Notes on Life Magazine’s Special Issue on the American Woman, Dec 24, 1956 (just months

after the debut of the Barry Allen - Iris West Flash in Showcase 4)

Introduction credited to Mrs. Peter Marshall (Catharine Marshall, widow of the former senate
chaplain Peter Marshall), argues that women’s gains often come with costs, on the logic that
with new freedoms come new responsibilities. Odd examples o ered: by learning to drive
women gained freedom, but suddenly had the new job of ferrying husband and kids around in
the car. Particularly telling quote clipped and saved to disk:
Ask any thoughtful, honest woman what the most satisfying moments of her life have
been, and she will never mention the day she got her rst job or the day she outwitted
her boss on his ground. But she will always speak of the night when, as a teenager, she
wore her rst formal (p. 100) and twirled in the arms of a not-so-bad date to tingly
music. Or the night the man she loved took her in his arms, bringing a special look to
her face (p. 149). Then there was the moment when she held her rst baby in her arms.
It was not just releasing, it was completely ful lling (p. 62).
p 3; page refs in the quotation refer to pages from the magazine where the
reader is being invited to nd examples of the claims she makes here.
Brett Harvey quotes this passage The Fifties: a Women’s Oral History (San Jose : ASJA Press,
2002) presenting it as typical of the valorization of childbirth as the highest duty of women (90).
The passage also recalls Basil Ransom’s words in Henry James 1886 novel The Bostonians,
that Verena Tarrant was “meant for love.” But as a man I’m also struck by the way that this
characterization of women is also implicitly a characterization of men and what they should
want: the ful lling release for them must come not from romance, marriage or children, but in
getting a job or besting the boss.

I’m struck, moreover, by how the two worlds distinguished in this formulation (a masculine
world of struggle into which women may enter but never truly enjoy, and a feminine world of
soft, yielding ful llments) are thrust violently into combination by characters like Iris West and
Katharine Hepburn’s Tess Harding. They engage in witty combat not just with their bosses, but
with their romantic partners.

p 31, “Women Hold Third of All Jobs.” The article goes on to claim that more women working
in 1956 than worked during WWII. I suspect that this is a bad use of statistics, comparing total
jobs rather than % of jobs held. But the article provides evidence that the news of women
working could be greeted in celebratory language. The article notes not just raw numbers of
women working, but variety: women represented in every job category in the US Census,
women working as “executives … , cab drivers , and furnace tenders,” not just as teachers,
nurses and garment workers. The photo essay goes on to o er examples of some prominent
trades: Nursing, Entertainment (a photo of showgirls), (Factory) Assemblers, Teaching, Garment
Trades, O ce Work, and Food Processing.

p 73, Cornelia Otis Skinner, in a point-counterpoint piece titled “Women are Misguided: They
Are Still Waging a Shrill, Ridiculous War Over the Dead Issue of Feminism,: makes a telling
comment about some women’s e ort to prove they are the equal of men: “A surprising number
of women in this country still maintain that they can don anything better than a man can. This is
a pity, for if a woman can do a man’s job better than he, and if she lets him know it, she is no
true woman.” That nal line seems telling: as with Marshall, Skinner imagines competition with
me to be unladylike.

p109, Robert Coughlan in “Changing Roles in Modern Marriage: Studying causes of our
disturbing divorce rate, psychiatrists note wives who are not feminine enough and husbands
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 no truly male.” The article opens by invoking the rise of romantic love as cause of much marital
unhappiness, high divorce rate and leading to juvenile delinquency. Together with the article’s
title, Coughlan seems to be thinking in terms familiar from the family in Rebel Without a Cause:,
released in Oct 1955: Jim Stark, screaming out his confusion at his apron-wearing father. The
article surveys the opinions of psychiatric professionals from around the country. The core
problem: “the failure of men and women to accept their emotional responsibilities to each other
and within the family—as men and women, male and female.”

