The Continuing Struggle of Domesticity and Gender Roles/Norms

No matter what, there are always going to be struggles and debate when it comes to gender roles and norms. As much as I would like to believe that there will be a time when men and women are equal in all aspects, not just the workforce, I believe that it is a far off distance dream, one with no reality. Women will continually be put into the domestic sphere, no matter how hard we may try to escape because it has become something normative. And though the face and look of the modern day housewife may have changed since the 1950s, those ideals and the principles that came about in that era still remain, and certain aspects have just gotten worse.

It’s an ongoing struggle, one that will most likely be a struggle for years to come, but the best thing to do is just educate yourself and to not fall victim to stereotyping women based solely on the domestic past that used to be so prominent, and could be argued prominent today. Domesticity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the grouping together of this gender norm and the stereotyping that develops from it is where the problems lie. And though the “idyllic fifties” may seem like they were the epitome of the “American Dream” it’s hard to tell for certain because what exactly is the “American Dream?” It’s a question we can ponder as we look at how the housewife image and sphere has been at the root of almost anything pertaining to a woman and that’s something that could be changed, but at this point it’s an ongoing struggle and only time will tell for certain if things will improve.

The Ideals of 1950s Marriage Presented in Literature

Marriage has been held as a sacred practice by many. An institution entered into when in Modern day terms, you’ve found your soul mate or the love of your life. However, this was not always the case, sometimes a marriage was made with a financial state of mind, entering into a marriage with social and financial stability, not for love. The rising prospect of love in marriage began to rise and by the 1950s “going steady” was the first step towards reaching that ultimate goal of marriage. With marriage, came the implementation of stereotypes, some that still exist today.

The ideal of the “50s housewife” became what was expected of women and while the “manly working man” became the expectation for the male. However, throughout the course of time, these gender stereotypes have come into questioned and have even been reversed. Not only in literature, but in film as well, these mediums tend to question the basis of what constitutes these gender roles and even goes as far as to question and play with these gender roles, especially in marriage, in different ways. This is something that still continues now in our society. Gender roles are continually being questioned and the traditional sense of marriage, women being the homemaker and men as the breadwinner, are being questioned as well and have even changed the norm and which could now be classified as the “modern marriage” rather than the “traditional marriage.”

Starting in the 1950s, this idea of the “housewife” came to a forefront within society. The perfect housewife was one who was able to cook, clean, bear children, raise the children, and be able to please her husband by having dinner on the table by the time he came home from his corporate job. This was the ideal, the life that people strove for, the perfect suburban couple and family. This put women into a stereotypical type of household role, where women were then seen only as good at cooking and cleaning, never really seen as an equal to her husband or any man for that matter. Women were presented as weak and men were presented as strong. Divorce was far from anything that was as common as it is today and something that was majorly frowned upon. If a woman was unhappy in a marriage, she had to grin and bear it, for not only her children, but for her husband as well.

This idealized sense of marriage and the stereotypical gender roles is presented in Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. It portrays April and Frank Wheeler as being the perfect couple from the outside, though inside their marriage it is a far cry from perfect. They put on a front so that they won’t be judged by the outside, by their neighbors. They live the stereotypical suburban life, April is the homemaker caring for their two children and Frank works the big city corporate job. They have the perfect suburban home and they seem to live the life that everyone at that time dreamed of and strived for. However, it is far from idealized as Yates makes that perfectly clear in the first opening pages of the novel, showing April and Frank arguing on the street while driving home. This is something that would not have been portrayed in the presenting of this idealized version and image of marriage.

Gender roles are still very much in place in marriage today. Though, today marriage is much less idealized than it was before, there is still always that constant fulfillment of those stereotypes, there really is no way to completely rid them from our lives, just because they have been present for so long. It is easier now for women to be just as career oriented as a man and to have higher paying jobs, but in society’s eyes the man is still supposed to be the breadwinner of the family and the woman, though she may work now is still supposed to be seen as the homemaker. Now instead of living to an ideal expectation, women are to be a “superwoman” of sorts and be able to juggle a career, family and home and still keep their husband happy, where the expectation of the man is to basically be the breadwinner, but also be a family man. So instead of expecting an ideal, in marriage, there is now an expectation of expecting more from your spouse and that perhaps could have come about from the questioning of gender. However, complacent we may be now with our ideas of marriage; it will only change in the future as those gender roles continually become questioned.

