Redefining the New Woman, 1920-1963

Angela Howard-Zophy, Sasha Ranae Adams Tarrant, Angela Howard-Zophy, Sasha Ranae Adams Tarrant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135647575
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: History

2. Redefining the New Woman, 1920-1963
Despite the fact that women's suffrage did not produce the catastrophic consequences predicted, mainstream opposition to the feminist movement refused to die, as exemplified in commentaries by industrialist Henry Ford, renowned literary figures D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, and even presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, all represented in this volume. The other selections first focus on sources published during the interwar years and indicate that the legacy of progressive social feminism exacerbated reactionary attitudes toward women in the context of postwar political fundamentalism, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. The second part contains literature that appeared between 1941 and 1963, and reflects the ambivalence and backlash toward wives and mothers in the workforce and the public sphere, driven by the social, political, and economic conservatism of the Cold War Era.

THE CULTURAL BACKGROUND OF THE AMERICAN WOMAN

THE men who crossed the Atlantic and settled what became the United States were firm and confident in their intention to make the culture with which they were familiar dominant in the new land, or, in a few instances, to bring into being a different civilization but one conceived and planned in Europe. Rarely was there any understanding of the impossibility of fulfilling their designs. It was distance and the unescapable demands for new adjustments that gradually forced upon the people the building of a culture that became more and more indigenous.

There is nothing to indicate that women were more conscious than men that their migration would mean breaking away from the mores of the Old World, although they may have been more troubled by the prospect of trying to work out their household responsibilities in the untried wilderness. In this clinging to European attitudes and customs, which made the new undertaking an outshoot of European civilization, the first comers differed radically from those who immigrated after the Revolution. With the exception of those coming with no thought from the first of actually settling in America, the later immigrants were attracted to the United States in part that they might break away from Europe and free themselves from its irritating or limiting circumstances. They realized that they were passing from one civilization to another. Indeed, to accomplish this often was their purpose.

The English, the Dutch, the Swedish, the Spanish, and the French colonists expected to plant the culture of the land of their birth in the New World where it would flourish and become a portion of the Old Country in the New. Only the last were able to resist successfully the pressure toward change, but even they were broken off from a living, intimate contact with the historic evolution into which they were born, and were left with the task of perpetuating the cultural slice they carried over, which in time became as unlike the civilization that developed later in the motherland as it was alien at the beginning to the American wilderness.

The yeast that was to leaven American civilization was mixed and vitalized in Europe and transported, without change, to these alien shores. The men and women who brought it here, whether birds of passage possessed by the lure of covetous expectation or by the hankering for adventure, or persons committed from religious, political, or economic motives to life in the wilderness, held tenaciously to the customs, the standards, and the philosophic outlooks upon life to which they had been accustomed on the other side. Change came, but it was unsought and, as a rule, resisted. In spite of their natural effort to hold to the old and familiar, the new environment took command and gradually forced a profound reconstruction of European ways of living. This necessary readjustment in turn led to new thinking, until soon in process along the narrow coast line of North America were the beginnings of a native culture. No part of that European importation was more resistant to the new influences than the practices and the attitudes that established the status of woman. Her position was something that was so taken for granted, such a social axiom, that it was accepted by most men and women as a finality not open to question. This firmly established convention by no means assumed the insignificance of women, for it was recognized that they were indispensable in the new settlements.

Woman was the silent sex, since in man’s hands were the means of social prestige and political expression, but this does not mean that her part of the burden was light nor that her contribution was considered unimportant. It was rather that the rôle that was considered proper for her kept her away from the spotlight. A long history lay behind this fact, one so interwoven with the growth of Europe that it is now difficult to disentangle the influences that operated to fix so firmly the social status of woman. Change was bound to come here as in other features of the social experience brought over from Europe, but rather more slowly than in most, because so much had contributed to the establishment of woman’s position. Moreover, many of these influences were continuing and were less worked upon by the conditions of the new environment than were other aspects of the imported civilization.

