A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Pretty-looking, cheerful gal for Mad Ave agcy”; “poised, attractive girl for top exec” in a law firm; “Exec Secy . . . Attractive please!” A particularly demanding employer stipulated “you must be really beautiful.” One company atypically sought a “career minded college educated” candidate for an executive secretary but specified that she must be single. A few sought Ivy League grads, but the main job requirement for such prospective employees was “good typing skills.”
    The male section included 281 ads for accountants and 153 for chemists, while the female section had just 9 ads in each of those job categories. Eleven ads sought men for attorney positions, but none sought women. There were 29 columns of “Sales Help Wanted/Male” but only 2 columns of “Sales Help Wanted/Female.” The “Help Wanted/Male” section had 94 ads for management trainee positions, while only 2 such ads appeared in the women’s job section.
    On the other hand, the female section of the want ads contained 162 ads for gal Fridays and girl Fridays, 459 for secretaries, 159 for receptionists,
and 122 for typists. Similarly, there were 119 ads for “Household Help Wanted/Female,” but just 5 for “Household Help Wanted/Male.” One ad, reflecting the racialized as well as gendered nature of job opportunities, touted dependable, live-in maids from the “Miss Dixie Employment Agency,” catering to the many white middle-class families that imported African-American servants from the South. Another ad, however, specified that the “Waitress-Parlor maid” they wanted to hire must be “White, well experienced.”
    Once hired, working women, single or married, were discriminated against in pay, promotion, and daily treatment on the job. In 1963, women who worked full-time earned only 60 percent of what men earned; black women earned only 42 percent. On average, a woman with four years of college still earned less than a male high school graduate.
    Women could lose their jobs if their employer no longer considered them “attractive.” Airline officials forced flight attendants to retire in their early thirties because, as one company official explained, “the average woman’s appearance has markedly deteriorated at this age.” Another matter-of-factly explained the business considerations behind the policy: “It’s the sex thing, pure and simple. Put a dog on a plane and 20 businessmen are sore for a month.”
    There was no recourse against what we now call sexual harassment. One high school boy who worked a summer job in a newspaper room in 1964 wrote in his diary that when he entered the compositing room with Doris, the copy girl, “all of the printers and linotype operators started screaming and howling. At first I didn’t understand what was going on, but then I figured it out: They were doing it to Doris.” When he asked Doris what it meant, she responded, “It’s just how they act around women.” The boy found the incident startling, but once it was explained to him, he simply accepted it, as Doris had to do, as the way work was conducted in those days.
    Women also had little control over their sexual and reproductive destinies in 1963. In 1958, New York City had finally prohibited its hospitals from denying contraceptive counseling to patients, after a newspaper reporter
discovered that the city commissioner of hospitals had ordered the chief of obstetrics at Kings County General Hospital not to fit a diaphragm for a diabetic mother of three who had already had two cesarean section deliveries. But in 1963, seventeen states still restricted women’s access to contraceptives. Massachusetts flatly prohibited their sale and made it a misdemeanor for anyone, even a married couple, to use birth control. Not until 1965 did the Supreme Court rule that it was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy to deny married women access to contraceptives. It took several more years for unmarried women to obtain equal