Madison Avenue made its money from the women consumers of the post-war 1950s and 60s. Their lucrative advertising pitches continued for decades, successfully keeping women out of the workplace and in the marketplace, buying new products and priding themselves on running their homes with all the resourcefulness of a corporate CEO.
A simple ploy for ensuring that women remained “happy in the home” was to create propaganda that was spread through films of the times and other media to promote the idea that “any truly successful woman was a married woman” and if you dared to venture into the workplace of men you did so at your own risk. In other words…Get a Job, Girls, and Ruin Your Life!
The Best of Everything, 1959-with Hope Lange and Joan Crawford
The 1950s Way of Fostering Female Yin
In American culture, viewed from the vantage point of late 2010s, we tend to think of the roles of women in our society before the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s as being stultified and limited. This is not entirely an accurate view because we have come to CREATE the notion that women have been oppressed just because they are women and that men have tended to control or limit their opportunities and expression just for the sake of brute domination.
Although this notion is decidedly a false impression, it was used very effectively to give the women’s movement traction and create a rift between men and women that would then help bring down the existing power structure and promote what was declared as a new era of “equality.” In actuality, what was at the heart of the issue was not equality for women but MONEY AND POWER.
In terms of the Daoist concept of Yin and Yang or male and female, the polarization of the roles of men and women in society and in the household were pretty well drawn. In most cases, in American society pre-dating the 1960s, men were the bread winners and the women stayed home and tended to running a home and raising children. The male Yang role, as head of the household, was often merely titular in nature and by the 1950s, even though the male of the family earned the money, it was largely the woman of the household that spent it. (See more about the concept of Yin and Yang or male and female roles in society in the book Nobody Wants to be the Girl Anymore: Rediscovering the Power of the Female Yin).
Before their liberation, women were seen by Madison Avenue as being the true consumers in the family and, for the most part, controlled the paychecks of their husbands. Advertisers appealed to the ordinary housewife in order to make her spend the family dollar by making the job of the homemaker equal to that of her husband with her dozens of important decisions to make in order to get the meal on the table and the house spic and span and up to the standards of the family on “Father Knows Best”. The television commercials of the time often demeaned the “man of the house” by making him incompetent and incapable of doing chores like laundry or cooking, and only the savvy housewives with the correct “new and improved” products and detergents were up to the task of running a household and caring for a home and family.
It is important to remember that after World War II many women who had been given jobs of real authority and productivity during the war years had been simply released from their responsibilities when the men came back from the front, and their jobs were given back to the men who had temporarily surrendered them to go to war and protect the country. Many women resented this cavalier dismissal because they had gotten accustomed to the pay and responsibility the war years had provided them. Employers assumed (most certainly erroneously) that the female work force understood their employment was only transitory, and employers made little or no provision to offer any form of career choices to the outgoing female workers and executives.
Many commentaries have stated again and again that the women should have known that surrendering their job back to a returning male would be the ultimate outcome, and some women did. But for many it became simply a case of “how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree”. And even the women who fully understood that their efforts were merely a wartime necessity were nonetheless disappointed and disheartened to return to a life that seemed to put them back in the Dark Ages.
The Workplace is No Place for a Nice Girl
Jobs were for men who had to support families and children, so, as a result, men would naturally get paid more than a woman in the workplace. If it was shown that a woman was a single parent and needed a job to support her children, she was most assuredly given a job. But, in the culture of the 1950s, the working woman was seen as taking a job away from a man who needed to support a family, and she was limited to certain kinds of positions because it was believed that job was only temporary for the woman. It would be a waste of time and resources to train a woman for a high level career job when in a matter of months she would most likely meet an agreeable man who she might marry and might make her new provider and a new father of her children. Such was the thinking of the post war decades.
This might sound demeaning even insulting to an ambitious woman of today, but it was largely the rule that women worked until they could marry or remarry because the state of matrimony and motherhood was what the American culture promoted as the goal of a truly successful woman and the primary goal of any attractive, self-respecting female of the species.
Hollywood of the time reinforced this connubial standard and made it an unquestionably attractive choice to give up the drudge and routine of a loveless job and find a man with whom to settle in and start a family. Madison Avenue advertisers reinforced this stereotype for women, knowing that she controlled the household budget and in the 1950s and 60s the marketing term for the consumer was almost exclusively referred to by the pronoun “she”. The thinking of the time was that it was somehow unnatural for a girl to want a career and working girls like stewardesses, waitresses, secretaries and even nurses were often seen as having questionable morals and were believed to be an easy target for the businessman or salesman. It was acceptable if that salesman asked you to marry him, but if not, you were seen as …” nothing but a cheap little slut”.
One of the best examples of “the working girl is the big loser” is the 1959 film “The Best of Everything”, starring Hope Lange and Stephen Boyd. The film is an indictment of the perils a young career girl might face living in the big city, so, predictably each of the three young women who share a Manhattan apartment struggle with the effects of “modern” relationships. In the film, it is unequivocally shown that the office of the 1950s consists of working girls that are waiting to get married, engaged girls saving up for an apartment in which they can co-habit… and successful but unhappy career women. There are few or no exceptions to this rule and there are virtually no happy women executives because they have presumably made all the wrong choices or somehow refused to want what a woman should want.
