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Women in Context

Year 11 Booklet

2012

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The Fifties

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique became a bestseller in 1963. She argued that in the postwar period, rigid gender norms restricted middle-class, suburban white women's options and aspirations to full-time wifedom and motherhood. The roles of women were contradictory: more middle-class white women than ever before had opportunities for education, work, and autonomy, but the culture punished the women who pursued them. Discrimination, scorn, and characterizations of professional women as old maids, unfeminine, or negligent mothers, functioned to keep women in the home, literally and psychologically. The 1950s are best known as a time of prosperity and optimism; obsessive anticommunism, which led to the cold war; narrow gender expectations for women; and a glorification of the "normal" nuclear family. In fact the 1950s are an aberrant decade in the twentieth century in that after the Great Depression and World War II, most Americans wanted to settle down. The number of young people who married rose precipitously; age at the time of marriage and childbearing dropped; and the birthrate increased significantly, a trend termed the baby boom. Premarital virginity for white women and traditionally male-dominant heterosexual families (with men as the breadwinner and head of the household and women at home) were universally promoted. Institutions and goods expanded rapidly in postwar America: corporations; the military; advertising and media; suburbs; highways; and consumerism and consumer products, particularly housing, automobiles, household appliances, and televisions. The decade is often remembered fondly as a time of abundance, optimism, and safety. At the same time currents of discontent and anxiety arose. Black people, especially in the South, were angry and the national struggle for civil rights intensified. The 1950s are punctuated with important race-related events, such as the 1954 Supreme Court decision against segregated schools, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Emmett Till case, and the Little Rock Central High School integration struggle. Many of the heroes of these events were Black women. Black music (and its imitators) was popular among teenagers, who formed a demographic category unto themselves, especially from a market perspective. Thousands of teenagers had money and time to spend on records, magazines, clothes, and makeup—they created a new youth culture. Parents worried about losing control of young people, most visible in the national concern over juvenile delinquency. The Beat writers, known for their rejection of mainstream American values and their embrace of bohemian existence, attracted many young whites.

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Homophobia was apparent in the glorification of the "nuclear" family and in the campaigns against lesbians and gays that linked them to crime and communist activities. In addition, anxiety over the atom bomb and nuclear war permeated the culture. Unknown to most suburban whites, there were many poor people in this country. In fact the United States was deeply divided by race and class, a realization that galvanized young Blacks and whites in the 1960s. The cities were becoming underfunded sites of Black and Latino/Latina neighborhoods as whites moved to the segregated suburbs. The migration of Blacks out of the South, and the influx of people from Puerto Rico and Mexico into the United States, changed racial and ethnic urban demographics. For Native American women and communities, the 1950s saw the emergence of two very damaging federal policies—the era of termination of tribal life and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Relocation Program. These policies were designed to "mainstream" Native Americans so they could be "just like everyone else" in the 1950s. The policies added to Native American urban migration. In contrast to the upward mobility of many white women, women of color struggled to survive. The 1950s were a paradoxical time, then, when American society seemed stable and contained. Underneath the facade, however, African Americans and other people of color, youth, women, lesbians, and gays were gathering force to expose its contradictions.

- Wini Breines

A Streetcar Named Desire

It is believed that Tennessee Williams expressed much of his troubled childhood through his plays and other writings. His first commercially successful play was A Glass Menagerie. A Streetcar Named Desire was the next play to be written.

The play depicts all types of desire between human beings, culminating in betrayal, revenge, and madness. This 1951 movie, directed by Elia Kazan, is very faithfully adapted from the play. The all-star cast includes Marlon Brando as

Stanley Kowalski, Kim Hunter as his wife Stella, Vivien Leigh as Stella’s sister Blanche DuBois, and Karl Malden as Harold Mitchell (Mitch), a friend and poker buddy of Stanley’s.

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The action is aptly set in New Orleans (also known as “The Big Easy”) in the years shortly after World War II. Blanche DuBois, a neurotic, rather frail woman, brought up to be a genteel Southern lady, was raised with her sister on Belle Reve (Beautiful Dream), the ancestral plantation in Laurel, Mississippi. Due to debaucheries of her father and his predecessors, and her own weaknesses, Blanche has lost Belle Reve.

