that's why we're providing lower income students access to affordable internet. so homework can just be homework. talks connect to compete. >> cox, along with these television companies, supports c-span 2 as a public service. class. right? we'>> we are moving into the pot war period. then, we'll be there for the rest of the class. we're going to start in 1945 and go all the way into the end of the 20th century. as you know, this is the u.s. survey so it's the greatest hits, of american history, that's my job. today's lecture is a lecture that you get because of what i am a specialist in, it is a lecture that you would not get from another professor in this department teaching this class. so this lecture is 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, and at the end, also. for zoom people, the questions will be in the chat. of all the nations in the world at the end of world war ii, only the united states emerged stronger and more prosperous than it had when the war began. europe and asia, of course, had been devastated by the war, but america's farms and 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. it had given them a sense of purpose. victory seemed to confirm their struggles. so there is 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 ii, the united states would be facing a new international enemy -- the soviet union. the next 40 years of american history would be defined by the contest with it, which of course, you know, it is the cold war. 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 vulnerable 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 us in these families. this is a couple in 1959. they married and they decided to have their honeymoon in their bomb shelter. this sheltered honeymoon was featured in life magazine, which is why we know about it. they had these pictures of them outside the bomb shelter, surrounded by their consumer goods, and the article joked fallout can be fun. what they had is they would take all of these supplies into the bomb shelter and then they would have 14 days of unbroken togetherness in the shelter. the idea here is that this honeymoon, and 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 what american families would be. these would be families that were supposed to fulfill all of its members, but also be essential protections of the outside world. this kind of family would be an essential defense against russian incursion. americans believed deeply that russians had very different values of all kinds. but also, americans increasingly believed in the 50s that this kind of family would protect against any corrosive elements within the united states. so here's e argument of this lecture. in the 1950s, americans made the nuear family central to national identity, demanded conformity to that ideal, and punished those who deviated. the 1950s americans made the nuclear family now 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. sorry, here's my outline. we are going to talk about marriage and families in the 1950s, talk about these tensions built into ideals in the 50s, we're going to talk about two important groups that have deviated from this ideal and were punished in different ways, we'are going to talk about the lavender scare, then we are going to talk about unwed mothers. let's talk about the big demographic changes that affect americans in the 1950s. in the 1950s, few americans remain single. 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. their husbands were usually only a year or two older. this early marriage, much more common teenage marriages, you think that parents or 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. they usually had those babies in the 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. in the 40s, two children was the ideal for most american families. by 1960, most families wanted four. and of course, this massive amount of reproduction produced what becomes famous as the baby boom. baby boomers are the people who were 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 a distinct and different roles, with a male breadwinner and a female 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. that's partly because of the postwar economic boom, which i will talk more about on thursday. this is also a period where there are strong unions that are spreading wealth into working class homes in more equal ways and the government has got a number of programs that are throwing money into a variety of homes, which again, i'm going to talk about on thursday. by the mid 50s, nearly 60% of americans had a middle class income. that is unprecedented in american history up until this point. so, to give you a comparison on that, the roaring 20s, famous for its prosperity, only 31% of americans had a middle class income. the 1950s, 60%. that's a huge leap. it is possibly 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 kin networks, who would have been that essential childcare that they would have used in previous generations. so, 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 childcare experts insisted that a mother's full-time attention was necessary for her children's well-being. this is a period where a lot of experts, anything that might be wrong in society, one of the most common explanations is that something went wrong with the mothering relationship. she was either working, or she was overprotti and overbearing, or whatever. so, just to give you a sense, justoemind us about how unusual the 50s are here, for the first ti in 100 years of american history, the age of marriage and motherhood fell. they had been gradually increasing over ti. rtility increased. fertility had been on a slope downward since the 1800 and divorce rates declined. again, divorce rate had been on the incline. so, the 50s breaks hundred year old the trends and all of these areas. so, this was a really unusual moment and people who are in it and living it, acknowledged it to be unusual. people, americans talk 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 a traditional family, but at the time, they were much more likely to think of it as a very distinct from the families that came before. they thought of traditional as extended kin networks where you live next to your family. the suburban homes where you rely on parents and children together, that was modern to people in the 50s. it felt modern to 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 who did much of the housework and childcare. and of course, that domestic situation was built on the labor of other people, usually women, children, sometimes poor people, and in the south before the civil war was the slaves who did this kind of labor. in the 1950s, middle class women do the bulk of the domestic service. 