“Tolerating” the Woman in Your Life

In this video from the 1950s, it is teaching men how to “deal with women in the workplace.” While they may have seen it as educational and opening themselves up to something new and something that wasn’t the norm, it is very sexist. It depicts the main man having a problem with a woman in a high ranking position and the best advice that is given to him is that he just has to deal with it and be respectable as he has dealt with “women in the office before.” By having a video like this, that is meant for educational purposes, but at the same time offends in a way, it is only perpetuating those gender roles as being the norm, and that it is strange for the woman to leave the domestic sphere when there really is no need to, since in postwar thinking the “men are back.” Rather than helping to teach men how to deal with women in the workplace, as if it is some kind of heavy burden, they are perpetuating the inequality that exists within the workplace, inequality that still exists today. In a way this video shows that it’s okay to feel what you are feeling and as long as you can hide it while you are at work, then it’s okay to be a little mad that women are in the workplace and have positions that are characteristically male jobs. All this does is lead it to be taught that gender roles are normal and that they should be complied with and not changed, which really shouldn’t be the case.

This short film goes back to the idea of consumerism and materialism. A woman gets a new kitchen that makes her friend a bit jealous, and the typical housewife scenario is played out as well as product placement and the appealing to the women in the domestic sphere. It goes along with the first video that women belong in the domestic sphere, it’s where they are the most natural and comfortable and they can get nice new stuff. It perpetuates that advertisements target the domestic side and the beauty side of women so that they play into these frivlious acts and not worry about getting a job or entering the workforce. Instead they should plan dinner parties in their new kitchen, while they chat with their friends about their new washer and dryer. This video puts out an image and illusion of the “American Dream” but when in all reality there is much more being shown here than just simply a cute little “word to the wives.” Wives are a large consuming population, as they still are today. They feel this constant need to improve themselves and to become reliant on a man, but at the same time be independent because they are expected to be accomplished in terms of domestic work. It’s like this never ending cycle of consumerism and materialism and domestic ideology that begins in the 1950s and never truly ends, not even today.

50’s Beauty Standards vs. Today

This post is more looking at how what is considered beautiful today differs from what is considered beautiful today and is more of a commentary on looking at the present and referencing the past, taking on a more critical viewpoint of today’s society which relates well to the overall topic of redefining “woman” and “housewife in today’s society. I find myself asking the question, Since when did beauty become equivalent with being “skinny”?

It couldn’t necessarily have been with the development of magazines because the second image I discovered was an advertisement from an old magazine that was to help women who were “too skinny” to get glamourous curves. It is strange to think that our society today has flipped around the idea of beauty and made it not about looking healthy, but looking like you haven’t eaten anything in two days. What I think is to blame is fashion magazines, they use extremely skinny models and make women believe that this is how you should look. This in the process makes women self-surveillance themselves to the point where the side effects can be really unhealthy, like anorexia and bulemia.

What really needs to happen to prevent self-surveilling is more of a media and fashion acceptance of fuller figured women and to realize that being skinny isn’t necessarily the right thing or the most healthiest thing. Women, however play into this mold of trying to become as skinny as possible because in their mind they think that is the only way that they will be accepted by the opposite sex, which is not necessarily true. I think that women self-surveil themselves to the point where they constantly look to fashion magazines and Hollywood to define what their perception of beauty is, though it may not be what the general consensus on beauty is. And now more than ever there seems to be more and more campaigns trying to get women to see their real beauty and that women are naturally beautiful no matter what dress size you may wear. This is seen in Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign. If women really do want to change how they look, the best way is to get healthy and not try to starve themselves to fit into some stigma that the fashion world says is the way you should look, and how a “thigh gap” is what is sexy. I feel that if women looked back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, they would see some curver women and know that that is beautiful as well, I mean look at Beyonce. She is an example of a curver women in today’s society and entertainment industry and there are women who believe that she is the most beautiful woman out there. If there were more celebrities that looked like her and more celebrities that promoted a healthier body image, I really think that self-surveilling that women do would probably be more healthy and not as detrimental than it is right now. 

