The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [32]
A few months before their wedding, my mom received a gift from one of my father’s friends, a book entitled The Pastor’s Wife. The friend had added this inscription: “To the future Mrs. Greenfield, That she may know her job better.” The norms of what it meant to be a pastor’s wife had been written down in book form.
My mom recently pulled this book off her shelf and sent it to me, and it does indeed read like a rule book.
On marriage and motherhood: “If a girl says, ‘Marriage does not interest me’ either she is not normal or she is ‘a gay deceiver’! Every normal girl looks forward . . . to having a home of her own, and to becoming a mother. The Creator made her so . . . At the heart of every parsonage he would have a woman who would rather live as a wife and mother than occupy any other position on earth.” And “a Christian woman excels most of all as a mother,” but be warned—“never should the wife make the husband feel that he has taken a second place.”8
On housekeeping: “The first duty of the minister’s wife is to make the home attractive. The same holds true for any woman. The wife of a farmer or a mechanic, a doctor or a merchant, looks on the home as her chief opportunity to do good in the world.” More specifically: “I urge that you keep the bathroom immaculate day and night . . . How could a woman say her prayers if she knew that the bathroom needed a day’s work to make it fit for human beings?”9 (Now I understand why my mom would often stay up late at night doing housework.)
The norms expressed in these rules were powerful to my mother, and women who were not pastors’ wives had books of their own, or books of general admonition such as Emily Post’s Etiquette. Women were expected to focus on the home even if they had to find an outside job. They neglected their roles in the home at their peril, and few marriages could fairly be described as equal. The norms limited men as well, in ways that only later became clear to those of us who wanted a greater role in child rearing. Even now, most employers—including my own—provide little or no paternity leave for new fathers, even when maternity leave is generous.
These gender norms were only partly the product of law, but the law always lurked—reinforcing, reflecting, assuming. It was not until 1976 that a court recognized sexual harassment as a legitimate cause of action—before then, women who were sexually harassed at work had no right to sue. If a woman were raped by her husband, most states did not consider it a crime until the 1980s or later.10 Employers who discriminated on the basis of sex were protected by law—it was considered a part of the freedom of contract to base employment decisions on sexual stereotypes. This changed as a matter of federal statute only with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Supreme Court first interpreted the Constitution to invalidate a gender classification only in 1971.11
Rules and norms worked together to enforce cultural limitations. In the early 1970s, our family lived near Louisville when my mother and other female teachers wanted to start wearing pant suits to school. It was both a norm and a rule for teachers to wear skirts and dresses, and before the female teachers could feel comfortable wearing pants, they had to ask for a ruling from the county board of education to permit it. My mother would not have been flogged if she had broken the norm. But absent a board ruling she could have been punished or reprimanded. More precisely, she feared such punishment or reprimand, and that was enough to keep her from wearing pants.
It’s easy to see from the distance of half a century that for many women, the norms defined what was possible and appropriate. In the era when my mother decided to take advantage of her skills and education to get a paying job, she had essentially three choices: secretary, nurse, or teacher. She became