and go all the way until the end of the 20th century. as you know, this is the us survey so it's sort of the greatest hits of american history as my job. today's lecture though is a lecture that you get because of what i am a specialist in right? this is a lecture that maybe you wouldn't get from another professor in this department teaching this class. so this this lecture is really going to situate us in the 1950s and really talk about gender and families in that era. and you know as all lectures you should feel free to ask questions in the middle if you want or at the end also and zoom people the questions will be in the chat. so of all the nations in the world at the end of world war two only the united states emerged stronger and more prosperous in when the war began. europe and asia of course had been devastated by the war and america's but america's farms factories were all intact. despite social tensions that were ever present and still during the war the fight against fascism had seemed to unify americans and given them a sense of purpose. victory seemed to confirm their struggles. so there's a new sense of prosperity and some kind of security in the post-war period but there was also insecurity in this world because of course after world war two the united states would be facing a new international enemy the soviet union. and the next 40 years of american history would be defined by the contest with it. right which of course, you know is a cold war and we will be talking in detail about that in the coming weeks. but the awesome and destructive power of the atomic bomb in addition to that ongoing ever-present cold war made americans feel. terrible in new ways in the post-war period and we can see the effects of both this prosperity and the insecurity in ideas about american families in the 1950s. before i get to the argument. i want to give you a little story to situate a situate us in in these families. so this is a couple in 1959 they married and they decided to have their honeymoon in their bomb shelter this what they called sheltered honeymoon was featured in life magazine, which is why we know about it. they had, you know these pictures of them outside their bomb shelter surrounded by their consumer goods. and the article joked fallout can be fun. and what they had was they would take all these supplies into the bomb shelter and then they'd have 14 days of what they called unbroken togetherness. in the shelter so the idea here was that this honeymoon and really this marriage all you needed was consumer goods. sexuality of course and total privacy this was an ideal nuclear family in a nuclear age. they were isolated sexually charged cushioned by abundance and protected by the wonders of modern technology. this would be an emblem for what these families in the 50s the ideal of american families would be these would be families that was supposed to be would fulfill all its members, but also be essential protections from the outside world this kind of family would be an essential defense against russian incursion americans believe deeply that russians had very different values of all kinds but all so americans increasingly believed in the 50s that this kind of family would protect against any corrosive elements within the united states. so here's the argument. of this lecture in the 1950s americans made the nuclear family. central to national identity demanded conformity to that ideal and punished those who deviated the 1950s americans made the nuclear family central to national identity demanded conformity to that ideal and punished those who deviated. let's talk about some of these big demographic changes that happened in the 50s around here. sorry. here's my outline. we're gonna start with talk about marriage and families in the 50s talk about some of these tensions built into ideals in the 50s going to talk then about two important groups that as deviations from this ideal were punished in different ways gonna talk about the lavender scare and then talk about unwed mothers. so let me talk about the demography's big demographic changes that. that affect americans in the 1950s. so in the 1950s few americans remained single and most married young and younger than the people who were marrying in the decades before. by 1959 nearly half of all american brides were under the age of 19. and their husbands were usually only a year or two older and this kind of early marriage like teenage much more common teenage marriage is you think that parents are experts would be upset by this. parents and experts in the 1950s very much approved of these young marriages. less than 10% of americans in the 50s believed that an unmarried person could be happy in life. most newlyweds quickly had babies an average of three and they usually had those babies in their 20s. almost all married couples in the united states regardless of race or class wanted a large family in the 50s. and this is really a shift so in the 40s two children was the ideal for most american families by 1960 most families wanted for and of course this this massive amount of reproduction produced what becomes famous as the baby boom, right baby boomers are the people who are born out of this era? in these families often and this was the ideal and the attempted practice were men and women in these marriages often took distinct and different roles with a male breadwinner and a female homework a homemaker. so this was mostly a one income family. and this was made possible in the 1950s for a few reasons during the 50s more and more families were able to live in middle class comfort on one salary and that's partly because of the post-wear economic boom, which i'm going to talk about more on thursday all this is a period with our strong unions that are sort of spreading wealth into working class homes in more equal ways, and the government is got a number of programs that are funneling money into a variety of homes. which again, i'm going to talk about on thursday. so by the mid 50s