Among the trends that we have noted is the transformation in conception of motherhood from a lifelong status to a role—an identity that could be taken on, thrown off, or combined with other identities. In 1956, Alva Myrdal and
Viola Klein announced that women now occupied two roles: at home and at work.75 Of all the social transformations of the postwar era, the rapid increase in the employment of wives and mothers was the most conspicuous. Until the 1950s, such employment had been seen as a sign of bad times, poverty, and male unemployment. While strongly defending the right of women to work regardless of marital and parental status, most feminists of the interwar years had assumed that in the absence of financial necessity only a professional elite would choose to combine motherhood and career. And social disapproval of the employment of married women had reached a high point during the interwar era.76
But after an initial trend toward full-time motherhood, such attitudes gradually faded into obsolescence during the postwar era. An influx of married women transformed the labor force. The pace of change differed among Western European countries, but the trend was consistent: in France, where many married women had always been employed, the percentage of such women in the female workforce rose from 49 percent in 1954 to 53 percent in 1962; in Britain, where married women had customarily stayed home, the percentage rose from 43 percent in 1955 to 50 percent in 1967; in Italy, where the number of employed married women actually declined from 1945 to the mid-1960s, it increased dramatically after 1970.77 The class composition of the female work force also changed: whereas in earlier eras working-class women had been the most likely to seek employment, by 1960 women from high-income families, chiefly those with professional qualifications, were disproportionately represented in the labor force.78 Well-trained women found opportunities in the expanding social-services sector and in the schools, kindergartens, and medical facilities that were bursting with the offspring of the baby boom. The average age of the female work force rose, for the women who entered after a period of full-time motherhood often held their jobs until retirement.
Unlike previous generations of married women workers, who had usually claimed that they worked out of economic necessity, these women tended to regard their work as an exercise of personal choice. They demanded the repeal of laws that had permitted, and in some cases required, the dismissal of women from employment—chiefly in desirable jobs in the civil service— upon their marriage, and had empowered husbands to forbid their wives to work. In Britain, the “marriage bar” for teachers was struck down during the war; similar laws in Germany were repealed in 1953 and the right of husbands to prevent their wives from working was revoked in 1957.79 In the Netherlands, a civil servant, Mevrouw Tendeloo, protested against her dismissal when she married, and was supported by a coalition of feminist groups, which argued that decisions about employment were best left to the individual woman and her husband. The Dutch regulation was finally struck down in 1957.80
“The married woman who leaves her home each day and goes off to work has become a familiar, if controversial figure in Western society,” wrote the British sociologist Pearl Jephcott in 1962. “Some see her as a symbol of freedom, but to others she is the epitome of irresponsibility and neglect.”81 Feminists’ attitudes toward the employment of mothers were based less on theory than on empirical research. The declared aim of the researchers was impartial data-gathering, but in fact they were also influenced by their own life history as academically qualified, middle-class professional women who often struggled with the new dilemma summed up in the phrase “women’s two roles.”
Evelyne Sullerot—whom we have already met as a leader of the birth- control movement—was born in 1924 into a French Protestant family, spent her adolescent years in the Resistance, and upon the death of her mother took on responsibility for her family. After the war she trained as a teacher, but gave up this career to raise four children. Later, having found a new vocation as a volunteer in the cause of birth control, she continued her studies and became a highly successful academic sociologist.82
Alva Myrdal (whom we have met in earlier chapters) had produced three children, founded an education college, and authored several books, but until the 1950s was still chiefly known as the wife of the prominent sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who became a diplomat. In 1948, her life seemed at a standstill, for her own professional work had been interrupted by her husband’s move to a position with the United Nations in Geneva, and she had no occupation but that of housewife and hostess. “She entered a period of desperate powerlessness that I did not recognize at the time but understood later,” recalled her daughter, Sissela Bok, “She felt, I believe, buried alive, locked into the superficial role of hostess while shielding a wifely role that had become nothing but a mask.”83 When she herself was offered a job with the United Nations, she took it in 1949, even though this involved leaving her family for Paris and later New York—a decision for which her daughters, then aged thirteen and fifteen, never completely forgave her.84
The Dutch sociologist A. J. Schellekens-Ligthart, who in 1957 published one of the first studies of Dutch working mothers, was also known as a model of a new and still controversial female life-plan. A highly competent academic researcher, Schellekens-Ligthart was also married and the mother of several children.85
The Swiss Iris Meyer-Huber, a native of Basel who qualified as a lawyer in 1941, married a fellow lawyer, Peter von Roten, in 1946. The couple shared a legal practice until the birth of their daughter, Hortensia, in 1952. In that year Iris von Roten temporarily withdrew from the legal profession and concentrated on the writing of her book, Frauen im Laufgitter (Women in the Play-Pen), which appeared in 1958. Meanwhile, she cooperated with her husband, who was elected to the Swiss parliament in 1949, and with the League of Swiss Women’s Associations (Bund Schweizerischer Frauenvereine) in preparing a parliamentary initiative to grant Swiss women the right to vote, which they alone among all their Western European contemporaries did not yet possess. The initiative was rejected by Swiss voters in 1959, and Swiss women did not win the right of suffrage until 1972.86
The works produced by these and many other researchers asked why mothers worked outside the home. The results were based on the responses of mothers themselves, often supplemented by detailed studies of the subjects’ workplaces, households, and communities. The subjects included both middle-class and working-class women, and the researchers acknowledged and analyzed class differences.