It is interesting to see the images out there that promote a healthier body image, not a “skinnier” body but a healthier one and I think that leads to more positive body images for women to look at. I just hope that maybe one day we can go back to how it was in the 50s and 60s when curves were in and seen as very glamourous, but until then women just have to not be so harsh on themselves and really love the skin they are in.

The 50’s Beauty Ideal

In the 1950s television promoted ideals of womanhood that celebrated a “new and improved” domesticity and the small screen also advanced a new vision for the female form, a “molded, hourglass shape” clothed in the era’s glamorous new contours. If the basic shape of fashion could change the “soldier woman” of the 1940s into a flower, then the human condition could change too, at least according to Christian Dior (Cassidy 18).

The cosmetics industry mirrored this fashion renaissance. After the war consumers were now offered a limitless array of beauty products and two “Titans” of the cosmetic world, Hazel Bishop and Revlon, invested richly in television sponsorship. The beautification of American women demanded artful coordination and design. Femininity began to be linked to the opulence of 1950s consumer products. Television then devoted itself to beauty and fashion advice and to the quest for glamour. 

By promoting glamour to the masses, television opened up a fresh category of consumer products, now it could advertise during the day, everything from hair coloring and chic hats to hosiery and sport shoes. Other formats also integrated glamour into their consumption message and centrally glorified the stylish makeover as redemptive (something that is still seen today). Media also appealed to the housewife a lavish association with Hollywood stars, by introducing Hollywood into the television industry it evoked nostalgia for “an opulent world that existed outside the home” (Cassidy 20). Feminine charm then was an elusive quintessence linked to authentic loveliness.

Here are a few commercials from the 1950s to give an idea of the use of feminity:

Today’s Housewife

Though today’s housewife may still exist, there has been a new development in the sphere of portraying domesticity and that has come with television playing up housewife imagery. This has been seen in reality television and also with prime time dramas. A few shows that come to mind are The Real Housewives series, as well as Desperate Housewives, both these shows play up the stereotype of the housewife and show it in different ways. While one portrays a fictionalized version, the other portrays a “real” version of the housewife, but in the end the message is still the same, each one is glamorizing the lifestyle of the housewife.

And while today’s housewife may hold a job, there are certain expectations that come with being a “housewife,” well at least in today’s society. Usually, they are attractive, wealthy and have a husband with a high paying job, they are able to afford an expensive house and designer things. In today’s society, these shows, as well as others are promoting a lifestyle. Being a “housewife” is considered a lifestyle, though it could be argued that most women do take on certain aspects of the “housewife” though it may not be all aspects. Women are usually rarely separated from the domestic sphere, yes a woman may be strong and independent and have a career, but if they are not married by a certain age, it could be seen that they don’t possess the qualities that would make them a suitable partner, i.e. those of the domestic side.

As progressive as our society thinks we are, we have a long way to go, as these “traditional” gender roles are reinforced on a daily basis whether we are aware of it or not. Today’s housewife is the modern woman, the modern woman is the modern “housewife” it’s hard to separate the two completely because no matter what in some way they always tend to overlap. And now there is a new element added to the mix of the “housewife,” a sexuality of sorts that comes about and this is seen, especially in the show Desperate Housewives which, in this clip, shows that the domestic sphere in today’s culture insects, love, lust, money as well as enforcing gender roles that came about in the 50s of cooking and hosting guests.