nearly 60% of americans had a middle class income and that is just unprecedented in american history up until this point so to give you a comparison on that the roaring twenties right famous for its prosperity only 31% of americans had a middle-class income the 1950s 60% right? that's a huge leap. so it's possible economically for a lot more people in the 50s than before. also, there are strong incentives for wives and mothers to stay home. good childcare was rarely available in the 50s and a lot of these families are increasingly moving to the suburbs away from their extended kid networks who would have been that essential childcare that they would have used in previous generations. so you have a lot of people have fewer access to their relatives to take care of their children. so you have women who simply have to. stay home at least in part. and a new cohort of child care experts insisted that a mother's full-time attention was necessary for her children's well-being. so this is a period where a lot of experts anything that might be wrong in society. there's a one of the most common explanations. is that something went wrong with that mothering relationship either she was working or she was overprotective or overbearing or whatever. so just to give you a sense just to remind us about how unusual the 50s are here for the first time in a hundred years of american history the age of marriage and motherhood fell they had been gradually increasing over time fertility increased fertility have been on a slope downward since 1800. and divorce rates declined again divorce rates had also been on the incline. so the 50s breaks hundred year old trends in all of these areas. so this was a really unusual moment and people who were in it who were living it acknowledged it to be unusual and people who americans and talked about this particular type of family and this particular type of lifestyle as the modern way. we might often people might think of it as sort of a traditional family but at the time they were much more likely to think about it as very distinct from the families that came before they thought of traditional as extended kin networks where you live next to your family right these suburban homes where you really relied on just parents and children together. that was modern to people in the 50s and it felt modern to sort of strike out on your own in this way. also the labor of mothering. in this family was modern and a break from the past as well. so during the 19th century most middle class women had servants to who did much of the housework in child care. and of course that domestic situation was built on the labor of other people usually women and sometimes children. sometimes they were poor people's and of course in the south before the civil war. it was enslaved people. who did this kind of labor but so in the 1950s middle-class women do the bulk of the domestic service and so 50s housewifery really focus on the wife doing the labor and it being a fulfilling fulfilling part of the job. so the amount of time women spent doing housework actually increased in the 1950s despite the fact that the 50s is this moment where you have an explosion of convenience foods and also labor-saving appliances. but and yet the time that women did housework increased and child care absorbed twice the amount of time as it had for in the 1920s. so the 50s surveyors who talked to housewives found that housewives really thought of house work as not just labor but a medium of expression a way to express their identities that it became essential to their sense of self. now i want to say men too were invited to root their identities in home and family in the 1950s. so and we can see this very briefly even thinking about movies that were very popular in the 30s and 40s versus the 50s. so the 30s and 40s you have a whole range of films focused on tough male loaners right like humphrey bogart over here is our one of our better examples right his kind of film in the 50s you have a lot more films that focus on the domestication of men that the storyline often centered around a good woman. who gets a man to settle down? and you might think of these if anyone watches old movies sort of rock hudson and doris day movies being good examples. of those kinds of films so individuals were supposed to be rooting their identities in home and family this particular type of modern nuclear family in the 50s, but that family was also absolutely essential to the sense of what it meant to be an american in the 1950s because in this time in this era parenting family life your home was your civic duty in many ways. that mothers and fathers were supposed to be creating future patriotic generations that would extend the american way of life. and having a family that operated correctly would prevent people from going. ray from the various things that that americans at the time thought the nation stood for right? and we can see this connection. to american nationalism in these very famous debates that happen in 1959 called the kitchen debates. so in 1959. vice president richard nixon traveled to the soviet union for the american national exhibition in moscow. and he's just supposed to be going and looking through the six exhibition and he is engaging with the soviet premier nikita khrushchev. and in this sort of process of walking through this exhibition these two men right who are already engaged in a deep cold war. have a very famous. verbal sparring match in the exhibition and what they're doing in a broad sense is arguing about the relative merits of the american way of life. and or the relative merits of the soviet system, right? but what's important is they did not talk about missiles or bombs or modes of government. what they actually talked about. was washing machines and televisions and electric ranges and these became known as the kitchen debates. so what nixon says? is that washing machines were not just evidence of american ingenuity, but they allowed american women a time-saving