Blanche was married at a young age to an equally young man who was battling with his homosexuality and who committed suicide. Blanche relives this scene frequently, hearing in her mind the polka being played at the dance club to which she and her husband had gone, and where she brutally rejected him on the dance floor, and then replaying in her mind the shot she heard as he killed himself just afterward, after rushing off the dance floor.

Blanche tries to support herself by teaching English but cannot maintain Belle Reve on the salary. She also is attracted to young men and is ultimately discharged from her teaching position after being caught in a liaison with a17-year old student. She then attempts to support herself and to satisfy a problem with nymphomania through prostitution. She is kicked out of the hotel where she was plying her trade.

Desperate for a place to stay, she arrives in New Orleans and takes the streetcar (named Desire) to seek refuge with her sister Stella, recently married to a factory worker, Stanley. Blanche is shocked and repelled by the slum area in which they live, and simultaneously attracted and repelled by her working class brother-in-law, who projects raw, muscle-bound sexuality.

Blanche and Stanley are at odds from the start, she considering herself and her sister to be superior to him by education and breeding, he finding her pretentious and vapid. She is also beginning to teeter on the edge of madness. Stella is caught in the middle, wanting to be loyal to both her frail sister and her husband, who abuses her upon occasion but also holds her in sexual thrall. Stella is also pregnant, which she initially conceals from Blanche, knowing that this would upset her and add to her increasing frailty. Stanley reveals Stella’s pregnancy during one of the confrontations with Blanche.

Stanley regularly plays poker, and one of his poker buddies is Harold Mitchell (Mitch), a no longer young man who lives with and supports his dying mother. Mitch is attracted by Blanche’s air of breeding and apparent purity. He also does not realize that Blanche, at some indeterminate age past 30, is no longer of “marriageable age”, which she conceals by refusing to be seen in well-lighted circumstances. They begin to date and he considers marriage. Blanche is somewhat attracted to him as well, but also sees him as an escape from the intolerable situation of sharing a tawdry two-room apartment with her sister and crude brother-in-law.

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Stanley reveals Blanche’s true past to Mitch, who rejects Blanche as being a fallen woman and unworthy to bring home to his mother, in a brutal scene where he kisses her violently and disrespectfully.

In the next scene, Stella goes into labour and insists on going to the hospital. Stanley leaves her there, and comes home. He and Blanche are alone for the first time. He rapes Blanche, presumably to celebrate his impending fatherhood and to use his superior strength to overcome this woman who has been putting him down and attempting to separate his wife (property) from him since living with them.

Blanche’s already tenuous grasp of reality cannot survive the rape and the fact that her sister, unable to face a life with a newborn babe, independent of the man whom she both loves and hates, refuses to admit the rape. Blanche is put into an institution. Stanley sees himself as having triumphed, but in the movie Stella leaves him, although in the play she returns to him, unable to resist the dark sexual urges he releases in her.

The final scene shows Blanche being taken from the apartment to the institution. An elderly doctor offers her his arm in escort, and her last words are “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”.

A Streetcar named Desire depicts all types of desire and love, mostly in a perverse way. Husband-wife, but in a dominance-submission relationship. Implications that Blanche was abused by her father. Nymphomania, prostitution, homosexuality. Excess attachment to mother by Mitch.

In addition, there is the psychopathology of Blanche’s descent into madness. But there is a sort of redemption in the action of the kindly old physician offering his arm and solace.

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. He took the name Tennessee (his father’s birthstate), when he moved to New Orleans in 1938.

His father, a shoe salesman for the International Shoe Company, was a rigid and domineering person who put Williams down for his literary aspirations and talent and who forced him to leave the University of Missouri before completing his degree in playwriting, to work in the shoe factory. His mother was the daughter of a minister. Both parents fought frequently and bitterly.

His sister, Rose, suffered lifelong depression, as did Tennessee. Rose was institutionalised and lobotomised. She is considered to be reflected in many of Tennessee’s female characters, including Blanche. He also had a brother, Dakin, who was his father’s favourite and who apparently possessed the manly attributes desired by his father, unlike Tennessee, who in addition to wishing to pursue an “unmanly” career, was also a homosexual.

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One of his closest friends when he was at the University of Missouri was Harold Mitchell. Tennessee was also very close to Harold’s wife. While working at the shoe factory, Tennessee met a working class young man who seemed virile, sure of himself, and popular with men and women alike, named Stanley Kowalski.

