From Rosie the Riveter to The Feminine Mystique

The national war effort spurred into action by the December 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor required maximum military force and maximum industrial production. But if the men were off fighting the war, who would run the factories? Women answered the call in massive numbers, invading traditionally male workplaces. Posters exhorting workers to give their all for war production often depicted a woman in denim overalls and bandana, wielding a rivet gun like an expert. She was Rosie the Riveter, symbol of American womanhood in World War II.

For most American women, the war was their first experience of life in a workplace other than the home. Women faced new responsibilities but also tasted new freedom and independence. Yet when the war ended, the women, for the most part, quit their jobs, married the returning soldiers, and settled into lives as homemakers.

Throughout the 1950s, relatively few women questioned their role in the home. With the beginning of the 1960s, however, the American economy started a gradual shift from predominantly manufacturing-based to service-based industries, and women soon began finding job opportunities in these venues. Propelled in part by the powerful advertising medium of television, the 1960s were also driven by headlong consumerism. Increasing numbers of women found it necessary (or desirable) to earn a second income for their product-hungry families.

In 1963, writer Betty Friedan sent a questionnaire to graduates of Smith College, her alma mater. She asked probing questions about the women’s satisfaction in life, and the answers she received were sufficiently eye opening to prompt her to write a book, The Feminine Mystique. Its thesis, based on the Smith questionnaire and other data, was that American women were no longer universally content to be wives and mothers. They were, in fact, often the unhappy victims of a myth that the female of the species could gain satisfaction only through marriage and childbearing. The Feminine Mystique, an instant bestseller, struck a chord that caused many women to reexamine their lives and the roles in which society had cast them.