Things are a bit different in the Real Housewives series, where things are supposed to be more “real,” but yet again it is just promoting the typical gender roles and showing stereotyping and excess to an extreme. It could be seen as basically one big materialism and consumerism “commercial” that seems to be where our society is headed in terms of valuing ideals.

 

What’s the Problem with a Housewife?

The biggest problem with the 1950s housewife is that the domestic ideology of the 50s, particularly that of cooking, was an intricate part of the dicourse that sought to limit a woman’s life to the domestic sphere. Domestic ideology of the time sees that the home is the center of a woman’s existence, and thus, increasingly high standards begin to operate concerning housework and cookery, turning the “housewife” into a full time occupation, despite all the labor-saving gadgets which filled the post-war home (Neuhaus 543).

The popular culture representations which seem to offer ambivalent images of the thoroughly domesticated woman, present other kinds of evidence of the critique on the “housewife.” The women who baked, glazed and decorated throughout postwar cookbooks were figments of the postwar American imagination. They were expressions of desires and fears in a nation strained by the war and baffled by the unstoppable social changes that shaped the 1950s. These women were as fictional as Betty Crocker and constructed for a very similar purpose, to soothe and reassure. It is apparent that these images show a story of strained and tested gender norms (Neuhaus 546). 

However, these images and ideals did meet some criticism, women did distress that they could not live up to the domestic ideal, their anxiety about being able to be the “perfect” wife and mother would evolve into active, organized resistance to that ideal.  By stating assumptions about women’s lives, these advertisements and influences left room for those “assumptions” to be questioned (Neuhaus 548).  Take cookbooks for example, they were instruction manuals in attitudes and desires that should have been “natural” to men and women, thus they actually denaturalized those attitudes and desires. These texts articulated what must not be articulated, but assumed in order to maintain “traditional” gender norms.

These issues also arise in this song, entitled “She’s a housewife, that’s all” where Arlie Duff basically insinuates that this woman’s life is now different than when it was before she was married. Now she is just simply as housewife and doesn’t have the time to do other things, more enjoyable things, her days are now devoted to her family. And while that is not necessarily a terrible thing to be devoted to family, the worry is that women were told and persuaded to believe that being “perfect” is what made life and one’s relationship “great.” It’s all about pleasing and in a way “knowing your place” and to an extent it was insinuated and depicted over and over again that a woman’s place was within the home, in the domestic sphere, that’s where the central issue with the “housewife” lies in that anxities of the time were so bent on portraying this “American Dream” that they were along the way enforcing gender roles and norms and creating stereotypes that would become much more prevalent in future generations.

The Modern Woman and the Domestic “Ideal”

Today when one thinks “domestic” the immediate image to come to mind is “Martha Stewart” a woman who became a mogul by her “lifestyle” teachings. Martha Stewart is a woman who shows how one can make the perfect home, the perfect table setting, perfect recipes for Thanksgiving dinner, how to tie a perfect bow, all things that can be pushed into this idea of the domestic and the woman as homemaker. Though the domestic ideals that came about the in 1950s may not be perceived to be as prevalent today, there are still those gender norms and gender roles out there. Woman are still held to this high stand of being a nurturing homemaker and mother, but the image and vision has been updated a little.

Now the modern woman is supposed to maintain a home, a job and take care of her children, all while maintaining an “ideal” figure and to treat her man right. A woman today is always trying to build up a higher domestic prowess and to be a perfect balance of Martha Stewart, and say Oprah Winfrey (Miller 1).  Though the setting and time has changed the ideals have not. Women are still supposed to be homemakers and to cook for their families and host dinner parties, things have just changed in terms of style with the time. Now there are magazines and television networks, for example, HGTV or the Food Network, to get your domestic ideas and how to constantly improve your space.

Advertisements have been amped up to continue to appeal to the materialistic wants of consumers and now a new aspect has been added, competition. Now its about neighbors who have the nicest lawns, who has the most expensive house among friends, etc. the list goes on. Maintaining the ideal is still as prevalent today as it was in the 50s, it could be argued that more is expected of women now, it seems that no matter what way women go there is always a critique. They are either too “work-oriented” or if they are a housewife/stay- at- home mom, then they are seen as “lazy.”