Tennessee also reportedly had a love-hate relationship with physicians. Physicians figure in several of his plays and other works, usually as characters uselessly trying to save the lives of other characters. He also believed, as reported in his Memoirs, that at least one physician tried to kill him.

Gore Vidal, a close friend, said that Williams drank and took prescriptions to deal with his problems, becoming hooked on amphetamines prescribed by one doctor. A psychiatrist attempted to persuade him to give up both writing and sex.

He was a prolific writer, with sixty plays, and many screenplays to his credit, two novels, a novella, more than 100 poems, and an autobiography. He died in 1983, choking to death on a bottle cap.

Characters

Blanche Dubois: No longer a young girl in her twenties, Blanche Dubois has suffered through the deaths of all of her loved ones, save Stella, and the loss of her old way of life. When Blanche was a teenager, she married a young boy whom she worshipped; the boy turned out to be depressive and homosexual, and not long after their marriage he committed suicide. While Stella left Belle Reve, the Dubois ancestral home, to try and make her own life, Blanche stayed behind and cared for a generation of dying relatives. She saw the deaths of the elder generation and the end of the Dubois family fortune. In her grief, Blanche looked for comfort in amorous encounters with near-strangers. Eventually, her reputation ruined and her job lost, she was forced to leave the town of Laurel. She has come to the Kowalski apartment seeking protection and shelter.

Stella Kowalski: Blanche's younger sister. About twenty-five years old and pregnant with her first child, Stella has made a new life for herself in New Orleans. She is madly in love with her husband Stanley; their relationship is in part founded on the most direct and primitive kind of desire. She is close to Blanche, but in the end she will betray her sister horribly by refusing to believe the truth.

Stanley Kowalski: Stella's husband. A man of solid, blue-colour stock, Stanley Kowalski is direct, passionate, and often violent. He has no patience

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for Blanche and the illusions she cherishes. He is a controlling and domineering man; he demands subservience from his wife and feels that his authority is threatened by Blanche's arrival. He proves that he can be cold and calculating; in the end, he moves mercilessly to ensure Blanche's destruction.

Harold "Mitch" Mitchell: One of Stanley's friends. Mitch is as tough and "unrefined" as Stanley. He is an imposing physical specimen, massively built and powerful, but he is also a deeply sensitive and compassionate man. His mother is dying, and this impending loss affects him profoundly. He is attracted to Blanche from the start, and Blanche hopes that he will ask her to marry him. In the end, these hopes are dashed by Stanley's interference.

Eunice Hubbel: The owner of the apartment building, and Steve's wife. She is generally helpful, giving Stella and Blanche shelter after Stanley beats Stella. In the end, she advises Stella that in spite of Blanche's tragedy, life has to go on. In effect, she is advising Stella not to look too hard for the truth.

Steve Hubbel: Eunice’s husband. Owner of the apartment building. One of the poker players. Steve has the finally line of the play. As Blanche is carted off to the asylum, he coldly deals another hand.

Pablo Gonzales: One of the poker players. He punctuates the poker games with dashes of Spanish.

Negro Woman: The Negro Woman seems to be one of the non-naturalistic characters; it seems that the actor playing this role is in fact playing a number of different Negro women, all minor characters. Emphasizing the non-naturalistic aspect of the character, in the original production of Streetcar, the "Negro Woman" was played by a male actor.

A Strange Man (The Doctor): The Doctor arrives at the end to bring Blanche on her "vacation." After the Nurse has pinned her, the Doctor succeeds in calming Blanche. She latches onto him, depending, now and always, "on the kindness of strangers."

A Strange Woman (The Nurse): The Nurse is a brutal and impersonal character, institutional and severe in an almost stylised fashion. She wrestles Blanche to the ground.

A Young Collector: The Young Collector comes to collect money for the paper. Blanche throws herself at him shamelessly.

A Mexican Woman: Sells flowers for the dead. She sells these flowers during the powerful scene when Blanche recounts her fall(s) from grace.

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A Streetcar Named Desire

Main Themes

Fantasy/Illusion: Blanche dwells in illusion; fantasy is her primary means of self-defence. Her deceits do not carry any trace of malice; rather, they come from her weakness and inability to confront the truth head-on. She tells things not as they are, but as they ought to be. For her, fantasy has a liberating magic that protects her from the tragedies she has had to endure. Unfortunately, this defence is frail and will be shattered by Stanley. In the end, Stanley and Stella will also resort to a kind of illusion: Stella will force herself to believe that Blanche's accusations against Stanley are false.

