People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [301]
But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, “the problem.” And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone.
The “mystique” that Friedan spoke of was the image of the woman as mother, as wife, living through her husband, through her children, giving up her own dreams for that. She concluded: “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
In the summer of 1964, in McComb, Mississippi, at a Freedom House (a civil rights headquarters where people worked and lived together) the women went on strike against the men who wanted them to cook and make beds while the men went around in cars organizing. The stirring that Friedan spoke of was true of women everywhere, it seemed.
By 1969, women were 40 percent of the entire labor force of the United States, but a substantial number of these were secretaries, cleaning women, elementary school teachers, saleswomen, waitresses, and nurses. One out of every three working women had a husband earning less than $5,000 a year.
What of the women who didn’t have jobs? They worked very hard, at home, but this wasn’t looked on as work, because in a capitalist society (or perhaps in any modern society where things and people are bought and sold for money), if work is not paid for, not given a money value, it is considered valueless. Women began to think more about this fact in the 1960s, and Margaret Benston wrote about it (“The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation”). Women doing housework were people outside the modern economic system, therefore they were like serfs or peasants, she said.
The women who worked in the typical “woman’s job”—secretary, receptionist, typist, salesperson, cleaning woman, nurse—were treated to the full range of humiliations that men in subordinate positions faced at work, plus another set of humiliations stemming from being a woman: gibes at their mental processes, sexual jokes and aggression, invisibility except as sexual objects, cold demands for more efficiency. A commercial “Guide to Clerical Times Standards” printed a question-and-answer column:
Q. I’m a businessman, and my secretary seems to move entirely too slowly. How many times a minute should she be able to open and close a file drawer?
A. Exactly 25 times. Times for other “open and close operations” . . . are .04 minutes for opening or closing a folder, and .026 minutes for opening a standard center desk drawer. If you’re worried about her “chair activity,” clock her against these standards: “Got up from chair,” .033 minutes; “turn in swivel chair,” .009 minutes.
A woman factory worker in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the early seventies, in a medium-sized corporation whose president’s dividends from the corporation in 1970 amounted to $325,000, wrote in an organizing newspaper that 90 percent of the workers in her department were women, but all the supervisors were men.
A few years ago I was suspended for three days from work because my children were still young and I had to take time off when they were sick. . . . They want people who keep quiet, squeal on one another, and are very good little robots. The fact that