Women and Gender in Postwar America

The study of women in the post war era of 1945-1960 has been neglected by historians in comparison to the history of women in World War II or women activists of the 1960s. This is thought to be because women in post war America had simply slipped back into the domestic ideal of traditional sexual divisions of labor, and resumed their less than interesting lives.  In other words, women had returned to their homemaker identities; contained to activities that fell within the realm of acceptable female roles and responsibilities. They were simply happy housewives whose fulfillment came from marriage, motherhood and family. Or were they?  In this paper I will explore how women navigated their return to domesticity during the post-war era and in the early Cold War era while continuing to maintain their autonomy.  Through the lens of anti-communist activism, we will see how women used their roles in civil and political organizations to challenge the challenge the domestic stereotype that women belonged in the home. For many Americans communism was a threat to their basic civil liberties, and it impacted their thoughts, how they spent money, and how they spent their time. While most believed the government was doing all they could to protect the country against military threats abroad and at home, others believed that if communism found its way in, it would destroy the American family ideal.

During wartime, government propaganda, media, and film all focused on women’s contributions to the war efforts.  Women assumed positions in factories, filling in for the men who had entered the war to defend the country.  Women were elevated to positions of importance – for without them, the war efforts could not have been successful.  But the shift in post war propaganda removed the power that women had been given, and returned them to their traditional subordinate roles.  However, despite attempts to return women to a conservative position, postwar social and cultural changes did open doors for women in the political and civil arena.

As the end of WW II came, women who were primarily responsible for home, family and domestic duties, began paying attention to foreign policy. These same women who supported the ideal that women belonged at home also believed that the threat of communism to the country was so great that without their actively taking steps to fight communism, they were risking not only their children’s lives, but the whole American way of life.[1] Stepping in to the role of anti-communist activist was not difficult for these women as many had the experience other female activists blazing the trail before them- both before, during and following World War I.  Women of the post war period found a platform on which they could assert themselves.  At this early point in the Cold War with a combination of gender and class issues always at the forefront, women found the anti-communist platform a nice fit with her domestic expectations.

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Women in particular saw their ability to participate in the anti-communist movement as a way to protect their homes and families. They found they could spread the anti-communism message through small group gatherings, social meetings, and newsletters. One such newsletter, The Minute Women of the U.S.A., Inc., was born from the efforts of Suzanne Stephenson in Connecticut, 1949. What began as a small group of American housewives, soon grew to over fifty-thousand members across multiple states. Stephenson only instructions were that members never reveal that they were Minute Women and always present themselves as individual concerned citizens. In her view, political activism was more effective when it appeared to be spontaneous.

  The newsletter was a tool to bolster their already strong letter writing and telephone campaigns.  As evident in the March 1956 issue, many of the newsletter articles were a combination of Christian values meets communist conspiracy theory. What better way to reach women than through religion and fear of a communist invasion? In this issue the writer identified only as “Dorothy” writes “Let’s look a moment at Communism. It is the forceful means of bringing about socialism. Who pays the biggest price under socialistic rule? Women. One need but look at the plight of women in the Iron Curtain countries where socialism prevails… the Government owns and controls. Do you think it can’t happen here?”[2] In the mid 1960’s the group finally faded away as the nation turned against McCarthyism and the anti-Communist hysteria had diminished.

 The relationship between men and women in the shifting realities of the postwar world was challenged by not only the trauma of the Great Depression and the two World Wars, but especially during the interwar and post war periods.  These events not only had major economic impacts for the country, but they also undermined traditional family relationships and gender roles as men and women adjusted to their new roles.   This was especially challenging for men who, on returning from war found their work unfulfilling, but also felt threatened by women in the workplace.[3]

Going beyond just the political scene, these anti-communist women also worried about the impact of communism on a scale closer to home.  They worried about the infiltration of communist agents on community organizations and how the Red influence on the economy would impact their household budgets.  This did not abate even in the late 1950’s with the end of the Korean War, the death of Stalin, and televised Army-McCarthy hearings.  The anti-communist groups continued to push for education of Americans to be vigilant against the dangers of communism. This was capitalized on by female politicians and even some of their male constituents to engage women in the political process and show them that they can make a difference.  Anti-communist activists also used this to show the housewives and mothers the importance of taking their voting rights seriously. It is here where it is most noticed that partisan differences in class, education and religion place higher numbers of women in the Republican party since Democrats were more traditionally aligned with the working class who had less leisure time and therefore were less often involved in political polling and election events.