The Old South and the New South: Stella and Blanche come from a world that is rapidly dying. Belle Reve, their family's ancestral plantation, has been lost. The two sisters, symbolically, are the last living members of their family. Stella will mingle her blood with a man of blue-collar stock, and Blanche will enter the world of madness. Stanley represents the new order of the South: chivalry is dead, replaced by a "rat race," to which Stanley makes several proud illusions.

Cruelty: The only unforgivable crime, according to Blanche, is deliberate cruelty. This sin is Stanley's specialty. His final assault against Blanche is a merciless attack against an already-beaten foe. On the other hand, though Blanche is dishonest, she never lies out of malice. Her cruelty is unintentional; often, she lies in a vain effort to please. Throughout Streetcar, we see the full range of cruelty, from Blanche's well-intentioned deceits to Stella self-deceiving treachery to Stanley's deliberate and unchecked malice. In Williams' plays, there are many ways to hurt someone. And some are worse than others.

The Primitive and the Primal: Blanche often speaks of Stanley as ape-like and primitive. Stanley represents a very unrefined manhood, a romantic idea of man untouched by civilization and its effeminising influences. His appeal is clear: Stella cannot resist him, and even Blanche, though repulsed, is on some level drawn to him. Stanley's unrefined nature also includes a terrifying amorality. The service of his desire is central to who he is; he has no qualms about driving his sister-in-law to madness, or raping her.

Desire: Closely related to the theme above, desire is the central theme of the play. Blanche seeks to deny it, although we learn later in the play that desire is one of her driving motivations; her desires have caused her to be driven out of town. Desire, and not intellectual or spiritual intimacy, is the heart of Stella’s and Stanley's relationship. Desire is Blanche's undoing, because she cannot find a healthy way of dealing with it: she is always either trying to suppress it or pursuing it with abandon.

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Loneliness: The companion theme to desire; between these two extremes, Blanche is lost. She desperately seeks companionship and protection in the arms of strangers. And she has never recovered from her tragic and consuming love for her first husband. Blanche is in need of a defender. But in New Orleans, she will find instead the predatory and merciless Stanley.

A Streetcar Named Desire

The Film

(United States, 1951, 122 minutes, b&w, 16mm)

Directed by Elia Kazan

Cast: Marlon Brando . . . . . . . . . . Stanley Kowalski

Kim Hunter . . . . . . . . . .Stella Kowalski Vivien Leigh . . . . . . . . . . Blanche Dubois

Karl Malden . . . . . . . . . . Harold 'Mitch' Mitchell

When Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway in December 1947, the American theatre was forever changed. But where Broadway saw a revolutionary form of intimate drama, the Hollywood film studios saw what they liked to see - money. Streetcar's popularity as a stage production, and, more important, its instant notoriety as a major event in American culture, gave promise of a feast at the box office. And yet, Hollywood couldn't help feeling schizophrenic about the prospect of adapting Streetcar to the screen.

The drama of A Streetcar Named Desire rests on a bedrock of distinctly American sexual and social decadence. In the years 1945-1950, Hollywood was struggling with the question of how it really felt about the American Dream. Could it still endorse the Main Street world of Andy Hardy's Carmel, or fantasies like The Wizard of Oz, where troubles seemed to melt like lemon drops? Or, had the war invalidated Hollywood's late 1930s optimism with horrible truths about the dark capabilities of the human soul, with Auschwitz and Nanking and Katyn and the Chancellory Bunker?

Those five years after World War II saw the ground under Hollywood shift. The ever-climbing audience graph for Hollywood films stalled in 1946, and then headed rapidly downward, as television purchases grew exponentially. In 1947, the first of two tides of Congressional investigations into Hollywood's

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ostensible infiltration by Communists tore the industry apart. It was a dismayingly uncertain world, and it even nurtured its own film genre: the film noir, stories of murderous deceit, lust, and criminality told in suitably dark, expressionist visual terms.

A Streetcar Named Desire enfolded all the anxieties of the era in its story of perverse gentility colliding with the earthy truths of the working class. Most emblematic of these was sex, for Streetcar is not about "sexuality" - it is about sex. Hollywood's Breen Office, charged by the studios with policing their projects for what we now call "family values," let it be known that Streetcar, no matter how potentially profitable, would be the diciest of properties to adapt to the screen. In choosing to make Streetcar against its own best wishes, Hollywood would be affirming its adulthood, and acknowledging its responsibility to portray society with warts intact. The story of Stanley Kowalski's brutal conquest of brittle, tragic Blanche Dubois was a test to see whether Hollywood had grown up with its audience.