a tool that would allow them to sort of root their lives and have better lives in the home. nikita khrushcheff countered with pride. he said that you know that the soviets valued female workers and they didn't have time for what he called capitalist attitudes towards women. he said that the soviet system had no time for and no use for full-time housewives. but for nixon and for a lot of americans in the 50s americans superiority rested on the ideal of the suburban home complete with modern appliances and distinct gender roles for a family members. that consumer goods and suburban homes proved that america provided an abundant life in an atomic age. and in this home women could achieve their glory as housewives and men could display their economic success. so in the 50s, perhaps more so than any other moment in american history the idea of home and a particular type of family come to stand in for the nation and for democracy the values of capitalism and democracy. all right, so i'm going to move into tensions here. i want to talk about how even in a moment where they're really strong ideals around gender and families. they're sort of tensions built into american ideals. the first thing i want to talk about is sexuality and really i think that men and women are being pulled in multiple directions, but i'm really going to focus on the ways that women are being pulled in multiple directions by the imperatives of this era. so during the cold war. there was a new emphasis on. a containing sexuality in order to preserve social order and we can see this in a whole host pop culture venues. so for example, sexually liberated women were linked in popular culture to communist subversion save a lot of popular novels who narrate sexy women as infiltrators and spies, right that sex is like very connected to political subversion. and so just like the soviet threat had to be contained in eastern europe female sexuality had to be contained within marriage or that really risked some kind of social stability and maybe even the free world others spoke about the what would happen a sexual breakdown in the family if more and more women left, which also could lead to some kind of social collapse. but the logic of the time went that the way to prevent communism from seeping in to the american american society was through the nuclear family. that if you had a wife at home who was caring for her children raising them to be future patriotic americans and also loving her husband. like there was a very strong idea of a sexy wife. so this was not an ideal that was absent of sexuality sex was absolutely central. she had to these married couple had to have plenty of sex in the marriage in order to keep a husband from straying because if he's strayed if she did not keep him happy then that would he might fall into the hands of loose women sex workers pornography or homosexuality and all of that could lead you straight to communism. and yet so there's this incredible boundaries and these credible dangers to excessive sexuality, right? here's marilyn monroe this torrent who is uncontrollable, right? and yet there were signs of sexual. the everywhere in the 1950s, especially among young people. so there was this hyper-attention to sexuality this embrace the importance of sexuality, but it had to be contained for young people with through jerk dating and rituals of trading rituals and early marriage and we can even see this in sort of the way that fashion's is changing in the 1950s. so here we have sort of the straight more boyish. look of the flappers in the 1920s, and then you have sort of the shoulder padded strong women of the 30s and 40s here with katherine hepburn. and the 50s though was a very different kind of fashion ideal that speaks to some of the problems or some of the tensions around sexuality. so in the late 40s and 50s, you have a move towards long wide skirts exaggerated bus lines a pinched waist this the era that inaugurates the pusha bra, right but these fashion sort of created an aura of what a historian is called untouchable eroticism. that the body was made into a guarded fortress through girdles and bras that told a man to keep his hands off but promised a great things in marriage. and of course, this is jane mansfield here who was a famous star. she's also the mother of mariska hargitay for svu fans out there. anyway so perhaps unsurprisingly when you have this embrace this this embrace of sexuality, but these really strict boundaries and these dangers that a lot that run alongside of it. the people cross those boundaries right sometimes by accident or sometimes in a in a moment of weakness, so you actually have an increase in premarital sex in the 1950s and at a moment where it was still hard a pretty hard to get contraception abortions illegal and so you have a an increase in out of wedlock pregnancies all in the 1950s. so you also see some tensions around education educational ideals in the 50s. so to do their civic duty men and women were encouraged to see higher education during the cold war. during the cold war everyone needed to go to college or go to school and go to college to make the united states number one. and so as a result in the 50s, you have americans really work for an improved educational system and greater access to college education. in the name of the cold war writing in the name of competing with the soviet union and importantly these reforms really applied to both men and women. so for example, just one small example here in 1958 congress passed the national defense education act. which authorized low interest long-term loans to college and graduate students this is a funding package in many ways. and it was open and able to be equally accessed. by both men and women this piece this big piece of legislation opening up college helping people fund college open to both men and women. but actually once women got to college. textbooks would often warn that there were dangers if women actually competed with men magazines of the era