50s housewifery really focused on the wife doing the labor and it being a fulfilling part of the job. so, the amount of time that women spent doing housework actually increased in the 1950s, despite the fact that the 50s it is a moment where we have an explosion of convenient foods and labor saving appliances. yet, the time that women did housework increased. childcare absorbed twice the amount of time that it had in the 1920s. the 50s, surveyor and talk to housewives, found that housewives really thought of housework as not just labor, but a medium of expression. it was a way to express their identity. it became essential to their sense of self. now, men too were invited to a their identities in home and family in the 1950s. we can see this very briefly, even thinking about movies that were very popular in the 30s and 40s versus the 50s. the 30s and 40s, you have a whole range of films focused on tough male loners like humphrey bogarts. he is a better example. his kind of film. in the 50s, you have a lot more films that focus on the domestication of men, the storyline often centered around a good woman who gets a man to settle down. you might think of these--, if anyone watches old movies, we have this film here that is a good example of those. individuals were supposed to be rooting their identities in a home and family. it is a particular type of modern nuclear family in the 50s. the family was also, absolutely essential, to the sense of what it meant to be an american in the 1950s. in this time, in this era, parenting, family life, your home was your civic duty in many ways. mothers and fathers were supposed to be creating future patriotic generations that would extend the american way of life. having a family that operated correctly would prevent people from going astray from the various things that americans at the time thought that the american nation stood for. we can see this connection to american nationalism in these very famous debates that happened in 1959 called the kitchen debates. in 1959, vice president, richard nixon, traveled to the soviet union for the american national exhibition in moscow. he is just supposed to be going and looking through this exhibition. he is engaging with the soviet premier, khrushchev. in this process of walking through this exhibition, these two men, who are already engaged in the deep cold war, have a very famous verbal sparring match in the exhibition. what they are doing, in a broader sense, is arguing about the relative merits of the american way of life, or the relative merits of the soviet system. but what is important is they did not talk about missiles, bombs, or modes of government. what's actually talked about was washing machines, televisions, electric ranges. these became known as the kitchen debates. what nixon says is washing machines were not just evidence of american ingenuity, but they allowed american to win in eight times saving tool that would allow them to root their lives and have a better time in the home. he countered with a pride and said the soviets valued female workers. they do not have time for what he called a capitalist attitude towards women. he said that the soviet system had no time a for and no use for full-time housewives. but for nixon, and for a lot of americans in the 50s, american superiority rested on the ideal of the suburban home. complete with modern appliances, and distinct gender rules for 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 comes to stand in for the nation and for democracy, the value of capitalism and democracy. all right, im going to move into tensions here, i want to talk about how even in the moment where they're really strong ideals around gender and families, there are tensions built into american ideals. the first thing i want to talk about is sexuality. really, i think that men and women are being pulled in multiple directions. i'm really gonna focus on the ways women are being pulled in multiple directions by the imperatives of this era. so, during the cold war, there was a new emphasis on containing sexuality in order to preserve social order. we can see this in a whole host of pop culture venues. so, for example, sexually liberated women were linked in popular culture to communist subversion. we have a lot of popular novels who narrate sexy women as infiltrators and spies, right, that sex is very connected to political subversion. 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 type of social stability and maybe even the free world. others spoke about what would happen, the sexual breakdown in the family if more and more women left, which also could lead to some kind of social collapse. the logic of the time went that the way to prevent communism from seeping in to the american society was through the nuclear family. that if you had a wife at home who is caring for her children, raising them to be future patriotic americans, and also loving her husband, like there is a very strong idea of a sexy wife. this was not an ideal that was absent of sexuality, sex was central. she had to, this married couple had to have plenty of sex in the marriage in order to keep the husband from straying. because if he strayed, if she did not keep him happy, then he might fall into the hands of loose women, sex workers, pornography, or homosexuality. all of that could lead you straight to communism. and yet, so, there is this incredible boundary, these incredible dangers to excessive sexuality. here is marilyn monroe, this torrent who is uncontrollable, right? and yet, there was signs of sexuality everywhere in the 1950s, especially among young people. there is this hyper attention to sexuality, the importance of sexuality, but it had to be contained. for young people, through strict dating and rituals, strict dating rituals an early marriage. we can even see this in the way that fashion is changing in the 1950s. so, here we havthe streets more boyish look in the 1920s of the flappers. and then you have the shoulder patted strong women of the 30s and 40s, catherine hepburn. the 50s, it 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 bust lines, a pinched waist, this is sort of the era that inaugurates the push up bra, right? this fashion created an aura of, what historians have called, untouchable eroticism. the body was made into a guarded fortress through girdles and bras that told a man to keep his hands off but promised great things in marriage. of course, this is jane mansfeild here, who was a famous star, she's also the mother of -- four those fans out there. anyways. so, perhaps unsurprisingly, when you have this embrace of sexuality but these really strict boundaries and the dangers that run alongside of it, the people cross those boundaries, right? sometimes by accident, sometimes in a moment of weakness. so, you actually have an increase in premarital sex in the 1950s. at a moment where it was still pretty hard to get contraception, abortion is illegal, so you have an increa in out of wedlock pregnancies also 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 are encouraged to seek higher education during the cold war. during the cold war, everyone needed to 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 working for an improved educational system and greater access to college education. in the name of the cold war, right? in the name of competing with the soviet union. 