One such woman who had a major impact on the advancement of women in politics was Margaret Chase Smith.  Born in 1897 in Maine, she became one of the prominent voices of 20th century American politics. After taking over her husband’s House seat in 1940, Smith carved out a three-decade career as an independent-minded congresswoman and senator, notably supporting women’s rights and making a high-profile stand in opposition of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against communism.  Smith began her involvement in politics serving on the Republican State Committee until she left to help her husband with his 1936 run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Once he was elected, Smith became his secretary. She handled everything from filing to helping prepare his speeches. When he died of a heart attack in April 1940, Margaret Smith assumed his position in the House and held on to the post after winning in a special election that June.  During her eight years in the House of Representatives, Smith demonstrated that she acted according to her conscience instead of simply following the party line Smith was an advocate for women’s rights and she co-sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment with Congresswoman Winifred Stanley in the mid-1940s, and worked on improving the status of women in the military.

In 1948, Smith successfully won her bid to become a senator, making her the first woman to serve in both chambers of Congress. Despite her own opposition to communism, Smith spoke out against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s intense persecution of nearly anyone suspected to have communist links. Smith is most famous for delivering a speech called the “Declaration of Conscience” which said “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism—The right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood, nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.”[4] Throughout the 1960’s Smith held on to her Senate seat and continued to vote based on her own beliefs, not party politics. In 1972, Smith lost her bid for reelection. After leaving office in 1973, Smith served as a visiting professor for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. She also helped establish the Margaret Chase Smith Library in her hometown of Skowhegan.

Another major contributor to the female political agenda was Phyllis Stewart Schlafly. Born in August 1924, Schlafly was a devout Catholic, and an ultraconservative anti-Communist. She was also a housewife and mother before receiving her law degree in 1978 from Washington University.  Those three things; ultraconservative anti-communist, housewife/mother, and educated woman set her apart from many other women of the time. This is primarily because of the path which Schlafly took in her activism.  While most young women were getting married and having children, Phyllis was earning her education, working, and finding her way into the political scene.

Schlafly made her first unsuccessful run for Congress in 1952, during the Korean War.  While she volunteered in organizations like the Illinois Federation of Republican Women and made statewide speeches as a state officer and national defense chairman of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she did not make an attempt for public office again. Instead she focused on publishing historical records relating to the history of Republican national conventions that told how the “kingmakers”—the party’s eastern, internationalist wing—had cheated the “grass roots” of their choices.[5] She did not make another attempt at a Congressional seat in Illinois until 1970 when she ran a “Cold War issues” campaign. She asserted that it was the federal bureaucrats who had created a permanently poor welfare class and that civil rights and New Left groups full of Communists along with federal poverty workers had organized the riots connected to the Vietnam War and the tense climate surrounding the protests. Schlafly opposed the war and saw it as a Soviet trap to divert U.S. resources from providing a strong defense.

It wasn’t just Cold War politics that drew Schlafly in.  Her support for equal rights for women also kept her activism strong.  In 1972 an amendment passed Congress which prevented ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing equality of rights for women. Schlafly opposed it because it struck at traditionalist family and religious values which could open the door to legalization of homosexual marriage and abortion to name a few.  As a writer, Phyllis Schlafly’s work centered on national defense and feminist ideals and values.  In her book The Positive Woman in 1978, she compared a traditional wife and homemaker, pro-family and pro-defense ideal, to feminist ideals and values.  Her style often offended readers across the political spectrum, but some critics acknowledged that her arguments made sense. Eventually the women’s movement became less insensitive to her position. Ultimately, the ratification period for the amendment expired in June 1982.

For thirty years Schlafly fought for her cause and her opponents found her to be an incredibly fierce and capable fighter for her views. She did this while raising a family, writing books, newspaper columns, and appearing on a weekly radio talk show focusing on education. She remained a spokeswoman for conservative causes, presenting her views on day care, comparable worth, and the Family Medical Leave Act to the U.S. Congress. She even weathered through attempts to discredit her family-values message, when the news media reported in 1992 that her son was a homosexual. Still, she was voted Illinois Mother of the Year that same year. 

