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In the aftermath of the second world war, there was a flood in the labor market as men returned home to find women in their positions, having taken them so that the country and the war effort could continue while the men were away. Most men got their jobs back, but many women still wished to keep on in the labor market.

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One of the first icons that one would think of with regards to women’s empowerment.

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Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

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The main idea is that women, after the war’s end, steadily increased their participation in the labor force. This was a significant factor in the upcoming 3rd wave of feminism that calls for social equality, which makes sense, as women are beginning to achieve financial and personal independence in this time period.

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Source: Census Bureau

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Most important is to focus on the cohort of those turning 15 between 1954 and 1963. By twenty years old, nearly half of all those surveyed had had premarital sex, despite the fact that the average age of first marriage had dropped down to that exact age: 20.

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Philomena is a movie based on a true story about Philomena Lee, who has nonmarital sex in the 1950s and becomes pregnant. The convent of nuns who house her ostracize her for her “sin” and take her child away from her to put up for adoption. The story is her search for her son as an old lady with the journalist Martin Sixsmith. Over the course of the story, the deeply devoted and pious Philomena shows how this Puritanical way of thinking has led her to consider what she did to be a sin.

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"Buddy was amazingly close to his mother. He was always quoting what she said about the relationship between a man and a woman, and I knew Mrs. Willard was a real fanatic about virginity for men and women both. When I first went to her house for supper she gave me a queer, shrewd, searching look, and I knew she was trying to tell whether I was a virgin or not" (Plath  Chapter 6 - Page 71).

As is quite clear, at the time, premarital sex was still considered to be irresponsible and unclean. This ties directly into Philomena, with Philomena being led from a young age to regard sex as sinful and merely human lust.

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Esther is finally getting on birth control towards the end of The Bell Jar, and she describes it as freeing, as she is no longer liable to any man to become pregnant as a result of sex.

“I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: ‘I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person . . . I was my own woman” (Plath Chapter 18 - Page 223).

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“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters” (Plath Chapter 10, Page 64).

When considering learning shorthand, Esther inwardly cringes away from the idea; she wishes to be her own successful woman. As this takes place in the ‘50s, we already see the burden of domesticity start to weaken after the women’s war effort on the domestic front. Esther was previously an editor for a fashion magazine, already showing how women can have mobility in places like the media, which ere previously considered just for men. True, the ‘50s are characterized by suburban domesticity, but the ball is now rolling for the coming decades to chip away at the cult of domesticity.

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Esther finds out that her previous love interest, Buddy Willard, has actually had sex before quite a few times. This doesn’t frustrate Esther because of jealousy, but because Buddy is held by everyone around him to be a pure and respectable man, despite the fact that if a woman had had premarital sex, she would lose that respect in the community.

“I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not” (Plath Chapter 7 - Page 81).

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“From World War II through the 1960s, America was deluged with articles claiming that boys and men, as never before in history, were “confused about what they should and should not do to fulfill their masculine roles” (Bailey 103).

As a result of women’s brief takeover of the workforce and their subsequent gains after the men returned home from the war, there is now much insecurity from men about what it means to be masculine if women are also having jobs and financial self-sufficiency.

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“‘Good etiquette, for a man, is whatever makes him a woman feel more like a woman, without making her feel weakminded. . . . Good etiquette, for a woman, is whatever makes a man feel more like a man, without making him feel more harassed and put upon than he normally does anyway,’ explained a book of contemporary manners in 1959” (Bailey 97).

Taking into account the post-war developments between men and women, it is easy to see why a culture of hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity would develop. It became the norm that men were to quickly pay the bill on dinners and rush to open the door for their date, as this was considered protective and assertive. In exchange, women were to make room for their date’s masculinity and allow themselves to be protected and led.

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Going steady refers to a relationship being “official”, instead of a relationship that gives its man and woman relative freedom to circulate around with other potential partners.

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Going Steady - Dating advice for teenagers in the 1950s

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What’s the Etiquette for an Actual Date, though?

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What’s the Etiquette for an Actual Date, though?

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Popular culture has become the means of disseminating and justifying society’s values. It makes sense, then, that shows in the ‘50s, such as Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy would depict domesticity in favorable terms. The latter would even have Lucy go out of her usual way of domestic responsibilities to find employment. Each time, it would end as a failure.

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Though the 1950s was in many ways a period of conformity with traditional gender roles, it was also a decade of change, when discontent with the status quo was emerging.

Popular culture and the mass media reinforced messages about traditional gender roles, consumer culture, and the Cold War ideal of domesticity, but the reality of women's lives did not always reflect these ideals.

African American women faced particular difficulties in the pursuit of postwar material abundance and the "American dream." Popular portrayals of ideal femininity and home life ignored the lives of minority women and families.

Conformity and the 1950s

The 1950s is often viewed as a period of conformity, when both men and women observed strict gender roles and complied with society's expectations. After the devastation of the Great Depression and World War II, many Americans sought to build a peaceful and prosperous society. However, even though certain gender roles and norms were socially enforced, the 1950s was not as conformist as is sometimes portrayed, and discontent with the status quo bubbled just beneath the surface of the placid peacetime society. Although women were expected to identify primarily as wives and mothers and to eschew work outside of the home, women continued to make up a significant proportion of the postwar labor force. Moreover, the 1950s witnessed significant changes in patterns of sexual behavior, which would ultimately lead to the " sexual revolution " of the 1960s.

