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From C-Span

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Vice President Nixon and Premier Krushchev waged an impromptu debate on the benefits of communism vs. capitalism, which became known as the 'kitchen debate.' They were standing before a new color...

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NPR Interview with Meredith May

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Researcher Aims to Tell the Stories of Woman-Owned Businesses in Post-War Houston by Houston Matters

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oday, the idea of women owning businesses is not a novel one, like it might have been back in the middle of the 20 Century. But gender roles started to fluctuate slowly after World War II, including here in Houston, and women took the initiative to start more and more businesses over the decades.

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From US History in Context

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Primary Source: Adlai Stevenson on a Woman's Place, 1955

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Primary Source: Adlai Stevenson on a Woman's Place, 1955

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From Digital History, University of Houston

"I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife.

The peoples of the West are still struggling with the problems of a free society and just now are in dire trouble. For to create a free society is at all times a precarious and audacious experiment. Its bedrock is the concept of man as an end in himself. But violent pressures are constantly battering away at this concept, redu cing man once again to subordinate status, limiting his range of choice, abrogating his responsibility and returning him to his primitive status of anonymity in the social group. I think you can be more helpful in identifying, isolating and combatting the se pressures, this virus, than you perhaps realize.

Let me put it this way: individualism has promoted technological advance, technology promoted increased specialization, and specialization promoted an ever closer economic interdependence between specialties.

As the old order disintegrated into this confederation of narrow specialties, each pulling in the direction of its particular interest, the individual person tended to become absorbed literally by his particular function in society. Having sacrificed whol eness of mind and breadth of outlook to the demands of their specialties, individuals no longer responded to social stimuli as total human beings; rather they reacted in partial ways as members of an economic class or industry or profession whose concern was with some limited self-interest.

Thus this typical Western man, or typical Western husband, operates well in the realm of means, as the Romans did before him. But outside his specialty, in the realm of ends, he is apt to operate poorly or not at all. And this neglect of the cultivation o f more mature values can only mean that his life, and the life of the society he determines, will lack valid purpose, however busy and even profitable it may be.

And here's where you come in: to restore valid, meaningful purpose to life in your home; to beware of instinctive group reaction to the forces which play upon you and yours, to watch for and arrest the constant gravitational pulls to which we are all expo sed_your workaday husband especially_in our specialized, fragmented society, that tend to widen the breach between reason and emotion, between means and ends.

And let me also remind you that you will live, most of you, in an environment in which "facts," the data of the senses, are glorified, and values_judgments_are assigned inferior status as mere "matters of opinion." It is an environment in which art is often regarded as an adornment of civilization rather than a vital element of it, while philosophy is not only neglected but deemed faintly disreputable because "it never gets you anywhere." Even religion, you will find, command s a lot of earnest allegiance that is more verbal than real, more formal than felt.

You may be hitched to one of these creatures we call "Western man" and I think part of your job is to keep him Western, to keep him truly purposeful, to keep him whole. In short_while I have had very little experience as a wife or mother_I think one of the biggest jobs for many of you will be to frustrate the crushing and corrupting effects of specialization, to integrate means and ends, to develop that balanced tension of mind and spirit which can be properly called "integrity."

This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, has great advantages.

In the first place, it is home work_you can do it in the living-room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand. If you're really clever, maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he's watchi ng television!

And, secondly, it is important work worthy of you, whoever you are, or your education, whatever it is, because we will defeat totalitarian, authoritarian ideas only by better ideas; we will frustrate the evils of vocational specialization only by the virt ues of intellectual generalization. Since Western rationalism and Eastern spiritualism met in Athens and that mighty creative fire broke out, collectivism in various forms has collided with individualism time and again. This twentieth- century collision, this "crisis" we are forever talking about, will be won at last not on the battlefield but in the head and heart.

So you see, I have some rather large notions about you and what you have to do to rescue us wretched slaves of specialization and group thinking from further shrinkage and contraction of mind and spirit. But you will have to be alert or you may get caught yourself_even in the kitchen or the nursery_by the steady pressures with which you will be surrounded....

