In 1920, for the first time, women nationwide could vote in a presidential election. In 2020, for the first time, a woman was elected on a presidential ticket.
Nothing has altered the personal lives of Americans over that century as deeply as the ascendance of women. A recent book by three sociologists provides intimate views of how great events upset patriarchal family arrangements and laid the groundwork for twenty-first century women’s empowerment.
1937 (Photographer: Ray Lomax)
Researchers usually identify social change by comparing snapshots at different periods, contrasting, for example, Americans’ parenting practices in the 2020s to their parenting practices in the 1920s. Rarely can we follow average people over the course of their lives to see how they encountered, handled, and were shaped by events. Such “longitudinal” studies are hard to do; a project has to survive over several decades and several changes in researchers. We have but few (though the British film documentaries in the “Up” series provide a taste of the method).
A 2021 book, Living on the Edge: An American Generation’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century, by Richard Settersten, Jr., Glen Elder, Jr., and Lisa Pearce, reports the journeys of about a hundred families living in Berkeley, California, from the early to the late part of the last century. “Berkeley?!,” you burst out. But Berkeley was not always the “People’s Republic of”; for much of the twentieth century it was a more conventional city of manufacturing as well as of a university and it housed many first- and second-generation immigrants. (U.C. researchers also started a roughly parallel study of Oakland families at around the same time. I’ll have occasion to mention findings from one of its reports, John Clausen’s American Lives, too.)
Settersten, Elder, and Pearce describe changes in several dimensions of their subjects’ lives, such as social class, job opportunities, and new styles of parenting, but none is more striking than the expansion of women’s self-sufficiency and the shrinkage of men’s.
Encountering History
The original researchers enrolled Berkeley couples having their first child in 1928 or 1929 and later researchers checked in on the couples periodically into the 1980s. The project spanned the Great Depression, World War II, the post-war boom, and the turbulent 1960s. Each era posed trials for the men–especially the working- and lower middle-class men–and opened opportunities for their wives.
Many of the wives had gotten at least some college education, but in the late 1920s they all expected to hold jobs only until they married–during that “in-between time.” About half of them did work when they were single. Most who kept working after marrying did so only out of economic necessity. A middle-class college graduate spoke for many when she later reflected on those years: “I wouldn’t have wanted anything else [than becoming a housewife]. And a lot of women around me felt the same. They were there to raise their families and bring up good kids, and feed them correctly. I never saw any unhappiness at all; everybody was family conscious. They weren’t looking for jobs and disrupting things.”
However, some issues had already arisen. By the 1920s, the “companionate” ideal of marriage–that husbands and wives should be close, confiding, best friends–had arrived in Berkeley. But many husbands had not yet accepted or enacted this ideal, and that led to some marital tension. (Many women in the Oakland study complained into the 1970s that their husbands could or would not talk about their feelings.)
Then the Great Depression started, steadily raising unemployment nationwide to 25% by 1933 and swamping the Berkeley families. The working-class ones suffered financially, many having to double up with kin and to accept charity. Most middle-class couples suffered less materially, but many of them felt a painful loss of social status. The unemployed men commonly blamed themselves. Often, their wives blamed them, too.
More women took jobs and most of them guided their families safely through scarcity. Both responses to the Depression magnified “the centrality and power of the mother, coupled with the father’s more estranged, marginal status.” Middle-class wives who worked outside the home in particular felt empowered and decades later still seemed invigorated by the experience.
The arrival of World War II upset couples’ arrangements yet again. This time, jobs and money were plentiful. The husbands were in their 40s and 50s, too old to be drafted. They easily found war-support jobs, such as building ships, which paid well and offered much overtime. Many of the women again sought employment, usually doing the sort of work they had done before marriage. They enjoyed both the income and the sisterly camaraderie of those jobs. One confessed many years later, “I should be ashamed for saying this, but I had a ball…” The war years of quasi-independence were long remembered even though most working wives went back to being homemakers after it was over. They returned home because that was the family life their generation valued.
These women had daughters, born in the late 1920s and in the 1930s, who themselves had daughters after the war, Baby Boomers who as teens and young adults experienced or at least witnessed the feminist movement. The granddaughters’ lives were profoundly changed. When the Berkeley study began, only one in ten married women nationally held jobs; over 50 years later, almost six in ten did.
Reflecting on the transformations around them, many now-elderly women in the Oakland study “were not sympathetic to the more extreme exponents of the women’s movement,” John Clausen reported, “but almost all recognized some of the restrictions, irritations, and at times humiliations that their gender had been subject to. Many were ambivalent. They had made choices decades before that they might not have made if given another chance.” And yet, many of those changes had begun in their own families in those decades before.
The New Gender Reality
Life stories such as those in the Berkeley and the Oakland studies flesh out what the statistical data show, that the last four generations or so of American women have experienced an unleashing of their potential and accomplishment. Women have outpaced men in educational attainment, passed men in competing for many of the most challenging jobs, and moved strongly into formerly male occupations, particularly taking legal, financial, and managerial positions. They have even began closing much of the wage gap. Meanwhile, working-class men have increasingly drifted to the margins of both the labor force and American society more generally.
Although much of the gender tumult and drama has occurred in the last 50 years, in fact, Living on the Edge shows that major rearrangements were going on much earlier in the private lives of average women who became the grandmothers and great-grandmothers of today’s more public barrier-breakers.
MADE IN AMERICA 