years later contradicted Taylor’s original thesis. Alongside a colleague, Sidney Chave, who had previously investigated rates of illness on a London County Council estate, Taylor undertook research into levels of psychiatric morbidity in Harlow, one of the eight new towns constructed following the New Towns Act, 1946.³¹ These new neighbourhoods presented an alternative to the growing congestion in London and residents were promised employment and quality housing in a green environment. In addition, each town included a church, a primary school and a community centre. It was hoped that the design would encourage social cohesion and help prevent isolation. However, Taylor and Chave were surprised to find that rates of primary-care consultations for the minor neuroses did not differ significantly from those recorded previously by Chave on a London County Council estate. As Hayward observes, ‘the distribution of these symptoms did not correlate with the image of the anxious young housewife produced in Taylor’s original work’.³² The two researchers concluded that subclinical neurosis was a disease entity ‘with its roots deep in the physical or emotional background of the individual’.³³

The results of a further study undertaken by two physicians from the Maudsley Hospital, E. H. Hare and G. K. Shaw, were published in 1965.³⁴ This research also indicated that rates of minor mental illness did not differ substantially between the older communities and new towns. The authors analysed the responses to 2,000 questionnaires and argued that, although residents commented on the lack of amenities in the new town, this did not affect their overall levels of satisfaction with their environment. On the contrary, many commented that they ‘liked the clean air’. Although the distribution of illness by gender was not the primary focus of the study, Hare and Shaw noted that women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four years who lived in the new district had higher rates of neurosis and fatigue. However, they also noted that more women from this group were caring for three or more small children. They therefore decided that this factor might account for the more general rise in levels of fatigue. Significantly, the authors concluded that ‘there was no evidence that housewives who went out to work either full-time or part-time differed from those who did not go out to work, in health, social attitudes or in social factors’. Indeed, they observed that housewives who also went out to work consulted their general practitioners more regularly than those who stayed at home.³⁵

Despite these findings, within feminist circles, the association between the middle-class housewife, domestic life and neurosis endured. Friedan proposed that women were longing for opportunities outside the domestic arena and that educated wives experienced symptoms of desperation, tiredness and despondency. She was also increasingly critical of the stereotypical images of women disseminated by the media. She maintained that they were largely devoid of ‘any mention of the world beyond the home’, and that ‘the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man’.³⁶ She advised women to marry later, and, wherever...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Reflections on the Desperate Housewife
• 2 The Art of Marriage: Marriage and Mothering during the Post-War Period
• 3 The Housewife’s Day: Personal Accounts of Housewifery and Mothering
• 4 Lightening Troubled Minds: Mid-Twentieth Century Medical Understandings of Affective Disorders
• 5 Not Something You Talk About: Personal Accounts of Anxiety and Depression
• 6 For Ladies in Distress: Representations of Anxiety and Depression in the Medical and Popular Press
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index