Woman's Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present
Rothman, Sheila M.
BOOK REVIEW Woman's Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present Sheila M. Rothman / Basic Books / $12.50 Constance Horner At is a stark, awful fact that as an...
...The women of the Progressive era supported a new concept of woman-as promoter of maternal -istic state action on behalf of the poor...
...Only the market force of an expanded need for office workers, department store clerks, and teachers permitted access to jobs, thereby instituting a workplace stereotype which endured until recently as an idea and which continues for millions as a fact...
...Virtuous womanhood" also had public possibilities...
...Continuing the habit of club life formed in college, women embarked upon programs of social action as "Protestant nuns" attacking the problems of city life through organizations like the WCTU, the YWCA, and rescue societies...
...Millennia old and therefore powerful, they endure through changes in the mere surface arrangements of life...
...Even educated women have not, at each shift in elite perspective, sloughed off the ideals of former times...
...In the fifties, the suburban developments, with their "family rooms" and large master bedrooms-architectural fantasy-monuments to the resumption of private satisfaction-became instead the breeding-ground of bored and anxious womanhood...
...Lest children be, in the words of a leading psychologist, "over-kissed," their development was to be placed in the hands of the child expert (particularly in the nursery school), who would correct any domestic pathology through therapeutic experience away from home...
...Good instincts and private philanthropy were supplanted by a commitment to sociology and to scientifically-designed, state-supported institutions (settlement houses, hospitals, schools...
...In marriage, contraception was viewed as an invitation to male lust (there being no female lust among the middle class in those days...
...As Jane Addams put it, "city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional [and now educated] housekeepers, have not been consulted...
...A person is, after all, the sum of the masters riding her soul from within...
...Divorce and inflation make it necessary for some to overwork...
...They come to patronize-even hate-the women who have chosen to do whatever they have been constrained to forgo...
...At the same time, however, the overwhelming opinion of the medical profession held women to be neurasthenic, and thus in need of protection from the dangerously strenuous life of the workplace or the college...
...For example, in establishing public health clinics for preventive medicine outside the domain of the private physician, so as to expand the role of the state in health care, reformers elicited a counter-reaction from the medical profession...
...Moreover, she seems to exult, albeit grimly, in the transformation of the role of women to that of a vested interest group...
...They still want to cherish, console, and inspirit their children, love their husbands as more than comrades, create beauty and order in their homes, and reach out to the needs of their communities...
...In yet another manic shift on the subject of "woman's place," the sociologists of the twenties, disappointed with the results of reform, turned their attention to the then- as now-dissolving family...
...Their discovery, not to put too fine a point on it, was -not enough sex...
...For "work," read "career"-the prescription was designed primarily for educated women...
...Married women especially are as subject today to the tyranny of culturally-imposed images of their "proper place" as they were in the supposedly more oppressive past...
...And for women these masters are, even after a decade or so of fine-tuning, in ultimate conflict with one another...
...It is an unhappy- although not unrewarding-struggle, not yet decided, contrary to Rothman's suggestion, in some final felicity called "personhood...
...In evaluating the impact of "educated womanhood" on social policy in this period, Rothman introduces a major theme of her work-the unintended negative consequences of reform in education, the workplace, and especially health care...
...Late 19th-century technological developments (electricity, municipal water systerns, apartment houses) freed women from domestic drudgery and encouraged a stimulating urban residential concentration...
...Doctors transformed their practices to encompass clinic functions...
...This view also demanded social and sexual equality with men as a right, not a benefit for society...
...Many are trying, with difficulty, to do it all...
...But for others the reason is cultural...
...An the Progressive era, this ideal of personal virtue was superseded by an ideology of "educated womanhood...
...With college sororities as mating-game boot camps, women were to stick the family back together with romantic love...
...Public care collapsed, and physicians assumed control of new areas of their patients' lives, such as pregnancy and child-development...
...But subtle as Rothman's analysis is, in one crucial respect it cruelly simplifies...
...Women's suffrage was advocated not in the name of equality, but in the hope that it would strengthen reform, especially against the retrograde ward boss...
...A wife's emotional energy was to be devoted to her husband, not her children...
...Her book is valuable because it offers a rare commodity in a polemical and myth-making time: the honest, judicious presentation of information-a veritable "true historie" of women in the family, at work, and in public life, both as subjects of social norms and as policymakers themselves...
...Women's self-esteem now depends not only upon a clean house, well-fed, well-clad, and educated children, a lively social and community life, and enhanced sexual experience, but also upon self-developConstance Horner lives in Washington, D.C...
...ment and the garnering of an income, the latest sine qua non of social respectability...
...And, of course, now they want rich intellectual lives, meaningful careers, and paychecks...
...men, rapacious and animalistic-and charged a woman, in the words of the Women's Christian Temperance Union motto, to "bless and brighten every place she enters...
...This schematic review can only hint at the complexity of Woman's Proper Place...
...Spurred by an expanding job market, and subsequently by the model of the civil-rights movement, feminists adopted a new ideal, woman as "person"-that is, woman defined as valuable in terms not of her relationship to a family, but of her relationship to a career...
...World War II sent them to work, but that was supposed to be a temporary patriotic sacrifice...
...Sheila Rothman, who would reject this characterization of women's current situation, has written a fascinating history of American societal assumptions about woman's role...
...Enter Betty Friedan and other early new feminists, with a prescription for self-esteem and identity through paid work outside the home...
...to the ignorant, miserable, and the vicious," to elevate health care and morals (not wages...
...Old-style reformers, fearful of the implications of Margaret Sanger's movement for personal pleasure at the expense of political action, fought the dispensing of birth-control information through public clinics, thereby confining the new freedom to those with access to private doctors and enhancing the "medicalization of sex...
...As wife-companions, they would abjure the meeting hall and the nursery, and advance emotional-erotic delectation in the bedroom...
...The first, "virtuous womanhood," dichotomized sensibility by sex-women were delicate, nurturing, and civilized...
...For the first time," writes Rothman, "it appeared that women's interests, family interests, and societal interests were in conflict.'' The contemporary family, she says, perceives itself as a battleground in which "every member should have...its own Clausewitz.'' Rothman foresees only further exacerbation of this conflict, as women reject calls to suppress their personal needs in the interests of any social grouping...
...Ironically, they have begun to run the classic rat race just when many men have fallen into a mere gentle jog toward material acquisition...
...The Depression kept women at home as effectively as the ideology of the twenties...
...In decrying this hegemony of doctors, then and now, Rothman joins a current, more general attack on the power of the helping professions over those they serve...
...In the words of the president of one charity organization, "the educated and happy and good are to give some of their time...
...Vassar College developed a regimen of diet, exercise, and rest to guard against the putative dangers of mental activity...
...BOOK REVIEW Woman's Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present Sheila M. Rothman / Basic Books / $12.50 Constance Horner At is a stark, awful fact that as an unintended result of the most recent women's movement in American history, wives from the middle class on down are more exhausted than at any time since they had to wash clothes by hand...
...Sexual expression, oddly, was considered incompatible with maternity...
...Rothman identifies four major ideals of womanhood which, at least for the middle class with whom her book explicitly deals, replaced one another from the post-Civil War period to the present...
...Some defensively deny the value of what they cannot manage to do, either within or without the home...
Vol. 12 • March 1979 • No. 3