And so it was that the Hollywood studios struggled for three years with Streetcar, and the nation's great theatrical hit remained stalled in the pipeline. Finally, in April of 1950, a first draft of a screenplay was ready; independent producer Charles Feldman was producing the film for Warner Brothers. Still, the Breen Office fretted. The story still turned on rape, and the play's intimation of homosexuality remained prominent, and Blanche still seemed vaguely nymphomaniacal. Director Elia Kazan watered down Blanche's lustful past and the remembered homosexuality of her first husband, but he was adamant on Stanley's rape of Blanche. As Tennessee Williams put it eloquently in a letter to the Breen Office, any further changes would be crass, because A Streetcar Named Desire was already "an extremely and peculiarly moral play, in the deepest and truest sense of the word." Williams announced to Breen that he and director Elia Kazan would stand for no changes that tampered with the fact of Stanley's rape of Blanche, warning Breen that the simplistic moralizing of prewar Hollywood was hypocritical in the wake of new realities:

The rape of Blanche by Stanley is a pivotal, integral truth in the play, without which the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society. It is a poetic plea for comprehension…

In the end, the Breen Office capitulated. Geoffrey Shurlock, later to be head of the Breen's Production Code office, remembered, "For the first time we were confronted with a picture that was obviously not family entertainment… Streetcar broke the barrier… [and] made us think things through… It began with Streetcar."

The old order waged a rearguard action, however. According to film historian Rudy Behlmer's exceptional recounting of Streetcar's production, the film got

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into the hands of Martin Quigley, an informal but powerful intermediary between the film industry and the Catholic Legion of Decency, a religious "watchdog group" which had its own parallel censorship regime to that of the Breen Office. A "C" (for "condemned") rating from the Legion of Decency could, it was believed, ruin a film at the box office, for Catholics would be urged not to see the film. Without consulting Williams or Kazan, Warner Brothers ordered an editor to trim three or four minutes of footage from various parts of the film, 12 cuts in all, including a crucial passage of music which underscores the erotic nature of Stanley's hold over the women of the story, and an exchange of glances between Stanley and his wife, Stella. The effect was to imply a kind of punishment for the act of rape which is central to the plot. Kazan was bitter as he went on to his next project, Viva Zapata! at Twentieth Century-Fox. The cuts, he said, were "directly opposed to Tennessee Williams' thought. All his characters are a mixture of the qualities we label `good' and `bad,' and that is their humanity…"

Still, everyone involved understood that a corner had been turned in the history of censorship. In the next decade a flood of intelligent foreign films from France, Sweden, and Italy would confirm Streetcar's complex picture of morality. Hollywood would return to Williams' work again and again, each time with a growing willingness to let his beautifully jaundiced view of the human condition express itself. There followed films like The Rose Tattoo and The Fugitive Kind, and notoriously, Baby Doll, where the Legion of Decency would at last be vanquished.

Finally, Williams and Kazan would have their revenge, though Williams would not live to see it. Those short but telling cuts in A Streetcar Named Desire cooked up to satisfy a powerful censorship agency have been restored, and A Streetcar Named Desire now speaks as eloquently about human frailty and passion as it did more than fifty years ago. The censors are long dead, but a great film lives.

— Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University

Excerpt from:

Does the American Family Have a History?

Family Images and Realities

Twentieth-Century Families

Over the past three centuries, Americans have gone through recurrent waves of moral panic over the family. During the late nineteenth century, panic gripped the country over family violence and child neglect, declining middle-class birth rates, divorce, and infant mortality. Eleven states made desertion

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and non-support of families a felony and three states instituted the whipping post where wife-beaters were punished with floggings. To combat the decline in middle-class birth rates, the Comstock Act restricted the interstate distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices, while state laws criminalized abortion. In a failed attempt to reduce the divorce rate, many states reduced the grounds for divorce and extended waiting periods.