Women, especially educated women, have a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy, and to play a direct part in the unfolding drama of our free society. But I am told that nowadays the young wife or mother is short of time for such subtle arts, that things are not what they used to be; that once immersed in the very pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debates for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they read Baudelaire. Now it is the Consumers' Guide. Once they wrote poetry. Now it's the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers. (Or do they any longer?)

Now I hope I have not painted too depressing a view of your future, for the fact is that Western marriage and motherhood are yet another instance of the emergence of individual freedom in our Western society. Their basis is the recognition in women as wel l as men of the primacy of personality and individuality. I have just returned from sub-Sahara Africa where the illiteracy of the African mother is a formidable obstacle to the education and advancement of her child and where polygamy and female labor are still the dominant system.

The point is that whether we talk of Africa, Islam or Asia, women "never had it so good" as you do. And in spite of the difficulties of domesticity, you have a way to participate actively in the crisis in addition to keeping yourself and thos e about you straight on the difference between means and ends, mind and spirit, reason and emotion_not to mention keeping your man straight on the differences between Botticelli and Chianti....

In modern America the home is not the boundary of a woman's life. There are outside activities aplenty. But even more important is the fact, surely, that what you have learned and can learn will, fit you for the primary task of making homes and whole hum an beings in whom the rational values of freedom, tolerance, charity and free inquiry can take root."

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Defying Donna Reed:
The Nature of Women and Work in the Postwar Years    

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Defying Donna Reed:
The Nature of Women and Work in the Postwar Years    

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Despite the fact that, in 1945, public opinion and outside pressures had pushed and pulled white women into the home and out of the workforce, they did not all remain at home. Immediately after the war, rates of women workers dropped.  But in 1947, the growth of employed females began again, passing the rates of women in the 1944 workforce.  This workforce, however, looked different from the female workers prior to the war. Whereas most employed women before the Depression and war years were young, single, or childless, in the postwar labor force, married women outnumbered single women, and women with children saw great gains in labor participation.[1]  By 1960, one-third of those employed included mothers with children under the age of eighteen.[2]

Unfortunately for these new labor recruits, women's increased participation in the labor force did not coincide with an enlarged acceptance for nontraditional gender constructs.  Traditional roles could not be overturned overnight.  A media blitz in the postwar years preached domesticity and a woman's fulfillment through home and family. When supposedly misguided women did enter the work force, some public policy makers argued that they deserved discrimination.  In leaving the home, they were possibly neurotic and, as such, poor and unstable workers.  They, according to some writers, did not have the imagination or capacity to be as good a worker as men.[3]  Yet, in spite of widespread media censure, women continued entering the workforce.  Reports on working women in the 1950s expressed surprise at the number of women in the labor force. The word revolution appeared frequently, showing the disbelief in women's rejection of domestic tranquility.[4]

The resistance to women's employment outside of the home did not only stem from the fear of losing traditional gender roles. Many white Americans, in the face of the Cold War, had turned inward, toward the ideal nuclear family. The media perpetuated the idea through television and magazines. Characters on popular television shows, like June Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver and Donna Reed on The Donna Reed Show, propagated middle-class motherhood.[5]  Indeed, the 1959 "kitchen debate" between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev underscored the accepted role of American women on a national stage.  At the American National Exhibition in the Soviet Union, Nixon praised a model kitchen for its ability to make life easier for housewives. When Khrushchev countered that communism did not confine women to the home, Nixon brushed the argument away, clearly communicating the differences between the ideal American postwar experience and the Soviet world.[6]

As the Cold War continued, anticommunists viewed women who stepped out of the housewife role with additional misgivings.  Child psychologists warned of a child's need for full-time attention, lest they fall prey to juvenile delinquency or communist ideologies.  The nuclear family was the foundation of democracy and, as such, mothers and homemakers were the first line of defense. As historian Elaine Tyler May has suggested, "self-supporting women were in some way un-American."[7]