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 ng term loans go to college and graduate students. this is a funding package in many ways. it was open and able to be equally accessed by both men and women. 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 4% of lawyers and judges where women. just to give you an example of this, when future supreme court justice ruth ginsburg, she went to law school, she graduated at the top of her class of columbia law school in 1959. when she got out, she could not find a job. no one would hire a woman lawyer, even though she was top of her class at columbia. and this was part of the tension built into these educational experiences in the 50s. women were encouraged to go to college, need to excel as americans, to put america on top. but when they were in college, especially when they got out, they were not necessarily supposed to embrace careers. the idea was, 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 is 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 going to wage labor? especially for those who are deeply committed to being full-time housewives? well, 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, they may not always. 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 faced discrimination. so, at this time, you found a job, often people found a job through want ads in the newspaper. it was 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. all jobs were divided by gender in the newspaper. and, so, women were already shuttled into certain kinds of work. these female fields include, included maids, 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 white full-time male 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 part of this, they still would be facing some kind of pressure within that ideal at some point in their life, most often. but now i'm going to turn to two big groups who were clearly falling outside of this nuclear family in the 1950s and are really punished as a result. so the first group i want to talk about our game men and lesbians. 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 ii where that awareness of homosexuality explodes across the nation. people are just like, the rate of people talking about gay people, being familiar with some terms, just explodes after the war. gay men and lesbians receive a different kind of public attention after world war ii. importantly, in this era, they become a new kind of enemy in the 1950s. i can give you a million examples of this, but i'm just going to stick to one. so i'm going to talk about the lavender scare, and it's connected to the red scare, which i'm going to talk more in-depth about later, but it sort of originates out of 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 the strong national paranoia that there could be communists all among you, that there is like a fifth column, you never quite knew, 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 department replies, they're like, no, no, no, not communist. they said they have no communists, they do say they forced out, they called, security risks, among those were 91 gay people. and then, you have a public, a press, that takes up 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 then 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 is more than double the rate for those considered politically disloyal. so, why? what is the logic of this? so, there were 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 believed they had a willful desire to betray state secrets. there was another category and this is really where gay people fell. that is the security risk. so, a security risk, for 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 risks had qualifications. like, you could be an alcoholic and not always be a security risk. and most government efforts to ferret out security risks focused on gay people. the logic here was that gay people were supposed to be so gregarious, outgoing, that they were unable to keep secrets. they said, the state department said they were often alcoholics because of internalized shame, and they said that they were easily blackmailed. all of these 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 followed suit in implementing their own ban by banning queer people employed by their agencies. all the agencies began to watch their employees closely for gay tendencies. these are not people who are out in the modern sense. these are people who are private. you have employers who are now trying to figure out whether they are gay. these purges, that are from the federal government all the way that down begin in 1950 and continued to be standard practice long after mccarthy lost his public authority. so when we get to that story, mccarthy's story is brief, he leads a mass movement and then he falls from grace. this is within a few years. this is not the case with this outcome of this lavender scare. these practices last well into the 70s. because really, in this era, 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 united states in the 1950s. so, the other group i want to talk about who are violating the rules and rules 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 responses. let's focus on a 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 an unwed mothers, sometimes they were teenagers, sometimes they were adults. the growing discipline of psychiatry was utilized to contain the act. unwed mothers were diagnosed as being particularly in mature or more commonly had a temporary illness. so, in 1965 two harvard scientist wrote, quote, every unwed mother is to some degree, a psychiatric problem, the victim of mild, moderate, or severe mental or emotional disturbance. so i would say that in this vision, where unwed pregnancy came from, there is no man in the story at all, there is no man involved in the act of getting pregnant. it was a woman's pathology. she allowed herself to get pregnant because of her mental illness. she is made into a patient. four white women, they have shame, temporary mental illness, but there was a process. there is a coercive and punitive process that allowed them to be redeemed. and we go back. the first step is the right have to be removed from their homes, that they went to their aunts, they went on a vacation to their aunts for six months. these they went to a maternity home, florence crittenden homes. there were about 47 florence crittenden homes across the country, they were a quarter of all maternity homes. florence crittenden homes hosted about 10,000 unwed mothers each year. florence crittenden homes only would allow white women to come in. you can see the structures of the institution allows only for unmarried white