Changing social trends following World War II

Demobilization at the end of World War II brought a great many changes. Millions of women who had joined the workforce during the war were displaced by returning soldiers. Messages in popular culture and the mass media encouraged these women to give up their jobs and return quietly to domestic life. Most women, however, wished to keep their jobs, and thus women made up approximately one-third of the peacetime labor force.

During the 1950s, marriage and homeownership rates skyrocketed, so there is no doubt that many Americans were content to pursue the "American dream." These trends were aided by suburbanization and the mass production of automobiles. Cars allowed Americans who lived in the suburbs to commute easily into urban areas for work. Cars not only changed work and housing patterns, but also facilitated the rise of new sexual norms. They provided young couples with a place to spend time together alone, away from the prying eyes of parents and other members of the community. This, in turn, led to a rise in premarital sex and birth rates. Thus, patterns of sexual behavior were changing even as the traditional ideal continued to insist upon marriage before sex.

Between 1946 and 1964, the largest generation of Americans, known as the baby boomers, was born. This demographic trend in turn reinforced women's identities as wives and mothers. Despite societal norms that encouraged women to stay in the home and out of the workplace, approximately forty percent of women with young children, and at least half of women with older children, chose to remain in the work force.

Cold War domesticity and popular culture

Gender roles in the 1950s were intimately connected to the Cold War. The term nuclear family emerged to describe and encourage the stability of the family as the essential building block of a strong and healthy society. In this view, a woman played a crucial role in waging the Cold War, by keeping the family unit strong and intact. She could do this best, it was thought, by remaining at home to take care of her husband and children, and refusing to pursue a career. Thus was a link forged between traditional gender roles and national security.

Moreover, because the Cold War was also a competition between two very different economic systems, the virtues of capitalism were touted as proving the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union. Capitalism revolved around the exchange of goods and services in the marketplace, and so identifying with consumer culture became a way of waging the Cold War. Women, traditionally expected to do most of the shopping for the household, were encouraged to identify as patriotic Americans by being savvy consumers.

The norms of consumer culture and domesticity were disseminated via new and popular forms of entertainment - not just the television, which became a fixture in middle-class American households during the 1950s, but also women's magazines, popular psychology, and cinema. Shows promoting the values of domesticity, like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, became especially popular. These shows portrayed the primary roles of women as wives and mothers. Lucille Ball, in I Love Lucy, inevitably met with disaster whenever she pursued job opportunities or interests that took her outside of the household. On the other hand, the fact that every episode revolved around Lucy's attempts to pursue outside interests indicated her discontent with remaining at home. Moreover, Lucille Ball, while playing the role of a hapless housewife on TV, was in reality a highly successful actress and producer, and thus challenged society's expectations of women.

African American women in the 1950s

It is important to remember that the ideal of domesticity was primarily aimed at middle-class white women. African American women, as well as women of lower socioeconomic standing, were not portrayed in popular culture as wives and mothers; in fact, these women were hardly portrayed at all. Although African Americans have been hugely influential in popular culture throughout the twentieth century, the 1950s were a very "whitewashed" decade from the standpoint of the mass media. Additionally, many African American women were forced by economic necessity to work outside of the home, and were thus excluded from the postwar ideal of domesticity.

What do you think?

Who benefited the most from the postwar surge in material abundance?

Were there signs of discontent with the status quo of the 1950s? What were they?

How did the imperatives of the Cold War shape gender roles and society's expectations of women?

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Women in the 1950s (article) | 1950s America | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Esther thinks back to Buddy Willard, with his stiff, old-fashioned ideals for dating. She finds that she can’t relate in the slightest to a need for security and protection from one man, or a desire to be a man’s rock from which he can pursue his ambitions while she’s tied up at home. What she longs for instead is freedom and mutual companionship, not codependency.

“He was always saying how his mother said, "What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security," and, "What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from," until it made me tired" (Plath Chapter 6 - Page 72).

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“Putting Him In The Mood For Masculinity”

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“Putting Him In The Mood For Masculinity”

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This picture implores women not to get jealous even when their man is flirting with another woman. Instead, the woman is supposed to simply “be more attractive” than the other woman. This reinforces stereotypes that the woman is supposed to be attractive for the man’s benefit and judgment, which is still a sentiment that we see today.

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"Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another" (Plath Chapter 7 -  Page 82).

Esther still hasn’t had sex with anyone and doesn’t until much later in The Bell Jar, and she feels this distinct characteristic identifying her as someone who has yet to be intimate or steady with another person. Dating Buddy Willard almost sufficed, but he was incompatible the whole time they dated; she just didn’t know. Despite the stigma against nonmarital and premarital sex, she still feels the pressure to partake, especially given how many other do in their youth.

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"The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly. My mother said this was something a girl didn't know about till it was too late, so she had to take the advice of people who were already experts, like a married woman" (Plath  Chapter 7 - Page 81).

Having already formed and consolidated relationships, the adults and parents of the 1950s were in good position to define what etiquette and proper values were. Despite the youth forming their own generational norms of sex and dating, they still relyed frequently on the experience of those who came before, allowing the older generations to generate the right narrative to preserve certain values in courtship.

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Joshua Grissman