In this essay, I will be exploring what factors affected the social status for the ‘ideal housewives’ in the 1950s. I will be considering the working woman, housing situations, comparing the US to the UK housewife, education and also the evolution of academic thought on the status and importance of housewives and women in society. These factors will enable me to make a clear judgement on the social status of housewives and therefore I will be able to analyze, which of these factors had the largest effect on how they were viewed and how they compared to others in society. Housewives in this time were seen by many to possess a lower social status as their contribution towards society was not necessarily recognized as much as it should have by the general public. This leads to the belief that the 1950s was a hard time for housewives and indeed women across the globe and not just in the United Kingdom and the United States. However, from my research that I will present in this essay, the social status of housewives became higher because key intellectuals started to recognize their contribution to the wider community and also gave legitimacy to a social group that could be seen as being devoid of respect.
During this period, women had the expectation and responsibility of being the primary caregivers, along with maintaining the household using housekeeping and home management skills such as cooking, cleaning and childcare. Housewives were thought of as the backbone of the household and this was seen as their contribution to a fundamentally patriarchal society. Women were often stereotyped and therefore confined to the household. Anything and everything they did must have been approved of by the man of the house, or in accordance to his happiness and preference. This idea could have stemmed from the notion that women were seen as second class citizens, thus empowering men and integrating the expectations of the ‘ideal woman’ within society. Herbert Hoggart was a British literaturist and sociologist who is prolific when looking at studies of British popular culture. Within these studies he mentioned that the mother “was the pivot of the house … she, more than the father holds the family together” (Hoggart, 1957: 37-44), the subtext was that such women were also the pivot of the ‘traditional’ working class identity. This view gives a more favourable representation of how housewives were viewed by intellectuals in society, especially when saying that women were more important than men in the household context. Of course, from using our contextual knowledge of this period, this is not always the view of the general public and that housewives were still very much restricted. Although housewives may have been viewed as important in the household, their contribution towards society was not as prolific as men due to their very nature and their lack of influence on the wider community.
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Furthermore, women were legally defined as property, otherwise known as a ‘chattel’. This meant that from birth women were owned by their father and were ‘given away’ at marriage to the husband and so they became the husbands property and responsibility, which again reinforces the idea that men held ownership over them. Women were considered to be predominantly sexual objects with one of their key responsibilities being to reproduce and create offspring. There was therefore a dependency on their male counterparts. The ideal woman was seen as “the quintessential white, middle-class housewife who stayed at home to rear children, clean the house and bake cookies” (Meyerowitz,1944). This statement somewhat reinforces the ideals that were assigned to women in this post-war era. Betty Freidan was perhaps the first to identify the concept of the ‘ideal woman’. Within her book ‘The Feminine Mystique’, Frieden can be quoted as saying “women could find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love. It denied women a career or any commitment outside the home and narrowed women’s world down to the home, cut her role back to the housewife” (Freidan, 1963). Again, this gives the impression that women were somewhat limited because of
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