called career women a third sex. in 1960 less than four percent of lawyers and judges were women. and just give you one example of this when future supreme court justice ruth bader ginsburg. she went to college. she went to a law school. she graduated at the top of her class of columbia law school in 1959. and when she got out she couldn't find a job. they would not no one would hire a woman lawyer even though she was top of her class at columbia. and this was part of the the tension built into these educational experiences in the 50s. that women were encouraged to go to college need to excel as americans to put america on top. but when they were in college and especially when they got out they were not necessarily supposed to embrace careers. the idea was that women are supposed to go to college and go to graduate school. and then go home and use that education to educate their children. this education was supposed to make them better mothers. we also see tensions around work in the 1950s. so obviously there's a celebration of homemaking and domesticity but even women who really wanted to be full-time housewives often found themselves having to manage both wage labor and family responsibilities. so in fact women's employment in wage labor doubles between 1940 and 1960. and 40% of american women who had children between the ages of six and 17 do some kind of wage labor in this decade. why why would you go into wage labor especially for those who were deeply committed to being full-time housewives? well because the trappings of the suburban american dream of the 1950s were very expensive. even if you know you can potentially get by with one income maybe not always. and so a majority of these women worked part-time for a specific family goal. a new car maybe college tuition for their children. and when they were in that wage market whether they really wanted to be there or not, they face discrimination. so at this time you found a job often people found a job through want ads in the newspaper like very old school, right? but if you look to the want ads what you would find are two columns. help wanted male and help wanted female and so all jobs were divided by gender in the in the newspaper. and so women were already sort of shuttled into certain kinds of work these female fields include included made secretaries teachers nurses and often those professions were lesser paid and overall female full-time workers in this era earned about an average of 60% of what full-time mail worker was paid at the time. so even for people who really invested themselves and believed in this nuclear family ideal in the 50s faced these tensions even for people who were totally on board. wanted to be a part of this they still would be facing some kind of pressure within that idea at some point in their life most often. but now i'm going to turn to two big groups who really clearly fall outside of this. taylor family in the 1950s and are really punished as a result. so the first group i'm going to talk about are gay men and lesbians. so as i mentioned in a previous lecture briefly. there was awareness of queer people, especially by urban americans in the early 20th century, but it's after world war two where that awareness of homosexuality explodes across the nation people are just like the the rate of people talking about gay people being familiar with some terms just explodes after the war that gay and gay men and lesbians receive a different kind of public attention after world war two. an importantly in this era they become a new kind of enemy in the 1950s and i give you a million examples of this, but i'm just going to stick to one. so i'm going to talk about an event called the lavender scare and it's connected to the red scare, which i'm going to talk more in depth about later. but sort of originates out of the same the same process. so joseph mccarthy famous senator from wisconsin led witch hunts in the early 50s looking for communists in the federal government and also in hollywood and he's really feeding into this strong national paranoia. that there could be communists all among you that it was like a fifth column that you could never quite knew but you always had to be on guard the communist might be your neighbor your teacher your grocer. so in 1950 joseph mccarthy claimed that there were 205 card carrying communists in the federal government. and the state department replied they're like no no, no not communists. they said they have no communists, but they do say they forced out they called security risks and among those were 91 gay people. and then you have a public a press that sort of takes up this this piece of information. and says this is evidence that the entire government was infiltrated with what they called at the time sex perverts. and it led to the firing of thousands of government employees. so in 1950 many thought that gay people posed more of a threat to national security than communists in the united states and you have agencies across the country boasting that they were firing up to one gay person a day, which was more than double the rate for those considered politically disloyal. so why what is the logic of this? so there was these two categories that federal agencies were working with to ferret out people. they didn't want to be working there. one was those who they considered disloyal and these were people who would be guilty of espionage or who had connections to allegedly subversive organizations like the communist party in the united states. so the people who were disloyal in that category the government agencies believe they had a willful. desire to betray state secrets but there was an another category and this is where gay people fell. that is the security risk. so a security risk were a person who had behaviors or associations that might lead them to inadvertently or unwillingly betray secrets in the future. and so the various groups of people who fell into this category were alcoholics. people who talked too much and the