Mounting public anxiety led to increased government involvement in the family and the emergence of distinct groups offering expert advice about childrearing, parenting, and social policy. To combat the exploitation and improve the well being of children, reformers pressed for compulsory school attendance laws, child labour restrictions, playgrounds, pure milk laws, and "widow's" pensions to permit poor children to remain with their mothers. There were also concerted efforts to eliminate male-only forms of recreation, campaigns that achieved success with the destruction of red-light districts during the 1910s and of saloons following adoption of Prohibition in 1918.

To strengthen and stabilize families, marriage counsellors promoted a new ideal: the companionate family. It held that husbands and wives were to be "friends and lovers" and that parents and children should be "pals." This new ideal stressed the couple relationship and family togetherness as the primary source of emotional satisfaction and personal happiness. Privacy was a hallmark of the new family ideal. Unlike the nineteenth century family, which took in boarders, lodgers, or aging and unmarried relatives, the companionate family was envisioned as a more isolated, and more important, unit, the primary focus of emotional life.

During the Depression, unemployment, lower wages, and the demands of needy relatives tore at the fabric of family life. Many Americans were forced to share living quarter with relatives, delay marriage, and postpone having children. The divorce rate fell, since fewer people could afford one, but desertions soared. By 1940, 1.5 million married couples were living apart. Many families coped by returning to a cooperative family economy. Many children took part time jobs and many wives supplemented the family income by taking in sewing or laundry, setting up parlor groceries, or housing lodgers.

World War II also subjected families to severe strain. During the war, families faced a severe shortage of housing, a lack of schools and child-care facilities, and prolonged separation from loved ones. Five million "war widows" ran their homes and cared for children alone, while millions of older, married women went to work in war industries. The stresses of wartime contribute to an upsurge in the divorce rate. Tens of thousands of young people became latchkey children, and rates of juvenile delinquency, unwed pregnancy, and truancy all rose.

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The late 1940s and 1950s witnessed a sharp reaction to the stresses of the Depression and war. If any decade has come to symbolize the traditional family, it is the 1950s. The average age of marriage for women dropped to twenty; divorce rates stabilized; and the birth rate doubled. Yet the images of family life that appeared on television were misleading; only sixty percent of children spent their childhood in a male-breadwinner, female homemaker household. The democratisation of the family ideals reflected social and economic circumstances that are unlikely to be duplicated: a reaction against Depression hardships and the upheavals of World War II; the affordability of single-family track homes in the booming suburbs; and rapidly rising real incomes.

The post-war family was envisioned not simply a haven in a heartless world, like the Victorian family, but as an alternative world of satisfaction and intimacy. But this family, like its Victorian counterpart, had its own contradictions and latent tensions. Youthful marriages, especially among women who cut short their education, contributed to a rising divorce rate in the 1960s. The compression of childbearing into the first years of marriage meant that many wives were free of the most intense childrearing responsibilities by their early or mid-thirties. Combined with the ever rising costs of maintaining a middle-class standard of living, this encouraged a growing number of married women to enter the workplace; as early as 1960, a third of married middle-class women were working part- or full-time. The expansion of schooling, combined with growing affluence, contributed to the emergence of a separate youth culture, separate and apart from the family. The seeds of radical familial changes were planted in the 1950s.

Contemporary Families

Since the 1960s, families have grown smaller, less stable, and more diverse. At the same time, more adults live outside a family, as single young adults, divorced singles, or as older people who have lost a spouse. As recently as 1960, seventy percent of the households in the United States consisted of a breadwinner father, a homemaker mother, and two or more kids. Today, the male breadwinner, female homemaker family makes up only a small proportion of American households. More common are two-earner families, where both the husband and wife work; single-parent families, usually headed by a mother; reconstituted families, formed after a divorce; and empty-nest families, created after a children have left home. Declining birth and marriage rates, the rapid entry of married women into the work force, a rising divorce rate, and an aging population all contributed to this domestic revolution.

Despite the changes that have taken place, the family is not a dying institution. About ninety percent of Americans marry and bear children, and most Americans who divorce eventually remarry. In many respects, family life is actually stronger today than it was in the past. While divorce rates are

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higher than in the past, fewer families suffer from the death of a parent or a child. Infants were four times more likely to die in the 1950s than today and older children were three times more likely. Because of declining death rates, couples are more likely to grow into old age together than in the past and children are more likely to have living grandparents. Meanwhile, parents are making greater emotional and economic investment their children. Lower birth rates mean that parents can devote more attention and greater financial resources to each child. Fathers have become more actively involved in their childrearing.

