Essay On Women In The 1950's

Society has always painted the picture of a “traditional” woman: stay home, raise the children, keep the house, be nurturing, and in a multitude of ways, contribute to American society. However the 1920’s marked the birth

Throughout the history of civil rights activism, African-American leaders brought light to the injustices that the people of color faced in their everyday lives. However, many Americans neglect to understand that several of these societal heroes were women. Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark end of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, McGuire highlights the black, female political revolutionaries present in the United States in the 1900s. Among these activists are Recy Taylor, a young woman whose horrific story sheds light on a dark past.

The television, air-conditioning, dishwasher, and cheaper phone calls and air travel all made life easier (Foner, 728). The “postwar baby boom” caused a large demand for “housing, television sets, home appliances, and cars” (Foner, 739). Automobiles became an essential part of daily life, causing a trend of “motels, drive-in movie theaters, and roadside eating establishments” (Foner, 740). During WWII, women had a vital role in working during the war; in 1955, the tendency continued and a higher amount of women worked than during the war. However, the motives were different in that the purpose was no longer “to help pull it out of poverty or to pursue personal fulfillment or an independent career” (Foner, 742).

Before the war the lives of the women were mostly housework and raising the children. As the men’s job moved from home to offices, factories, and shops the women made do with what they had. The house became private, domestic, warm, and personalized place. The women refocused their world’s on creating a comfortable, clean, and loving home for their families. They turned their undivided attention to the world other than in their own houses, thousands of women in the North and South signed up, joined, and volunteered to work as emergency nurses in make-shift hospitals.

Elaine Taylor May demonstrates a new version of containment prevalent in the domestic sphere. She gives a detailed description of the emergence of domestic containment-how it emerged and affected the lives of those who tried to conform to it, and how it unravelled in the wake of Vietnam’s era’s assault on cold war culture, when unwed mothers,

The purpose of this document is to show that women are helping in duties outside the household. This is important because this was unconventional at the time. Additonally, there is a chart that shows that there was a significant increase in jobs held by women in professional fields such as clerical, professional, service, and sales workers which shows that women were climbing up the ladder in terms of jobs. This increase in women in the workforce is further confirmed with the drop in jobs such as household, factory, and farm workers (Doc 3B). Women are now taking on more professional jobs that were typically for men and that alone is a significant change.

Also exclusive was their “sphere,” or domain of influence, which was confined completely to the home. Thus the Cult of Domesticity “privatized” women’s options for work, for education, for voicing opinions, or for supporting reform. The true woman would take on the obligations of housekeeping, raising good children, and making her family’s home a haven of health, happiness, and virtue. All society would benefit from her performance of these sacred domestic

Six million women took wartime jobs in factories, nearly three million women had volunteered with the hospital jobs, and 200,000 served in the military. Women’s work at home had contributed to the war effort, in many different ways, but for a lot of these women they were under a lot of pressure and stress due to their families being sent off to fight in the war. Women that worked from home did a lot of voluntary work and learned to cook and take care of the children. Women that served in the military had a great contribution to women in the 1940’s, but the women working in the factories had an even bigger

Women’s work in the home was undervalued, and as women began to work outside the home, they were expected to provide and care for the family (Eto, 2001). The exploitation of women as workers diminished as they protested,

In the last seventy years, women in America have made great strides toward equality, which has dramatically changed their role in society. In days that seem long past, women were expected to be doting mothers, immaculate housekeepers, and submissive wives. These roles were the primary, if not only, responsibilities of any woman prior to the 1940s. However, since the post-war era, the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of women have evolved in leaps and bounds. In the first half of the twentieth century, women were not wanted, or needed, to be a part of the workforce.

The role of the traditional housewife was very prominent in the 30s compared to the more gender-neutral roles in the household of today. Although a lot of people are beginning to mix gender roles and make certain jobs gender-neutral, the typical model of a traditional family is still expected out of many

The breadwinner-homemaker family, the norm since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, is being replaced by a new norm of diversity” (Schulte). Family life in the 1950s is one of the most looked back upon generations, because it was so closely following the second World War, and was the beginning of the Baby Boomer generation. Because a lot of the soldiers were returning from the war to their wives to have children, the

Women in the Progressive Era The Progressive Era was a time of change across America, a time when the country chose to reform into an industrialized urban country. Prosperity was widespread across America, so people turned to social issues to try to expand. Minorities in particular became a focus of this time period, and everyone tried to find a way to integrate them into society.

In the first document, “Women's Roles in the Late 1900s” talks about what women were expected to do and how their lives were “tied to house and children, endlessly unacknowledged work, little opportunity for outside contact or variety of experience, and little relief from everyday triviality.” It discusses how women were encouraged to do these things and how they had to do them because they were the only ones capable of actually doing these things.

During the 1890’s until today, the roles of women and their rights have severely changed. They have been inferior, submissive, and trapped by their marriage. Women have slowly evolved into individuals that have rights and can represent “feminine individuality”. The fact that they be intended to be house-caring women has changed.