Both Smith and Schlafly were pioneers in women’s participation in the public and civil arena during the post war era. Yet despite the nearly 30 years between their births, both women had similar experiences with their foray into the political world and the anti-communist movement. Because of their access to their spouse’s political power, Smith and Schlafly were able to affect change for women at a higher level than most, but others still contributed through simple every day efforts of their domestic lives.

Shifting social norms quickly altered the notion of domesticity. In the middle of the daily grind of household duties, many postwar wives and mothers were frustrated by their lack of professional fulfillment. Betty Friedan identified this frustration as “the problem with no name” in her landmark book The Feminine Mystique (1963). The book’s popularity spoke to Friedan’s connection to feeling discontentment. Women who came into adulthood in the 1960s were determined to make their lives less restricted than their mothers. As a result, the women’s rights movement and the sexual revolution of the 1960s challenged many of the traditional notions of motherhood and marital relationships.[6]  Many young women rejected the sexual conventions of their parents’ generation. Open discussion of sexuality and cohabitation outside marriage became more socially accepted. As birth control became more widely available, women exercised greater control over when or if they would have children, and in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court upheld on the grounds of privacy a woman’s constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy.

Friedman’s book became an instant best seller because women identified with her argument that both women and men found personal identity and fulfillment through their careers. Without this growth, she states, for women at least they would remain unhappy and unfulfilled leading to an unhappy home life for all.[7]  The struggle for women to find place and purpose in the middle Cold War era was further explored by historians who examined how post-war mass culture – such as magazines portrayed the domestic ideal of the housewife alongside the nondomestic activities involving women. Magazines like the Readers Digest and the Negro Digest highlighted stories of women who had rose above their domestic role. For women of color this acknowledgement bridged not only gender issues, but race as well. Ebony Magazine highlighted one such woman, Louise Williams. Louise was not only a wife and mother, but the only black female mechanic at American Airlines.  The magazine reported “”She is a good cook, but an even better mechanic…she was “never a lazy housewife.”[8]  The post-war period and subsequent Cold War years created opportunities for women that brought them out of home and into their communities as wage earners and contributors to the family. Women weren’t just shedding their domestic housewife/mother roles, but adding and balancing career with family.

As thousands of men were deployed overseas, women’s role within society began to shift in response to changing needs. They began to take on new roles in the public sphere, including working in previously male-dominated positions in factories, shipyards, and defense plants. These women are often called the “Rosie the Riveters” of the war. Many women, though, had a vastly different experience from the glamorized woman displayed in wartime propaganda. As the war came to a close, Americans desperately sought normalcy after years of chaos. Normalcy, as many saw it, was the return to traditional gender roles for men and women, and an increased focus on the family. 

The relationship between men and women in the shifting realities of the postwar world, was challenged by what was considered appropriate for each with regard to sexuality and gender.  During this time the Kinsey Report on Human Sexuality was published and it created an upheaval in the anticommunist ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family. Kinsey published two reports; the first in 1948 was entitled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, followed by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Each report was based on extensive interviews with thousands of American men and women, and presented an abundance of statistics about their sexual behavior. The report was thorough and included information on virtually every imaginable sexual statistic including incidence of homosexuality and lesbianism. The reports came at time when Americans were clinging to traditional beliefs that sexual intercourse should only take place within the confines of marriage and only between man and woman.

During this time, the government was also attempting to purge gay and lesbian individuals from holding any political office as it was a general belief that homosexuality would weaken national strength and ability to fight communism. This belief came out of Philip Wylie’s theory that homosexuality was caused by mothers raising boys to be weak physically and mentally- therefore making them easy targets for the temptations of communism. “Sexual perverts” were investigated and outed by the FBI which is what drove many into unnatural relationships to hide their true selves and led to the creation of the ‘closet’ homosexual. The term ‘momisms’ was also coined at this time. This was the theory that women who ignored their husbands drove them to infidelity, and women who ignored their children, raised criminals, or women whose sons were overindulged, developed into weak, effeminate men who would succumb to communist ploys.