homosexual however, only the homosexual was always a security risk all the other categories of security risk had qualifications like you could be an alcoholic and still not always be a security risk. and most government efforts to figure it out security risks focused on gay people. and the logic here was that gay people were supposed to be so gregarious outgoing. that they were unable to keep prints they said the this the state department said they were often because of internalized shame. and they said they were easily blackmailed and all of those things together made them a security risk. and this really escalates very quickly. so in 1953 president eisenhower issues an executive order barring gay men and lesbians from federal jobs. and quickly state and municipalities following follow suit implementing their own bands on queer people being employed in their agencies and all of those agencies begin watching their employees closely. four day tendencies, right? these are not people who are out in our modern sense. these are people who are private, but you have employers who are now trying to figure out whether they are gay. so these purges that are from the federal government all the way down that begin in 1950 continue to be standard practice long after mccarthy lost his public authority. so when you get to that story mccarthy story is very brief in certain way. he leads this mass, you know. of movement and then he sort of falls from grace within a few years. but that is not the case with this outcome of this lavender scare these practices last well into the 1970s. because really in this era in the 1950s questions of sexuality and gender merge with loyalty in this profound way and make queer people an enemy of the state in this and many other instances in the 1950s. so the other group i want to talk about who are violating and the rules and roles of the 1950s are unwed mothers. so besides homosexuality non-marital childbearing was treated as the most profound violation of the ideals of the era. all unwed mothers were punished in this era and in the decades after but there were very different. punishment and responses focused on white unwed mothers and women of color who were unwed mothers. i'm going to talk you through this here. so for white women who were unwed mothers often, you know, sometimes they were teenagers. sometimes they were adults. the growing discipline of psychiatry was utilized to contain this deviant act. white women white unwed mothers were diagnosed as being particularly immature or more commonly had a temporary mental illness. so in 1965 to harvard psychiatrists wrote quote every unwed mother is to some degree a psychiatric problem the victim of mild moderate or severe emotional or mental disturbance. so i want to say here in this vision of where on what pregnancy came from. there's really no. and in the story at all, right, there's no man involved in the act of getting pregnant that it was a woman's pathology right that she allowed herself to get pregnant because of her mental illness, so she's really made into a patient. so for white women, they have shame and his temporary mental illness, but there was a process a coercive and punitive process that allowed them to be rehabilitated and redeemed. okay, so the first oh, sorry. let me go back here. so the first step is that you had to remember that these women had to be removed from their homes right that they whatever they went to their aunts. they went on a vacation to their aunt's house for six months or they went on a vacation but really they went usually to a maternity home like these florence crittenden homes. and there were about 47 florence crittenden homes across the country. they were about a quarter of all maternity homes and you know florence crittenden homes alone housed about 10,000 unwed mothers each year. are but florence crittenden homes and many maternity homes. only would allow white women to come in so you can see already how the sort of structures of the institution allow this path only for white unmarried women. so she had to be removed from her home go to the maternity home. and once there there was a very strict pathway to go to to get redeemed. she had to express remorse. she had to say that she knew she was wrong that this was a terrible thing and she had to demonstrate her readiness and this is a quote to adapt to a heterosexual adjustment on a realistic basis. and this is key the second step is she had to relinquish her child for adoption. the maternity home counseled her that she to give up her child for adoption and 85% of all the women who come through maternity homes. did this protected her identity allowed her to not be an unwed mother when she got out, but also it allowed white infertile couples access to a white baby. who could then allow them to fulfill their family ideals. some women who came to maternity homes really imbibed this one pregnant girl wrote. this is a quote. she said she didn't think any unmarried girl had the right to keep her baby. i know i don't have that, right. but many others didn't want to give up their children for adoption and that and and a whole range of practices were used to try to get them to some women were told after labor that their babies died. then we're just taken from them many were pressured to sign away their rights either during labor or immediately afterwards. but she in order to be redeemed she had to give her child up for adoption. and of course have no no connection to it after that like there was no open adoptions after in this era. she also had to show her renewed commitment to marriage that she had to commit to herself that her destiny commit that her destiny was her life as a wife and a mother and a real woman. so a lot of the schooling that happens in these maternity homes is all about preparing a girl to become a wife and a mother. and then through this pathway should be redeemed for the marriage market right and then she could go on to have a proper family of her own. so historians