women. she had to be removed from her home. she went to the maternity home. once there, there was a strict pathway to go through to get redeemed. she had to express remorse. she had to say that she knew she was wrong. she had to say it was a terrible thing and demonstrate her readiness to adapt to a heterosexual adjustment on a realistic basis. this is the second step that she had to relinquish her child for adoption. the maternity home council to her to give up her child for adoption, and 85% of all the women who come through maternity homes did. this protected her identity. it allowed her to not be an unwed mother when she got out. it allowed white infertile couples access to a white baby who could allow them to fulfill their family ideals. some women who came to maternity homes, really did imbibe this. one pregnant girl wrote, this is a quote, she did not think any unmarried girl had a right to keep her baby. i know i did not have that right many others did not want to go after children for adoption. a whole range of practices were used to try to get them to. some women were told, after labor, that their babies died and that they were taken from them. many were pressured to sign away their rights, during labor, or immediately afterwards. but in order to be redeemed, she had to give her child up for adoption and, of course, have no connection to it after that. there was no open adoptions in this era. she also had to show her renewed commitment to marriage, that she had to commit to herself, commit that her destiny was a wife, a mother, and a real woman. the school that happens in his maternity homes was about preparing a girl to become a wife and mother. through this pathway, she would be redeemed for the marriage market. so, historians have estimated that these course of practices were used on about one and a half million women in the united states between the 1940s. these extend all the way into 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, because people were talking costly about unwed pregnancy and where it was coming from, most american, sort of, venues define their pregnancies as a product of family and community disorganization, that this was a community dysfunction that produced unwed pregnancy, or it was narrated as a product of biology. of course, we are built on a long-standing racist stereotypes as bothy hyper sexual without consciousness of sex and natural mothers. in a total inversion of what happens with white women, if you're women of color, especially black women, wanted to give up their child for adoption, she was often prevented from doing so by state agencies. there are many cases in this era where black women attempt to legally give up their children for adoption and are not allowed to but are charged with desertion as a result. there is very few pathways for redemption especially outside of communities of color. women of color are only punished for their unwed pregnancies. and we can see this escalating into the 60s and 70s, as women of color and their children get increasingly blamed for relying too much and zapping to state funds. you variety of ways that they are punished. if you had a child out of wedlock, you were easily evicted out of public housing. you are out of public organizations that allow public childrearing and excluding them from public benefits. another major way that we can see women of color punished for unwed pregnancies is a massive increase in forced sterilization. they occur in the 50s 60s escalating into the 70s. sorry, i just want to take you back a little bit. remember when we talked about the eugenics movement in the early 20th century? remember there were states that passed sterilization laws where the state would choose with certain rubrics about people who wanted to be sterilized by a state agency. that is not how these women in the post war period are sterilized. there is not a law that allows a state to sterilize these women. this massive increase was more of a de facto trend. this was something that many doctors and hospital hospitals took up on their own. what would happen is that a woman of color would go to a hospital to give birth. there, again, during labor and during the heat of labor, the pain of labor, she would be -- pressured to sign on to sterilization. even as commonly, more commonly, a doctor would just do the sterilization without permission. many people were not told that they were sterilized until they were released from the hospital. she is a famous human rights activist. in the 1960, five she claimed that 60% of the women who came out of her local mississippi hospital, had all been sterilized. they became a so common that people, locally, called them mississippi apendectimies. it is just like removing your appendix. this happened all over the country. it does not end in the 50s. it escalates into the 60s and 70s. in fact, you have this become part of the experience of reproductive health care 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. doctors, imagine they will be unwed mothers in the future. this really affects black women, latinos, and natives. the indian health service is one of these agencies that is at the heart of doing a lot of these forced sterilizations on native women. it is hard to tell because a lot of people felt shame about being sterilized. estimates say that a quarter of all native women were sterilized in this post war era. one person found that all the full blood members of the tribe were sterilized >> between the 1970 1980, the number of children born to native american parents dropped by a third. 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. it could only be addressed 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 ahistorical family, in fact, i want to suggest to you that it's a very historical family. it's absolutely necessary for us to understand the 1950s. it was a product of this era, and absolutely essential to so many parts of it. also, it will set up so many contests stations around families, gender, and sexuality, in the coming decades. any questions about that? >> this family, was it considered progressive at the time? >> yeah, great, progressive, modern, the way the family should go. this was an embrace, you know, this was not a partisan family at all. like, people of all parties embraced this version of family. >> [inaudible]. >> there were four underline words, i will email them to you. any other questions? all right, thank you so much. have a good day. a good day. our topic today is we are going to start with the discussion of native americans, this is one of two different discussions we are having. i want to make clear that we are not talking about the indian wars in this kind of lecture. that's going to be in a couple of weeks. we are going to use that as a way to link kind of wars throughout the 19th century all the way up to, and including, the spanish >> c-span now are free modi a video. up or online at c-span.org.