"Crypto-Feminism"

The policy initiatives of the Kennedy years had taken place against a backdrop of widening activity by women, continuing the trend that had intensified after World War II. Between

1960 and 1965 the number of bachelor's and first professional degrees earned by women increased 57 percent, compared with only a 25 percent increase for men. By 1968 women were earning about one-third of all master's degrees and 13 percent of doctorates. The more educated the woman, the more likely she was to work outside the home, and by 1968 women represented 37 percent of the labor force, up 3 percent since 1960. The increase for married women was even more significant: in 1960, 30.6 percent of married women worked; by 1968, that figure had grown to 37 percent.^[2]

What these figures did not reveal, however, was that, relative to white men, white women had declined in economic position throughout the postwar period. Of full-time workers in 1966, women earned only 58.2 percent of the income of men, down from 63.3 percent in 1956. Women with college degrees, a growing proportion of women workers, were still earning less than men with only high school educations. As more and more college-educated women entered the labor market, they encountered opportunities far narrower than their male peers enjoyed.^[3]

Working women did not suffer only economic disadvantages; they also paid an emotional price for joining the workforce. Throughout the fifteen-year postwar period, publications both popular and scholarly suggested that American women who assumed nonconventional roles were neglecting their families or losing their femininity. The country continued to prefer that women not openly challenge men professionally or intellectually. By the early 1960s, journalists were describing a "prevailing malaise" among women as a result of the conflict between women's achievements and traditional norms. Marya Mannes protested in the New York Times Magazine that intellectual women were victimized because American men were uncomfortable with them, and an essay in the Commonweal lamented that an honest, intelligent woman had inevitably to become a social rebel because American society did not really approve of forceful, thinking women. In October 1962, the editors of Harper's published a special supplement in recognition of the "important changes" that had taken place in the roles of women. In this issue, such authors as psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued that women who had been educated

like men experienced frustration when confronted after graduation by limitations for intellectual expression. Harper's called the nascent disquiet "crypto-feminism."^[4]

The discussion in the popular press of the plight of the American woman culminated in February 1963 in the publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. In evaluating information garnered from a questionnaire sent in 1957 to her 1942 classmates at Smith College, Friedan had detected a "problem that has no name," which displayed itself in the breakdown of the mental and physical health of college-educated homemakers who were living through their husbands and children. Friedan argued that women needed creative work of their own and that women's life plans had to integrate marriage and motherhood with independent work in order for them to be healthy individuals.^[5]

The "problem that has no name," "malaise," and "crypto-feminism" all referred to the strain between customary expectations for women and the changing circumstances of American life. Greater numbers of highly educated women, believing it to be best for their families if they did not work for pay, found themselves stultified by the lack of intellectually stimulating outlets while they were home. Then they faced three potentially useful decades after their children had grown, but often lacked skills and experience to permit an easy transition to the workplace. Those women with children who were forced to work by the exigencies of a consumer society discovered severely circumscribed possibilities for employment and advancement and in addition suffered criticism for leaving their families ostensibly without proper care.^[6]

Yet women did not, in the early 1960s, organize themselves to alleviate such difficulties. As Jo Freeman has pointed out, "Social strain does not create social movements; it only creates the potential for movements." The "social strain" described had in fact characterized the entire postwar period, leading finally to the call for a national commission on women. That commission's report, American Women, now served as a focus of discussion for the state commissions set up to emulate the national group, a nationwide system of commissions on women that, as

Freeman described it, created a "climate of expectations" for potential action.^[7]

American Women followed the appearance of Friedan's book by only six months, and the reaction to it, in both demand for copies and continuing formation of state commissions, indicated that the chord struck by these publications had wide reverberations. By October 1964 the government had distributed eighty-three thousand copies of American Women (which had also been translated into three languages: Japanese, Swedish, and Italian), and in 1965 Charles Scribner's Sons published a commercial version edited by Margaret Mead.^[8]