The cultural ferment that was brought over from the Old Country was neither simple nor consistent. It also was a composition into which had poured influences for thousands of years, reaching back even to the pre-European civilization of Asia. To assemble all the deposits that entered into the making of this leaven would require retracing the entire evolution of culture from the birth of civilization to the English settlements in the New World. The impossibility of so exhaustive an analysis must not conceal the fact that wherever one locates the beginning in Europe of any of the causal influences that fixed the position of women in the Old World, these choices are arbitrary, since stretching from them backward are chains of events and systems of thought that brought them into being. Moreover, if it were within one’s power to trace woman’s history by itself through this vast stretch of time, it also would remain a partial treatment, since the experiences of women were neither independent nor distinct but organically built into the entire life of all the people, irrespective of sex.

The life of men and the life of women cannot be severed as the skilled surgeon can separate one portion of the body from its surrounding tissue. The most that can be done in seeking to trace the various factors that have established the status of women and decided their career is to draw together the most immediate of the influences of European origin and suggest their more remote genesis, in so far as they were continuing sources of contribution affecting the life of women in the civilization of the seventeenth century. Although the task in hand requires that we gather only as much of the deposit accumulated by centuries of human experience as helps us understand the background of American women, our findings are useful in their attempted interpretation, not as they are isolated but as they are related to the entire life of the people who at any time or place contributed to the composite that made up the cultural background of the colonial settlers.

It would be an anachronistic misinterpretation of this fact to go searching through the past in the attempt to establish a conspiracy against the advancement of women. It is, of course, possible to find isolated occurrences that reveal individual or organized efforts to keep women to their allotted position, but to give these much emphasis would be to distort the cultural picture. It is the mores rather than persons that are responsible for the retardation of women in those cases where there clearly is discrimination. For the most part, what we find are mores and systems of thought, natural products of the time and place, that assign women their responsibilities and, therefore, in the analysis of the modern critic, hamper the self-expression and self-determination of one sex as compared with the other. The resistance met by ambitious and aggressive women who seek freer life is not usually born of any disposition on the part of men to keep women from going forward but rather from the reluctance to accept social changes and to make the adjustments that a new order demands.

It also leads to misunderstanding to regard these clashings between persons as necessarily due to masculine opposition. The feminine protest may be great, or even greater, and the resistance to progress may chiefly come from women. On the other hand, the stubbornness may be masculine rather than feminine. It is because of these facts that nothing could be more futile than to go searching human evolution to find evidence of an ever-present conflict between men and women. The mores of the past, as is still true of the mores of the present, have given, at least so far as social opportunity is concerned, an advantage to men in comparison with women, but rarely has there been any deliberate, organized effort on the part of men to conspire against women in order to make them socially inferior or to keep them in a state of cultural vassalage.

Another common fallacy in interpreting woman’s social status has been to think of it as something definite and consistent, a situation easily described and permitting all women to be lumped together. If this were true, it would be far easier to survey the social background of American women. Instead of being permitted to follow such a wide and well-marked-out pathway one is forced to take into account every conceivable variation, as a consequence of differences due to class, religion, and politics. Even the place of habitation has to be reckoned with. In the modern world, in spite of the closeness of people who possess highly efficient means of transportation and communication, we still find differences between city and country folk. These environmental influences were all the greater before the advent of an efficient science. As an example of this, consider how the early history of Christianity reveals the significance of the Roman highways in the spreading of the new religion. It is accepted first by the cities, and the rural centers, distant from the main arteries of travel, take it over much later than the thickly settled and easily accessible parts of the Empire. Every influence, from whatever quarter, that operates upon the culture of a people may also act upon that special part which interests us—the sphere and status of women.

For our purpose, it is necessary to draw together these conditioning elements as they relate to women’s culture. For convenience, these can be classified as the more distant factors coming down from Asiatic and European origin and those more immediately represented in the habits, emotions, and systems of thought possessed by the groups of people that established permanent settlement along the Atlantic coast line.

It will be misleading merely to examine the customs and the thinking of those who came to America as permanent settlers. There are also influences of more distant origin that were acting upon these people and continued to be significant even after they were out of the European environment. The most important of these were the fundamental ideas from which flowed thinking that in no small degree established the status of woman and attempted to perpetuate it. Although these underlying systems of thought deserve to be classified as philosophy, they were for the most part brought into the life of the people through religious teachings. They were not regarded as intellectual ideas but as Christian doctrine, and thus they were enforced as moral requirements by the emotions and the convictions associated with religious faith. This fact was to prove a continuous obstacle to the men and women who sought to improve woman’s status. Had these notions been regarded as mere intellectual products reflecting the past and present of intellectual leadership, there would not have arisen such an emotional barrier to woman’s advancement, and resistance would have lost the fierceness that came from conceiving the status quo of woman’s life as something established by moral principles.

