Free The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen

eyes and mouths advertised an exaggerated if untouchable female sexuality. “Fifties clothes were like armor,” the writer Brett Harvey recalled:
Our clothes expressed all the contradictions of our roles. Our ridiculously starched skirts and hobbling sheaths were a caricature of femininity. Our cinched waist and aggressively pointed breasts advertised our availability at the same time they warned of our impregnability. 25
    â€œExperts” rushed to reposition homemaking as a profession.
Life
magazine praised the “increasing emphasis on the nurturing and homemaking values among women who might have at one time pursued a career.” Standards of cleanliness steadily climbed as industry redefined laborsaving devices as necessities rather than luxuries. Advertisements mercilessly attacked women’s insecurities as mothers, wives, and housekeepers. To protect their children, mothers had to scour and sanitize their homes. A
professional
homemaker sewed her own clothes, preserved her own fruits and vegetables, developed the arts of an experienced chef, and decorated her home with the skills of an interior designer. Add in the nearly eight hours a week that many suburban housewives spent in a car chauffeuring about their brood and doing errands, and it becomes clear why suburban housewives spent more time consumed by housework, broadly defined, than had their grandmothers. 26
    The professionalization of the housewife turned the act of consumption into a patriotic act and kept American industry humming. Industrial psychologists advised manufacturers on how to make a housewife feel professional: “When a housewife uses one product for washing clothes, a second for dishes, a third for walls, a fourth for floors, a fifth for Venetian blinds, rather than an all-purpose cleaner, she feels less like an unskilled laborer and more like an engineer.” Later, one disgruntled fifties woman quipped, “The Good Housekeeping seal of approval was the brand of the slave.” 27
    More important than her homemaking skills or her appearance was a woman’s role as a mother. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the author of the 1946 best-seller
The Common Sense Book of Baby Care
, the child-raisingbible of that era, insisted that babies needed constant attention. Without a mother at home, children languished or, worse, became juvenile delinquents. A good mother always greeted her children after school with affection and nourishment. “More important than any meal,” remembered one daughter of the fifties, “the after-school milk and cookies were akin to Eucharistic substance, symbolic of nurture and love.” 28
    Spock, a paragon of child permissiveness, strongly encouraged mothers to stay at home with their children. “If a mother realizes clearly how vital this kind of care is to a small child,” he explained, “it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important after all.” When child care became too overwhelming, the distraught mother was advised to “go to a movie, or to the beauty parlor, or to get a new dress or hat.” But mothers, it turned out, could also do too much. Four years before Spock, Philip Wylie’s bestselling book
Generation of Vipers
set the tone for blaming mothers for everything that seemed wrong in the postwar era. Economic disaster, religious apathy, and the nervous breakdowns of soldiers during and after battle were all attributable to mothers’ overly protective domination of their sons, which he dubbed “Momism.” America’s mothers now had to walk the fine line between neglect and smothering overprotection. If they worked outside their homes, they risked creating a generation of juvenile delinquents. If they stayed home and smothered their children, they risked producing a generation of denatured, sissified young men. 29
THE BIG LIE
    After her