Dissecting the 1950s Housewife

Analysis of the 1950s Housewife

In studying social constructions in United States History, myths[1] are an important facet of American popular culture that depict the social climates for that era. This is because they are defined as stories that stem from a society’s repeated prominent ideology. For example, by studying the creation of the American myth, the 1950s Housewife, the social constructions of gender roles in the 1950s became more apparent because the myth exists as a direct reflection of the majority population’s ideology. The social historians, Omi and Winant[2], discuss the importance of a racial identity in determining where the identity of an individual rests within the greater part of the society. Because of this unwritten societal rule, Americans over their history have unconsciously established myth-making a natural and integral part of society in order to institute the bounds for necessary racial identities. In the case of the 1950s Housewife, young women were raised with this ideal and goal in mind.

The book When Your Marry by Duvall and Hill was an instructional manual for women on how to execute the wife’s position as a dutiful companion to the husband. On top of running a tip-top household the wife was responsible for balancing their life at home (which is identified as the women’s sphere). The happiness of the entire family was dependent on her and her abilities as a mother and housewife. The novel emphasizes that those women who make excellent housewives do not normally good companions. However, in no way does this give women a choice to either fill the companion or housewife role. Women are still encouraged to run a good home and to have pleasant personalities fit for a loving relationship. A popular culture depiction that hit the masses in the fifties of the ideal 1950s Housewife myth was June Cleaver from the show Leave it to Beaver[3]. Mrs. Cleaver was able to encompass all that the training manual When You Marry recommended, as if she was the model after which it was created. Her calm and cool composure never waivered as she was invested in her children’s and husband’s lives outside of her own work. She was a woman who understood the complexities and the art of balance in the home and therefore has continued to be a textbook representation of the ideal 1950s housewife.

In a retrospective view on the 1950s housewife the film Mona Lisa Smile depicts the journey of a socially rebellious professor at Wellesley College from 1953-1954. In this film, the professor Katherine Watson (played by Julia Roberts) finds herself surrounded by students who exemplify the ideals in When You Marry. The institution of Wellesley is depicted for its leniency towards newly married students and has traditions that center around the promise of marriage and child bearing. Watching this film fifty years after the era that it reflects further emphasizes the difference in social constructions between then and now. Although the woman’s role in 1953 differs greatly from that of a 21^st-century woman, women still are shown unfairness in the office and discrimination in daily life. It is no surprise that the myth of the 1950s housewife still resonates in today’s culture in America. It has been woven into our society and without it our society would probably enter a state of instability.

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[1] Slotkin (p.5) - “Myths are stories drawn from a society’s history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society’s ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness – with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain.”

[2] Omi and Winant (pgs. 21-2) Race and Ethnicity

[3] Billingsley, Barbara, perf. Leave It to Beaver. CBS. Fall-Winter 1957-1963.
Netflix. Web. 18 Oct. 2009.

Closest Thing to Brainwashing without Being Brainwashing

Imagine you are sitting at your computer staring at a black screen with colored words flashing in front of your eyes. The program demands that you press the letter "i" for right and "e" for left. Every time that you get something wrong a little red "x" pops up mocking your failure. However, when the green "failure" shows up, you're supposed to press either "i" or "e". Now, tell me that your head would not be spinning when you conclude this dreadful IAT session.

This was BY FAR the worst internet quiz and/or test that I have taken. Namely, because it messes with your brain in the most absurd ways. The program is designed to be "low-error." Whoever wrote the software was attempting to lessen favoritism by testing each category twice and switching the sides of "good" and "bad". To better understand how this testing works you can subject yourself to the closest thing to brainwashing that you can get to without actually being brainwashed by the following link; click at your own risk: http://www.understandingprejudice.org/demos/, https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html. Enough ranting.

These IATs tend to give results based upon first-instinct reaction which is generally imposed on an individual during their childhood. For instance, I probably received a result of being inclined to Christianity because I was raised in a Christian environment and have become more familiar with Christainity over Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam. These results could also just be pure rubbish.

The first activity, http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-htm, asks to sort images into various races. When I performed this task, I failed miserably. I think this is because the people that were pictured in this activity were not what I think of when I picture the various races. The people in this activity seemed to have uncommon or mixed ethnicity that made a great point on how races are so diverse and arbitrarily constructed.

If I were testing gender, race, or religious preference I would test based upon reactions to certain circumstances. I would also use more "user-friendly" programs that would make it easier for the user to focus on the task at hand and not the difficulty surrounding the operations of the task.

What Gender Am I?

I recently took two gender quizzes online, which was more difficult to find than I originally thought. Many of the quizzes that I observed used VERY stereotypical and very often, from my experiences, not true assumptions about men and women. In one of the quizzes that I took, the more interesting of the two, I found that the author chose what is either natural, soft, gentle, or light to be connected to what is "female." The most intriguing aspect of this quiz was that it graded you based upon your percentile and how you compared to other people who take this test. For example, I responded "chocolate cake" over "apple pie." Apparently, 73% of women who have taken this quiz responded with the same answer as I, chocolate cake. The way that the website analyzed the results persuaded me into believing that there could be some sliver of truth in this quiz, although I'm still skeptical. It does intrigue me that these results, while contrived from stereotypes, did in fact confirm some stereotypes. For instance, women prefer comedies over horror movies. These quizzes were actually the first that I have taken that have given me a "female"/feminine result rather than male.

Credit:
http://www.bellaonline.com/misc/quiz/female
http://quizfarm.com/quizzes/new/TristanWagner/should-you-be-male-or-female/

Survey Link

To see the survey discussed in my prior post, please follow the link below.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=DsBCV_2f_2f5glmF_2bH74PZFQpQ_3d_3d

A Closer Look At Gender (via Survey)

In the pursuit of discovering how our society defines male and female gender types, my classmates and I created surveys. In the process of creating mine I had difficulty deciding how I was going to word my questions. After deliberation, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to see how our society's stereotypes of men and women are reflected and possibly if they can be proven not true. I decided to use well known stereotypes like: men don't listen, women are neat, men are tactile, women notice changes, etc... After having 8 teenagers fill out this survey (4 women, 4 men) I was not surprised by the results I received.
The results show that for many of the stereotypical characteristics of males and females that I tested only 3 showed any significance (please note this survey was not analyzed statistically, the sample group was too small). The following were trends that I observed in the results:
Q2. Males vary in their ability to notice a change; females almost always notice a change.
Q3. Females like romantic comedies, males like thrillers.
Q4. Males generally don't like the mall.
My lack of surprise in the results most likely stems from my hypothesis that I formulated prior to making the survey. When looking at social constructs, especially stereotypical ones, there should be some sort of trend mimicking that construct, or else it would not exist in the first place. However, in looking at these trends I could not help but notice that many of the responses reflected the participant's personalities (I know all of the people that responded to my survey). This begs the question, are survey's like this one accurate in determining a person's gender? I would say no. I believe these surveys or quizzes show how an individual's personality "fits" within a specified gender construct. For an example, 3 of the participants got a score of zero, which I classified as "androgynous." Also, one of the females that I surveyed received a classification of "masculine," when in fact she is female. These results represent how stereotypes are nothing more than just that, stereotypes. I feel they are necessary in creating culture-wide interpretations of a characteristic, like being male or female, which allows for gender constructs to exist. However, these constructs should not be taken as an over-branching classification, individual personalities must be accounted for.