The thinking that functioned through Christian dogma is so laden with the contributions of the influential philosophies from early Greek thinking down, that to retrace this evolution in its fullness would require exploring the entire cultural watershed as it gave source to all the tributaries of thought that contribute to the main current. It is this latter flow that concerns us, and we are interested in it more as it enters Christianity than as an evolution of philosophy in its strictest sense. This, however, cannot be handled as if it were something fixed, a consistent system. It also has a history of change. Occasionally it has been interpreted, especially by its critics, as a final dogma without recognition that even when there is a prevailing consistency of doctrine at a definite time and place there are nearly always variations and departures from the main teaching and that always, from time to time, there are differences of emphasis as well as considerable shifting in the authoritative doctrines carried forward by the Church. The attempt to deal with the Christian teaching of any period as a consistency explains the case with which its critics and its advocates can radically differ while they both appeal to definite facts, historically well-established.

In spite of its originality, Christianity, as it historically expressed itself, took over certain liabilities that came out of the social circumstances of the time and the character and background of those who became followers of the new religion and that influenced its teachings and its organization. One of these elements that had appeared on the stage even before the Christian way of living came to expression was asceticism, and it was doubly rooted, for it gained support from the environment as well as from individual inclination. The word asceticism carries two very different suggestions, one stressing the effort through a self-conscious program of life to develop high standards of spiritual experience while the other emphasizes morbid trends such as appear in extreme form in oriental fanaticism. The defenders of Christianity conceive of the ascetic expression that so soon appeared in the new faith as essentially the first while its critics arc prone to select illustrations that emphasize the second type.

However wholesome the goals of any form of spiritual discipline, there is always risk, especially in those who are unbalanced through neurotic tendencies, of the effort to keep unspotted from the world taking an unsocial or a psychopathic form. Although it must be recognized that these excesses occur in the development of Christianity, the environmental encouragement that asceticism received was of Jewish origin rather than Eastern,¹ for the type of asceticism which was characteristic of Indian Holy Men was fundamentally incompatible with the Jewish teaching of ceremonial cleanliness, with its insistence upon practical moral conduct.

There was in Palestine, at the time of the birth of Christianity, a significant ascetic group, the Essenes, who illustrated what has been described as the natur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• Volume Introduction
• What Is Equality?
• Are Women’s Clubs “Used” by Bolshevists?
• The Unfemale Feminine
• Feminism and the Economic Independence of Woman
• The Collapse of Feminism
• Seven Deadly Sins of Woman in Business
• The Problem of Women in Industry
• Equality of Woman with Man: A Myth—A Challenge to Feminism
• Feminism Destructive of Woman’s Happiness
• Second Thoughts on Feminism
• Feminism and Jane Smith
• The Enfranchisement of the Girl of Twenty-one
• Public Opinion—Women in Industry
• Woman’s Morality in Transition
• Woman’s Encroachment on Man’s Domain
• Evils of Woman’s Revolt Against the Old Standards
• Fanatical Females
• This Two-Headed Monster—The Family
• Common Problems of Professional Women
• Sex Inferiority
• Chivalry and Labor Laws
• Cocksure Women and Hensure Men
• Emotional Handicaps of the Professional Woman
• What More Do Women Want?
• Are Ten Too Many?
• A Word to Women
• Is Feminism Decadent?
• A Woman’s Invasion of a Famous Public School and How Men Endured It
• The Disadvantages of Women’s Rights
• The Cultural Background of the American Woman
• Deterrents to Parenthood
• An Objective View?
• Trend of National Intelligence
• American Woman’s Dilemma
• Should Mothers Work?
• Social Psychological Correlates of Upward Social Mobility Among Unmarried Career Women
• My Great-Grandmothers Were Happy
• The Passage Through College
• Women, Husbands and History
• The Found Generation
• Table of Traits Assigned to Male and Female
• A Rousing Club Fight
• Acknowledgments