2. 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.
2
3. 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.
3
4. 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.
4
5. 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.
5
6. 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
6
7. 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.
7
8. 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.
8
9. 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
9
10. 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
10
11. 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
11
12. 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.
12
13. 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
13
14. 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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15. 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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16. 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
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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.”
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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.”
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