Nevertheless, the number of female workers continued to grow as business demands increased.  Across the nation, however, the kinds of work in which women generally partook changed in the postwar years. On one hand, more women held production jobs in 1950 than in 1940.[8] In the blue-collar jobs they obtained, though, they were in deskilled positions, not in the higher-paying skilled areas. In 1959, labor analyst Robert Smuts concurred that women in factory positions worked as assemblers of small items and machine operators, and "most jobs [were] still assigned on the basis of sex, and the best ones [were] still reserved for men."[9] The most rapidly growing industries, however, were in the service and clerical fields and relied upon female labor. Government employment agencies in 1946 found 40 percent of female applicants in service jobs, 13 to 15 percent in semiskilled positions and fewer than 5 percent in skilled work.  These were menial and poorly compensated positions. Women earned an average of less than sixty-five cents an hour in 70 percent of the jobs available to women.  This was a salary paid to less than one-fourth of all men.[10]

Why did women continue in the labor force after World War II in spite of the media’s opinions, low wages, and little recognition?  In East Texas and across the nation, women usually entered the workforce out of economic necessity.  The postwar economy, dependent on consumer participation, demanded more income than many families with one breadwinner possessed.  After years of deprivation during the Depression and World War II, families wanted new commodities, like televisions, cars, and appliances. Competitive consumption was necessary to achieve the middle-class American dream. Thus, women pursued employment to help the family budget but did not wish to equal or surpass the income of her husband.  The typical middle-class working woman of the 1950s and 1960s was supplementing her family's livelihood, not challenging the male breadwinner.[11] Additionally, rising earnings, fewer children, and the completion of childrearing relatively early in life left middle-class women free to find employment.[12]

For working-class women, the economic situation was more dire. In the cultural debates over whether or not women should work, few scholars and journalists paid attention to poor women in both rural and urban areas. Although the end of the war brought new consumer goods, it also heralded inflation and rising costs. Meat prices alone increased 122 percent in two years.[13] This increased pressure on families already dealing with inadequate incomes. East Texas, in particular, was an area with deep poverty. In 1950, seven out of the twelve counties in the Deep East Texas Council of Government had more than 20 percent of their families earning less than $2000 a year, the cut-off line for deep poverty, as defined by the United States Census Bureau.[14] In 1950, the median annual income of southern male workers, including those living and working in Deep East Texas, in logging was $1,151; in sawmills, $1,545. Only private household servants, earning $763, were lower. The median for all workers in the state of Texas was $2,332, making the wages for sawmill and lumber workers significantly lower than those in other occupations.[15]

This pattern of low wages for blue-collar workers did not end in the 1950s and 1960s. Nationwide, as late as 1974, 3.2 million working women were married to men who earned less than $5,000 a year, and another 2.3 million were married to men who earned between $5,000 and $7,000. At that time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that a family of four needed $7,386 a year to remain above the poverty line.[16]  Many women had no choice but to work in whatever positions they could find.

[1] Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995 (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1997), 143.
[2] William Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 218.
[3] Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 297.
[4] Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s  (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 63.
[5] Behind the scenes, however, some of the female actors, like Donna Reed, asserted creative and business control.
[6] For more on the “kitchen debate,” see Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds, Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011).

[7] Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 13.
[8] Blackwelder, Now Hiring, 131.
[9] Robert W. Smuts, Women and Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 33.
[10] Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond, 91.
[11]  May, Homeward Bound, 149.
[12] Kennedy, If All We Did was to Weep at Home, 203
[13] Ibid., 20

[14]Ruth Allen, East Texas Lumber Workers: An Economic and Social Picture, 1870-1950 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 6.  Those counties were Jasper, Newton, Polk, Sabine, San Jacinto, Trinity, and Tyler.

[15] U.S. Census, 1950, Pt. 43, Texas, Table 86.
[16] Kennedy, If All We Did Was to Weep at Home, 204.

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From the Library of Congress