The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [226]
28. See Philip E. Jacob, Changing Values in College, New York, 1957.
29. Margaret Mead, “New Look at Early Marriages,” interview in U.S. News and World Report, June 6, 1960.
Chapter 8. THE MISTAKEN CHOICE
1. See the United Nations Demographic Yearbook, New York, 1960, pp. 99—118 and pp. 476—490; p. 580. The annual rate of population increase in the U.S. in the years 1955—59 was far higher than that of other Western nations, and higher than that of India, Japan, Burma, and Pakistan. In fact, the increase for North America (1.8) exceeded the world rate (1.7). The rate for Europe was .8; for the USSR 1.7; Asia 1.8; Africa 1.9; and South America 2.3. The increase in the underdeveloped nations was, of course, largely due to medical advances and the drop in death rate; in America it was almost completely due to increased birth rate, earlier marriage, and larger families. For the birth rate continued to rise in the U.S. from 1950 to 1959, while it was falling in countries like France, Norway, Sweden, the USSR, India and Japan. The U.S. was the only so-called “advanced” nation, and one of the few nations in the world where, in 1958, more girls married at ages 15 to 19 than at any other age. Even the other countries which showed a rise in the birth rate—Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Chile, New Zealand, Peru—did not show this phenomenon of teenage marriage.
2. See “The Woman with Brains (continued),” New York Times Magazine, January 17, 1960, for the outraged letters in response to an article by Marya Mannes, “Female Intelligence—Who Wants It?” New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1960.
3. See National Manpower Council, Womanpower, New York, 1957. In 1940, more than half of all employed women in the U.S. were under 25, and one-fifth were over 45. In the 1950’s peak participation in paid employment occurs among young women of 18 and 19—and women over 45, the great majority of whom hold jobs for which little training is required. The new preponderance of older married women in the working force is partly due to the fact that so few women in their twenties and thirties now work, in the U.S. Two out of five of all employed women are now over 45, most of them wives and mothers, working part time at unskilled work. Those reports of millions of American wives working outside the home are misleading in more ways than one: of all employed women, only one-third hold full-time jobs, one-third work full time only part of the year—for instance, extra saleswomen in the department stores at Christmas—and one-third work part time, part of the year. The women in the professions are, for the most part, that dwindling minority of single women; the older untrained wives and mothers, like the untrained 18-year-olds, are concentrated at the lower end of the skill ladder and the pay scales, in factory, service, sales and office work. Considering the growth in the population, and the increasing professionalization of work in America, the startling phenomenon is not the much-advertised, relatively insignificant increase in the numbers of American women who now work outside the home, but the fact that two out of three adult American women do not work outside the home, and the increasing millions of young women who are not skilled or educated for work in any profession. See also Theodore Caplow, The Sociology of Work, 1954, and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles—Home and Work, London, 1956.
4. Edward Strecker, Their Mother’s Sons, Philadelphia and New York, 1946, pp. 52—59.
5. Ibid., pp. 31 ff.
6. Farnham