Working-class mothers, such as the British factory hands interviewed by Pearl Jephcott, emphasized that they worked chiefly in order to earn money. Nonetheless, most asserted that employment was also a choice, for under conditions of full male employment few married women who were living with their husbands needed work to survive. Rather, the wages of mothers served to enhance the family’s standard of living by making it possible to purchase the consumer goods that, after wartime shortages, were now finally accessible.87 Even in Germany, where so many families were fatherless, researchers gave scant attention to the single mothers and widows who did not fit into this bright and shining picture of newfound affluence.88 Many working-class mothers complained that domesticity was boring, particularly when the children were in school and the mothers had “nothing to look at but these four walls.” They enjoyed the sociability of the workplace: “you get a laugh mixing with the girls.”89 But, despite a strong preference for employment, these women identified themselves chiefly as wives and mothers, were in general not ambitious for advancement, often chose to work part time when their children were of school age, and admitted to guilt about the effects of their working on their families and households.90
By contrast, middle-class women with university degrees, and particularly professionals who had worked before marriage, often expressed frustration at what they considered the waste of their talents in the home. “I certainly think that it is a pity that so many women, because they want a family, are more or less forced to spend their time doing domestic work, when they might be doing something more socially useful,” said a British participant in a survey by Judith Hubback entitled Wives who Went to College. Educated women made bad wives and mothers, said another participant, because “we are doing work for which we are entirely untrained and usually dislike.”91 For these women, few of whom mentioned financial motives, work was primarily a psychological necessity, and domestic obligations often an obstacle to overcome rather than, as for the working-class women, a primary obligation.
Starting in 1936, Alva Myrdal had included among her many projects an ambitious study of women and employment, which was sponsored by the International Federation of Business Women. The research, which involved interviewing women in three countries—Sweden, the United States, and Britain—was complete by 1950, but Myrdal’s new career with the United Nations left her little time to write. Therefore, she entrusted the writing of Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work, which appeared in 1956, to a collaborator, the British sociologist Viola Klein, who had already published a book on gender relations.92 Klein and Myrdal began by defining the maternal dilemma: modern women “were guided by conflicting aims: on the one had they want… to develop their personalities to the full… on the other hand, most women want a home and family of their own.”93 Though they took the social context into account, the authors presented this chiefly as a personal problem that could be solved by women’s own efforts. Motherhood, they proposed, should no longer be regarded as a life-long task, but as a phase which could be planned in the new perspective afforded by women’s lengthened life-expectancy. Female lives must be lived in three phases: the first devoted to study and career training, the second to full-time child-rearing and family, and the third to full-time work.
For Myrdal, the “phase model” was new, for in her earlier book, Family and Nation (1940), she had advocated lifetime employment supported by child-care and other social services. In the 1950s, however, she and Klein seem to have been persuaded by current psychological theories that the “impersonal” atmosphere of a day-care center might reduce the child’s “sense of security, and lead to other undesirable results,” and that therefore “mothers should take care of their own children during the first years of their lives.”94 The end of the second phase, which (assuming that a woman married in her early twenties, had three children at two-year intervals, and returned to work when the youngest was nine) would normally occur when the woman was about forty years old, would probably be marked by an “acute emotional crisis.” But the retired mother’s feeling of “emptiness and lack of purpose,” could be dispelled by returning to what was assumed to be a rewarding career.95 Women could “have it all”—just not all at the same time.