  As the government was working to weed out anyone viewed as a potential threat to national strength, the baby boom of the mid-late 1940’s was occurring.  Birth rates rose in all social groups regardless of race, ethnicity and class.  Pop culture belief was that motherhood was the route to fulfillment of female sexuality and the primary source of a woman’s identity[9]. However by the end of the boom in the mid 1950’s, the push to conform to responsible family planning and the dissemination of contraception and contraceptive information by physicians was passing legislation in most all states.  Contraceptives were endorsed as a means of strengthening the family unit and responsibly spacing childbirth. Sexual and reproductive freedom provided more options for women, who previously chose either a career or marriage. By the 1970s, many marriages involved two careers, as both the husband and the wife worked and increasingly shared familial duties, accelerating a trend already well underway in the post–World War II period. These responsibilities added stress to family life. The divorce rate rose, and the phenomenon of the single, working mother became more commonplace.  Yet, throughout this period, more young women pursued careers in traditionally male-dominated fields, such as law, medicine, and business, loosening their bonds to the domestic ideal of a homebound life and shifting the course for a new generation of women in state and national politics.

Throughout the course of the post-war period, primarily between 1947 and the middle 1960’s women struggled to construct their own identities outside of the normal expectations of housewife and mother. Many Americans saw family as the strongest bond in the fight against communism, and women especially, took upon themselves the mission to combat communism on the homefront. After World War II, America was obsessed with family life and traditional gender roles. This obsession grew further during the Cold War as the traditional domestic roles of women were challenged.  Women were merging their domesticity with work outside of the home.

Through their activism, women found their voice. They used their positions as housewives and mothers to gain support of other housewives and mothers, and broke down the stereotype that women were ignorant to political issues and foreign policy. Both Phyllis Schlafly and Margaret Chase Smith showed that women could juggle families, husbands, and political work, and that women could have an impact on the political process. Anticommunism was traditionally recognized as a male fought crusade. Women who identified as anticommunist crusaders weakened the stereotype of normalized female behavior during the post-war era.  They encouraged women to get involved in local politics and where communism was concerned, there could be no compromise.

The traditional story of the postwar years has historically left out, slighted, and misinterpreted the contributions made by women during this period. The fact is that women were central to the anticommunist movement. In contrast to public perception that women were only interested in home and family, these crusaders wrote and spoke with great intelligence on foreign policy and were unafraid to challenge the government when the situation arose. The activism of women in the 40’s and 50’s provided a bridge for social and political change linking earlier generations of women  activists to those involved in the social movements of the 60’s. This is important because it had created the foundation for women’s social reform efforts that younger generations could build upon.

Bibliography

• Brennan, Mary C. Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism. Boulder, Colo: Univ. Press of Colorado, 2008.
• Critchlow, Donald T. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Meyerowitz, Joanne J., ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945 – 1960. Critical Perspectives on the Past. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1994.
• Nielsen, Kim E. Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001.
• “Oral History Excerpt | Ruth Young Watt on Her Role with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.” U.S. Senate: Contacting the Senate Search. July 20, 2018. Accessed November 30, 2018.
•  https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Watt_audio_clip.htm.
•  https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/oral_history/Ruth_Young_Watt.htm
• Sherman, Janann. No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith. Rutgers Series on Women and Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
• “The Minute Women of the U.S.A., Inc. Newsletter, Number 11,” Panama Collection, February/March 1956,, accessed November 30, 2018, http://cdm15942.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15942coll11/id/1328/rec/2.

[1] Mary C. Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism (Boulder (Colo.): University Press of Colorado, 2008) 32.

[2]“The Minute Women of the U.S.A., Inc. Newsletter, Number 11.” Panama Collection. http://cdm15942.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15942coll11/id/1328/rec/2

[3] Mary C. Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism (Boulder (Colo.): University Press of Colorado, 2008) 116.

[4] “Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience.” Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century – American Rhetoric. Accessed November 29, 2018. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/margaretchasesmithconscience.html.

[5] Donald T.  Critchlow.  Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ Oxford (2005) 59

[6] Betty Friedan, the Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 22.

[7] Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 230.

[8] “Lady Plane Mechanic,” Ebony, January 10, 1948.

[9] Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2017), 135.