Nevertheless, the profound changes--such as the integration of married women into the paid labour force--have taken place in the late twentieth century resulted in a "crisis of caregiving." As the proportion of single parent and two-worker families has increased, many parents have found it increasingly difficult to balance the demands of work and family life. Working parents not only had to care for their young children, but, because of increasing life spans, aging parents as well. In an attempt to deal with these needs, the United States adopted the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, entitling eligible employees to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a twelve-month period for specified family and medical reasons. Yet despite widespread rhetoric about promoting family values, many "reforms," such as welfare reform, weakened social supports for families. Whether the early twenty-first century will witness a wave of family-related reforms comparable to the Progressive Era remains to be seen.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/familyhistory.cfm

The Portrayal of Women in Magazines One of the earliest studies of women's portrayal in magazines was undertaken by Courtney and Lockeretz (1971). This is what their research concluded:

Portrayal of Women 1950

1. "Women as unemployed." Most women were shown in non-working roles and often at home.

2. "Women as low-income earners." Most working women were shown in secretarial, clerical, or blue collar positions.

3. "Non-working women in decorative roles and in idle situations." Often, the presence of women was not substantially related to the product advertised.

4. "Women have limited purchasing power." This reflects the observation that females were depicted as decision makers only for small-ticket items for the home.

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Portrayal of Women 1970

1. "A Woman's place is in the home." Even though there were 29 million women in the labour force at that time.

2. "Women do not make important decisions or do important things." Women were shown as independent only when inexpensive items or simple decisions were involved.

3. "Women are dependent and need men's protection." Women were generally isolated from their sex within the ads.

"Men regard women primarily as sexual objects: they are not interested in women as people." Women were often found in decorative roles having little relationship to the product (Courtney and Lockeretz, 1971)

Sexist Advertisements

How to see through the soft sell

Everyone has seen blatantly offensive advertisements that portray women as sexual toys or victims of violence. Such irresponsible advertising has rightly touched off cries of protest and organized action. The following are some of the more subtle ways advertising reinforces cultural values of subservience,

domination and inequality between the sexes.

1. Superiority. Three common tactics used to establish superiority are size, attention and positioning.

2. Dismemberment. Women's bodies are often dismembered and treated as separate parts, perpetuating the concept that a woman's body is not connected to her mind and emotions. The hidden message: If a woman has great legs, who cares who she is?

3. Clowning. Shown alone in ads, men are often portrayed as secure, powerful and serious. By contrast, women are pictured as playful clowns, perpetuating the attitude that women are childish and cannot be taken seriously.

4. Canting. People in control of their lives stand upright, alert and ready to meet the world. In contrast, the bending of body parts conveys unpreparedness, submissiveness and appeasement.

Dominance/Violence. The tragic abuse-affection cycle that many women are trapped in is too often glorified in advertising.

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I Am Woman – Helen Reddy

Words and Music by Helen Reddy and Ray Burton This song became the “anthem” of the women’s movement / feminists of the 1970’s.

I am woman, hear me roar

In numbers too big to ignore And I know too much to go back an' pretend

'cause I've heard it all before And I've been down there on the floor

No one's ever gonna keep me down again

CHORUS Oh yes I am wise

But it's wisdom born of pain Yes, I've paid the price

But look how much I gained If I have to, I can do anything

I am strong (strong) I am invincible (invincible)

I am woman

You can bend but never break me 'cause it only serves to make me

More determined to achieve my final goal And I come back even stronger

Not a novice any longer 'cause you've deepened the conviction in my soul

CHORUS

I am woman watch me grow

See me standing toe to toe As I spread my lovin' arms across the land

But I'm still an embryo With a long long way to go

Until I make my brother understand

Oh yes I am wise But it's wisdom born of pain

Yes, I've paid the price But look how much I gained

If I have to I can face anything I am strong (strong)

I am invincible (invincible) I am woman

Oh, I am woman I am invincible

I am strong

FADE I am woman

I am invincible I am strong

I am woman

17

Changing Verses Tell Tale in Song Musical Study Shows Women’s Progression

by Barbara Hey

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

“He isn’t good. He isn’t true. He beats me, too. What can I do?” - “My Man,” sung by Fanny

Brice, circa 1922

“I was in love wit ya. But the hell wit ya cuz you didn’t wanna treat me right.” - Pink, 2002

From powerless to powerful, women have come a long way baby, in lyrics and in life.