Young women are perpetually stereotyped for the “housewife” role, especially those women who join sororities who are made out to be in college only to receive their MRS degree. The role we have placed on the domestic role of women has relatively been unchanged since the 50s, it’s just that now those 50s gender roles are being played out into stereotypes, where the phrase “make me a sandwich” has come to have a derogarotry meaning stating that women are only good for making their significant others happy and their partners are happiest when they are in the domestic sphere. As much as society would like to think that we have evolved from these traditional gender roles, its quite the contrary, now they are being played out in a stereotypical way to still enforce these gender codes and roles and to make the modern woman complacent in her stagnant role as “housewife.”

Women and the Domestic “Ideal”

The first question to ask ourselves is what exactly is the domestic ideal? It’s a question that should be answered and to put it lightly here is a poem straight from “To the Bride,” a cookbook/homemaking manual that was published in 1956,

The way to a man’s heart
So we’ve been told,
Is a good working knowledge
Of pot, pan, and mold

The talented gal
Who can whip up a pie,
Rates a well deserved rave
From her favorite guy

A juicy red steak
Or a tender, fish fillet
Done to a turn
In a bright copper skillet

Will soothe the rough edges
Of tempers, no fooling!!!
And leave the man happy
Contented and drooling

Essentially, the 1950s domestic ideal limited women’s roles to those of wife, mother, and homemaker. This ideology is vividly illustrated in these lines. The 1950s in many ways was a repressive time for women, and though there are few exceptions, most women were put into this category of being a homemaker, wife and mother. The postwar period expanded this ideal of the domestic role of women and the new emergence of consumerism made it more possible to target to women through media, and to reinforce this gender stereotype of a woman being simply a “housewife” and nothing more.

Cookbooks are an example of how popular culture from the 1950s reflected a deep ambivalence Americans felt about the gender roles in the postwar years (Neuhaus 531). Also a time of very complacent and developing gender norms. During WWII, the cookbooks published reflected a cultural need to reaffirm women’s traditional roles, which reiterated that a woman’s place was in the kitchen. As “Betty Crocker” put it women remained “first and foremost, homemakers”(Neuhaus 532). Though realities for women may have changed during the war, the domestic ideal of womanhood had not. And war time deprivations begin to set the stage for what was to come during the postwar period.

Americans were in need of comfort food in the 1950s and with new developments in manufacturing and producing, the homogenization of cuisine was yet another aspect of postwar abundance and the new modern age. Comfort food then became not only a war-weary right, but a patriotic privilege. And with this women were expected to become more creative with the food they created and made. Cookbooks encouraged women to throw “Hawaiian company dinners” or “country style” meal (Neuhaus 533). Thus, advertisements began to appeal to women who were trying to keep up with this new domestic goal that they needed to “present” a meal and to not merely just “cook” it. Cookbooks tried to appeal to women by presenting representations of “traditional” women compeletly fulfilled by their roles as devoted and nurturing mother, which spoke to the desires and expectations of society, since more women were trying to seek employment outside the home and seeking other civic duties.

These cookbooks also maintained that a woman’s role demanded a cheerful acceptance of the inescapable and that she must learn to cook without complaint. The recipes within these books reiterated gender norms, by either sexualizing the process of cooking, i.e. : “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” or by gendering certain cooking processes or types of behavior, linking masculinity to meat preparation and barbecuing. They even went so far to show cooking as a desirable trait and that it would make one more attractive to the opposite sex, this was done by linking culinary skills to popularity. Essentially a woman’s job was never done. She must keep up her culinary skills to remain attractive to her husband, and not only with the cooking, but also the cleaning, and on top of that she must keep up her appearance. It is a whole medley of things that a woman must maintain in her daily life to appease not only her husband, but also society, because it is not necessarily what she wants to do, but rather what’s expected of her.