have estimated that these coercive practices were used on about one and a half million women in the united states between the 1940s and this these extend really up until the late 60s early 70s. so for women of color, they were largely excluded from these maternity homes and this whole process of rehabilitation and redemption. and commenters at the time acoustical people were talking constantly about unwed pregnancy where it's coming from. most americans sort of venues define their pregnancies as a product of family and community disorganization. but this was a community dysfunction that produced unwed pregnancy for women of color or it was narrated as a product of biology and of course this build on longstanding racist stereotypes around women of color and especially black women as both hypersexual without consciousness about sex and also natural mothers. so in a total inversion of what happens with white women if a woman of color and especially a black woman wanted to give up her child for adoption. she was often prevented from doing so by state agencies. there are many cases in this era where black women attempts to legally give up their children for adoption and then are not allowed to but also or with as a result so really there's very few pathways for redemption, especially outside of communities of color that that women of color really are only punished for their for their unwed pregnancies and we can see this actually escalating into the 60s and 70s as women of color in their children get increasingly blamed for relying too much and sapping state funds. so you have a variety of ways they're punished. i mean they're it was you had a child out of wedlock you're easily evicted from public housing. you have a variety of public agencies who punish out of child lock child rearing. and sort of excluding them from benefits. but i think one of the other major ways that we can see women of color punished for unwed pregnancies. is a massive increase in force sterilizations that occur the 50s 60s escalating into the 1970s? so if i just want to take you back a little bit if you remember when we talked about the eugenics movement in the early 20th century remember there were states. that passed sarah sterilization laws or the state would choose, you know with suit and root certain rubrics about people who then would be sterilized, you a state agency. but that is not how these women in the postwar period are sterilized. there's not a law. that allows a state to sterilize these women this this massive increase in force generalizations in the post-war period was more of a de facto trend. this was something that many doctors and hospitals were took up on their own. and what would happen was a woman of color would go to a hospital to give birth? and there again during labor during the heat of labor right the pain of labor be pressured to sign on to a sterilization but as commonly or even more commonly a doctor would just simply do the sterilization without permission. many people were not told that they were sterilized until they were released from the hospital. fannie lou hamer who's a very famous civil rights activist who will talk about later in 1965. she claimed that 60% of the women who came out of her local mississippi hospital had all been. realized they became so common that people locally called them mississippi appendectomies. they were that common just like removing your appendix. this happened all over the country and really it doesn't end in the 50s. it escalates into the 60s and 70s and in fact, you have this become so much a part of the experience of reproductive healthcare for women of color that it affects women. who were too young to even get pregnant you have young women who are sterilized as young as 12 and 14 because doctors imagine they will be unwed unwed mothers in the future. and as i said this really affects black women latinas and native women the indian health service is one of these agencies that is that the heart of doing a lot of these forced sterilizations on native women. it's hard to tell because this is like a lot of people feel shame about being sterilized but estimacy that a quarter of all native women in this country were forcibly sterilized in this post-war era. one person found that all the the full blood even though it's complicated term members of the caw tribe in oklahoma were sterilized but we know between the 1970 and 1980 the number of children born to native american parents dropped by a third. but because the logic of unwed pregnancy for women of color was rooted in communities and especially in biology that their deviance was imagined as permanent and only could be address. through punitive and often biological solutions so i want to end here and say that this family which is so important for us. we often imagine it as an a-historical family, but in fact, i want to suggest you it's a very historical family one. that's absolutely necessary to us to understand the 1950s. it was a product of this era and absolutely central to so many parts of it and also will set up so many contestations around families gender and sexuality in the coming decades. any questions about that? his family was considered progressive at the great. yeah progressive modern the way that families should go like this was an embrace like, you know, this was not a partisan family at all, like people of all parties embraced this version of family. there were four underlying words and i will email them to you. any other questions? all right. thank you so much and have a goododour topic today is we're g to start with our discussion of native americans. this is one of two different discussions. we're having i want to make clear that we're not talking about the indian wars in this kind of lecture that's going to be in a couple weeks and we're gonna use that as as a way to link. kind of wars throughout the 19th century all the way up to it including the spanish-american war so our focus is
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