Myrdal and Klein did not regard careers for mothers purely as therapy; indeed, they insisted that, in a rationally planned society, no adult should remain idle, and that women after the period of “active motherhood” had not only the right but also the duty to work outside the home.96 Nonetheless, only well-off professional women—especially Myrdal, a native of prosperous and benevolent Sweden—could have seen employment chiefly as a psychological rather than an economic necessity. And only in the full-employment economy of the 1950s could anyone have assumed that the woman who re-entered the labor market at forty, after twenty years of absence, would be able to build a career. But the authors declared that no major “change in the organization of work,” but only a change in women’s attitudes, would solve the maternal dilemma. “The best of both worlds has come within their grasp,” wrote the authors, “if only they reach out for it.”97
How did this optimistic prospect correspond to the real lives of working mothers? Many social science researchers drew a more realistic picture. Mothers who worked outside the home seldom actually took a break for twenty years, as Myrdal and Klein recommended. Many returned when their youngest child entered school, and some never quit at all; for example, by 1974 about one-third of German working mothers continued full-time work throughout the childbearing period.98 And, rather than “phasing” employment and motherhood, they combined both in a work week that sometimes exceeded ninety hours.99
Although some women—particularly in countries such as Germany, which gave little social support to working mothers—complained openly of fatigue, stress, and health problems, others took pride in the seamless performance of their double role. A. J. Schellekens-Ligthart, a Dutch sociologist who wrote the first study of working mothers in the Netherlands, assured the public in a newspaper interview that, however absorbing her academic career, her family came first. “When the children come home from school, they almost always find me here. I have lots of time for them after school, and when they are in school I have plenty of time for work and study. The evenings are for my husband—I can hear all about his work and his music, and when he is playing in a concert, I am there.”100 Contrary to the expectations of Myrdal and Klein that entry into the labor market would radicalize women, the new way of life often seemed merely another version of self-effacing femininity.101
But the effect produced by Myrdal and Klein was in fact more subversive. By identifying motherhood as one of two equally valuable “roles” rather than as women’s primary function, they had separated it from biological determinism and classified it as a cultural construction which was open to change and transformation. And if women’s roles could change with culture, then why not also those of men? Although in the 1930s Alva Myrdal had urged fathers as well as mothers to share child-care responsibilities, by 1956 her confidence in men had diminished and she had put the burden entirely on women. But this bias was soon pointed out by Eva Moberg, a young Swedish literary critic who was also active in liberal political circles. “We have to get away from the ‘two roles of women,’ ” she wrote in 1962. “Both men and women have one chief role, that of a human being. And in the role of human being, it is a moral duty, but also a great satisfaction. . . to take good care of our offspring.”102 Alva Myrdal agreed; in the preface to a volume edited by two Swedish social scientists, Edmund Dahlstrom and Rita Liljestrom, she referred to “the two roles of men” whose “role in the family must be radically enlarged.”103 In his own contribution to this book, which was published in 1962, Dahlstrom concluded that the welfare state should no longer encourage a division of labor which allotted child-care to women and employment to men, but should instead enable both men and women to work in and outside the home.104 In the mid-1960s Swedish social policy was reoriented toward the working couple through the provision of public child-care and other social services.105
Other responses to Women’s Two Roles were more conservative: for example, the German sociologist Elisabeth Pfeil considered that Klein and Myrdal were wrong to imply that paid work could have equal priority with maternal obligations.106 And Evelyne Sullerot raised another disturbing question: though working mothers themselves usually assured her that their husbands were supportive, her experience with the husbands themselves suggested otherwise. The couples who attended her lectures on women and employment, she recalled, often found themselves quarreling vociferously in the question period.107 By 1970, the work of married women outside the home had begun to be accepted by public opinion.
Considering the monotonous and unrewarding character of most waged work—especially of the jobs open to women—it is surprising that feminists should have seen employment in itself as the road to emancipation. This problem was noted by Simone de Beauvoir, who contrasted the interesting careers of middle-class professionals with the monotonous tasks of assemblyline workers. “There is no doubt that they get economic independence only as a class which is economically oppressed; and on the other hand, their jobs in the factory do not relieve them of housekeeping burdens.”108 However the middle-class origins and professional ambitions of most of these researchers inclined them toward an optimistic view of what they hailed as a new female life-plan. Problems that faced even the best qualified women—discrimination in hiring, pay inequality, gender segregation, sexual harassment—were hardly mentioned. Instead, the mere act of entering the workplace was hailed as a step toward personal liberation. “She claims the right to decide, or at least to have some voice in the decision, whether she will work when she is a mother or not. And this assertion of her individuality changes her consciousness and gives her life a new meaning,” concluded the German researcher Elizabeth Pfeil.109 Through re-entry into the work world, said the British sociologist Judith Hubback, woman must “evolve from exclusive femaleness towards the fulfillment of a wider personality.”110