The first time I watched the wildly popular, critically- acclaimed television show Mad Men, set in and around New York City in the early 1960s, I had an unusual reaction. “Turn it off,” I said, midway through the second episode as I watched the housewife of the philandering lead character nearly drive off the road in what appeared to be a nervous breakdown. “Turn it OFF,” I heard myself say again in a strange, loud voice. As my roommate switched off the television and turned to stare, I left the room.
I think Mad Men makes me feel claustrophobic not because it depicts an era in which women had no agency over their lives but because this era was just so…recent. When reading Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am struck again by this feeling. Though the play, which opened in the fall of 1962, feels powerfully pertinent to our lives today, I sometimes struggle to understand the reality of Martha and Honey’s upbringing and of their options only a generation ago. It seems that the assumptions and attitudes about women with which they live should belong to a much more distant past. In her book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, New York Times columnist Gail Collins captures this contradiction. “In 1960…although computers were pretty much the stuff of science fiction, almost all the other things that make modern life feel modern- jet travel, television, nuclear terror- had arrived. But when it came to women, the age old convictions were still intact.”
When I consider Martha in the confines and constraints of the early 1960s, I find that I can glimpse the reasons for her baiting and bullying throughout the course of the play. Martha herself alludes to the notion of an unhappy housewife at the very opening of the first act. She imitates a film in which Bette Davis is an exasperated housewife, explaining to George, “She’s discontent.” Although largely discontent, women in the early 1960s did not hold expectations of what they might want instead. In her book Collins reminds us that, “Most girls grew up without ever seeing a woman doctor, lawyer, police officer, or bus driver.” Women routinely went to prestigious four-year universities without female professors. A Berkley graduate she interviewed remembers, “I never even saw one. Worse yet, I didn’t notice.” Instead, college was an opportunity to secure your future by securing a husband. Collins recounts, “the (male) president of all-female Radcliffe celebrated the beginning of every school year by telling the freshman that their college education would ‘prepare them to be splendid wives and mothers and their reward might be to marry Harvard men.’” In 1960, Newsweek reported that 60 percent of women dropped out of college, primarily to marry.
This belief that women ought not to pursue careers, or even academics, with purpose or vigor, was cemented as a cultural value by linking it to male economic success. As Collins summarizes, “Prestige lay in having a husband who was successful enough to keep his wife out of the workplace.” For an intelligent women to strive for something other than a life at home the cost would be her- and her husband’s- social standing. Martha’s past proves this very point. Her nuanced grasp of language reveals an intelligence that already ripples through her verbal sparring with George. “Biology’s even better,” she says in the first act of the play. “It’s less abstruse.” When George corrects her that the word is “abstract,” Martha argues back. “ABSTRUSE!” she says. “In the sense of recondite. Don’t you tell me words.” And yet, when she tells Nick and Honey about her upbringing she reveals that after college, “…I came back here and sort of sat around for awhile. I was hostess for Daddy and I took care of him…and it was…nice. It was very nice.” The prestige of her father and her husband prevents Martha from having any ambitions of her own.
Left to live through the ambitions of others, Martha is sorely disappointed by Geroge’s failure to ascend to the top of the college’s hierarchy. “I married the S.O.B., and I had it all planned out,” she explains to Nick and Honey. “First, he’d take over the History Department, and then, when Daddy retired, he’d take over the college….And Daddy seemed to think it was a pretty good idea, too…until he watched for a couple of years!…You see, George, didn’t have much…push…he wasn’t particularly…aggressive. In fact he was sort of a…a…FLOP! A great…big…fat… FLOP!” With a socially insignificant husband, Martha cannot avail herself of any leadership activities or hostess duties that might have used her talents or simply have occupied her time. At the opening of the play, we are still a year away from Betty Friedan’s rallying cry that there are no “happy housewives” in the seminal book The Feminine Mystique, and most women saw no escape from the dreary boredom that had come to characterize their lives.
At first, it appears we’ve left those days of the unhappy housewife far behind us and today, in particular, seems a particularly potent time for women with an unprecedented prominence of women in politics. Yet, we might not be quite as far away as we’d like from the days in which, as Gail Collins so aptly puts, career women’s achievements “could never be mentioned except in the context of their femaleness”.
Love them or hate them, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are inextricably linked to their femininity (or lack of it). Though Sarah Palin regularly rallies her female fan base she refers to as “Mama Grizzlies”, she pointed out in a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine that the focus on her clothing is not only sexist but “a distraction.” Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign that was stalled early on by a perceived lack of likeability was all but revived during the New Hampshire Primary when a moved Clinton shed a tear in a moment that Real Clear Politics writer Richard Cohen hailed as “maternal.” Perhaps even more telling is the recent release of Forbes Magazine “100 Most Powerful Women.” Topping the charts is First Lady Michelle Obama, with the Chief Executive of Kraft Foods, Oprah Winfrey, The Chancellor of Germany and Hillary Clinton trailing behind her. In an article praising Obama entitled “How to Shine Like Michelle Obama” ForbesWoman writer Jenna Goudreau notes, “She presents herself as ‘the good wife’ that most of America aspires to be, while also modeling modernity. We know that she is well-educated, confident and led a high-powered career, but she smartly reveals her softer, supportive side.”
While there is much to admire about Obama in her role as First Lady, it is an ominous sign that she is named the most powerful woman in the world by a magazine that hails one of her achievements as having learned from other First Ladies and “stayed away from hard policy.” With a troubling nod to a past where women were firmly held in place, Goudreau extols, ”Obama respects her position in the hierarchy”. Now that certainly can’t be said of Martha.
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