Put Fanny Brice in the front row of a Pink concert, and she would likely be more than a bit

verklempt. Times they are a-changin’ and, author Dorothy Marcic said, one way to track those shifts is through a close look at the top 40 songs of each decade.

Marcic, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, did a content analysis of the lyrics sung by women over the century and found the themes

dominating the hits mirrored the women’s roles of each era. She published the results in “Respect: Women and Popular Music” (Texere, $26.95).

“Music tells the whole story of women’s empowerment,” said Marcic, a management consultant who speaks to corporations and business leaders about gender diversity in the

workplace, illustrating her points by belting out relevant songs. “Merely speaking isn’t always enough to make my point. Listening to the songs helps people reflect on how they were

shaped by the music.”

Music is not only the soundtrack of our lives; sometimes it’s the script as well. “The popular

songs of each decade are indicative of our values, our longings, what we relate to,” she said. Music also provides clues about how men and women relate to one another and how women

relate to themselves, she says. And those attitudes have gotten rawer with time.

Today we have Alanis Morissette singing about 21 things she wants in a lover, a stark

contrast to 1956, when “Que Sera, Sera” was big. That song was about a woman asking her mother and her sweetheart for advice and being told she has no control and should just

accept what comes her way.

Marcic might say what a long, strange trip it has been.

Songs in the first half of the century were about dependent women, with lyrics about

victimization, neediness and rigid gender roles. The songs were all about compliance, Marcic said, “I will follow him, I’ll do anything for you; just be my baby; even if you’re no good and

treat me bad; just love me and I’ll stand by my man.”

By the 1960s, songs were about women who rebelled and demanded respect. Women were

angry and vented that vocally in such songs as Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.” Another case in point: Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made for Walking.” Their anger was aimed at

men, but as women entered the workforce in greater numbers, their anger was joined by the frustration and guilt that came with shifting roles and unequal pay, says Marcic.

The next two decades were replete with cynicism -- Madonna’s “Material Girl” and Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with it?” And about toughness, in songs like Gloria Gaynor’s

“I Will Survive” and Helen Reddy’s anthem, “I Am Woman.”

18

By the late 1980s, other themes such as inner strength and self-direction entered the top 40

in songs such as Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love.” That theme perseveres to this day, along with lyrics that speak of self confidence and wisdom, like Alanis Morissette’s “You

Learn” and Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboy’s Gone.” Love’s still going bad, but women are at least learning from their misery.

Along the way, men have had their own favorite tunes as well, something that Marcic has recently been investigating. “The themes fit together like Lincoln Logs,” she says. While

women were into deference and submission, men were men, in the driver’s seat of their own lives and those of their women.

The prevailing themes for men have been vision (“Dream the Impossible Dream”),

domination (“I’m Sitting on Top of the World”) and control (“My Way”). By the 1980s, men’s

roles also were in flux, and lyrics began to be less testosterone-driven. Other themes emerged: regret (Chicago’s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry”) and collaboration (John Lennon’s

“Imagine”).

Women sang with acceptance about their abusive men in the first half of the century, too.

Now that theme has all but disappeared from popular radio play. Although male singers have had hits with such topics - Sting’s “I’ll Be Watching You,” is one example, warning that he will

be observing “every move you make.” For the most part, the message has shifted. “Rap music is filled with these messages as well,” says Marcic, “but they don’t appear in the top

40.”

“When women were coming out of their co-dependent phase, men were sung about as

insensitive, abusive creeps. But as women got more strength men weren’t as creepy anymore,” says Marcic.

But what about the female singers of today, swaggering down the VIP carpet at the MTV

Music Video Awards in outfits that would make Kate Smith weep, singing songs that would

make Doris Day blush?

“Women want to feel power, and what better way than to wield power sexually?” Marcic says. “As women get more equality, we’ll see less of that.”

But, she says, don’t overlook the other faces in contemporary women’s music.

“There is a crop of strong independent women who are not doing sexually explicit music,” she says. Included are such artists as Alicia Keys, India.Arie, Sheryl Crow and Sarah

McLachlan.

Marcic, 53, started investigating her musical side after leaving a position as a Fulbright

Scholar at the University of Economics in Prague and moving to Music City - Nashville.

”Music speaks not only about where we are in our lives”, says Marcic, “but of how far we’ve come.”