According to the article the biology of sex means that women are fundamentally tuned to
certain “primary feminine qualities—receptivity, passivity and the desire to nurture.” By
contrast, “for the male the sexual role requires aggressiveness and a certain degree of
dominance, even of exploitiveness (the desire to utilize others for one’s own advantage).”
Unfortunately cultural trends were leading “the sexes in this country are losing their identities.
The emerging American woman tends to be assertive and exploitive. The emerging American
man tends to be passive and irresponsible…. They are su ering from what the psychiatrists
call sexual ambiguity.”

A bit later, p110: “‘Feminism’ as such became moribund after women received the right to vote
and it now seems as quaint as linen dusters and high button shoes. But it yielded one major
product, that common urban phenomenon known as the ‘career woman.’” Citing an NYC
psychiatrist, the “New York Career Woman ‘syndrome’” involves a “bright, well-educated,
ambitious wife, probably in her mid-30s.” generally making as much money as her husband.
She’s unhappy that her husband drinks, and refuses to shoulder his share of family stu : bills,
plans, etc. His perspective: “She has strong ideas and … rather than get into a wrangle he had
tried to see things from her point of view and nally began letting her make most of the
decisions.” The rest of this passage sounds remarkably like a plot summary of the middle
section of Woman of the Year: she’s sexually attractive but not much of a wife or a mother.

Coughlan acknowledges (p 111) that this two-career couple is an unusual case, but then goes
on to posit that this case is an especially severe case of a more common malady, the
“suburban syndrome” of a wife who “having worked before marriage, or at least having been
educated and socially conditioned toward the idea that work (preferably some kind of
intellectual work, in an o ce, among men) carries prestige, nds herself in the lamentable
position of being ‘just a housewife.’” This strikes me as crucial, in that it suggests the
importance of the two-career couple for 1950s America: the pushy successful career woman
with her e eminate husband epitomizes a more widespread cultural malaise.

The remainder of the article a great source for epitomizing the sense in mid-century America
that psychological problems can be traced to problems in one’s upbringing.

p 140, Jim Magill, “My Wife Works and I Like It: Jim Magill argues that Jennie’s full-time job is
good for her, good for their children—and good for the budget.” A brief photo-heavy piece
describing the marriage of a two-career couple: he is a junior executive at Republic Steel; she
manages the bridal service of a department store. Her photograph is featured on the
magazine’s cover. Though positioned some pages after Coughlan’s piece excoriating working
women, this piece was certainly intended as counterpoint. Yet the piece is too brief to provide a
meaningful response to C’s formulation. Jim Magill talks about his experience in practical terms,
but can’t o er a theoretical account of how the compromises involved (everyone pitches in on
housework, they have a housekeeper who does childcare, they get to interact with their kids
more intensely after work) impact their identity as Man and Woman. The photographs in the
piece actually serve to drive Coughlan’s point home: Jim looks a bit schulbby in his bow tie;
Jennie looks forceful as she expresses her feelings at lunch with coworkers.
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Scrap: The cover image suggests a celebration is in store for working women, but the issue’s
editorials are mostly e orts written with the aim of forcing the genie of feminism back into the
bottle. The issue’s Introduction, under the byline “Mrs. Peter Marshall,” asks women to
acknowledge that they nd true ful llment not in the competitive male world of work, but in the
nurturing space of domesticity: “Ask any thoughtful, honest woman what the most satisfying
moments of her life have been, and she will never mention the day she got her rst job or the
day she outwitted her boss on his ground. But she will always speak of the night when, as a
teenager, she wore her rst formal (p. 100) and twirled in the arms of a not-so-bad date to
tingly music. Or the night the man she loved took her in his arms, bringing a special look to her
face (p. 149). Then there was the moment when she held her rst baby in her arms. It was not
just releasing, it was completely ful lling (p. 62).” One in particular, by Robert Coughlan,
characterizes working women as
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