Joan Crawford is also in the film, playing an aging, lonely career woman who finds her chance to meet a man has come too late, and she returns to her job after a failed attempt at finding happiness with an aging widower and his two kids. Upon her return she explains, “They needed too much and I found I had nothing left to give.”
Such is the none-too-subtle warning of the film to young working girls…. that if you stay too long in the urban jungle, you will become jaded and hard, undesirable and only fit for illicit and loveless affairs with married men.
From the high-strung actress, Gregg, Suzy Parker, who becomes unhinged and falls to her death from a fire escape while spying on a shallow producer who threw her aside in favour of a less clingy and neurotic actress, to the small-town-girl, played by Dianne Baker who endures the obligatory unwanted pregnancy, the working girls of the fifties are shown to run a gauntlet of shame and disappointment because they choose to hold down a job rather than marry and raise a family.
It is the heroine of the film, Caroline, played by Hope Lange, who finally chooses the man over her job as an editor at a prestigious publishing house and, in the final sequence, removes her hat as a gesture that she no longer has the need to identify as a business executive. She chooses to invest in the hearth and home and buys the products and commodities that Madison Avenue and the film’s producers insist she must.
There is a bit of heavy-handed foreshadowing early in the film when Hope Lange’s Caroline first meets Stephen Boyd as a book editor, Mike Rice. Over the obligatory cocktail that serves as the urban underpinning of sociability, Mike advises Caroline to: “work for six months or a year and prove to yourself what you need to, then get out and marry the med student or law student and love ever after… don’t get caught.” But Caroline has been to an exclusive college and can handle Mister Shalimar, the editor and chief with the roving hands and worn out compliments. She has her sights set on making her own way and being independent. This is a very credible and believable state of mind to us of the 2010s, but in the 1950s that kind of talk sent a mild shock wave of disapproval through most of the movie going public.
Playboys and Dirty Old Men
Films of the time depicted male business executives as philandering predators that prey on the young women who are new to the game and circle the water cooler pinching bottoms and proffering dinner invitations after late evenings of unnecessary dictation. These men are all about sex and tempt the unwary young females in the office with dreams of a better job, a possible marriage or simply a mink coat. In 1950s terms, once you had sex you were supposed to get married and any man that broke this rule and lured a poor girl into bed without marriage was seen as a brute and a very bad man. It is interesting from the vantage point of sixty years later to see that the entire responsibility for the unwanted pregnancy, or the suicide following a break up after a relationship was consummated, fell almost entirely on the man… most often seen as if the male was entirely in control and the woman was the “poor girl” who had been maneuvered into the sexual act but somehow had no responsibility for its outcome.
The cultural dichotomy here is that at the same time the idea of marriage and home is being glamourised and extolled to women, men of the era were inundated with popular pulp fiction magazines in the ilk of Soldier of Fortune that objectified women as sex objects and promoted the masculine mantras of “take what you want” and “she really wants it”. Even higher-toned magazines like Esquire and Playboy, at the time, depicted sexuality as a kind of game. Men had to learn to be smooth and forceful because the women folk were just waiting with their engines revving.
Such is the threatening propaganda behind the 1950s morality of “The Best of Everything” and it is only after Caroline sees the tragedy and unhappiness that befalls her roommates and empathizes with the plight of the lonely Amanda that she “comes to her senses”, and conforming to Mike’s warning, surrenders to his love and protection and then strolls off arm in arm in the final scene, hat in hand.
Hollywood was instrumental in leading women back into the home after the war with films like “Mildred Pierce”, which won Joan Crawford an Academy Award. In the film the character Mildred Pierce shows us the heartbreak and loneliness of a woman who claws her way to the top of a life in business only to discover that she is has not enough “woman” left to keep her man, and who also suffers the indignity of an ungrateful daughter who loathes her for her apparent hardness and lack of feminine charm.
The Valley of the Dolls, 1967- with Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke
and Sharon Tate
Same Story- Different Ending
With the advent of the 1960s and the women’s movement well underway, a film like the 1967 adaption of the searing Jacqueline Susann novel “Valley of the Dolls” follows basically the same theme as “The Best of Everything “ but with a decidedly different ending. Once again it is the story of three girls… the clever beauty from the good school, Anne Welles, played by Peyton Place star, Barbara Parkins; the up-and-coming singer, Neely O’Hara, played by Patty Duke, and Sharon Tate as Jennifer, the body-beautiful with no talent.
Again it is a story of ambitious young women trying to make their way in the business world of New York City and the glitzy falseness of Hollywood.
Brainy Anne Welles is discovered working in a New York talent agent’s office by an advertising executive who then makes her the spokeswoman for a national cosmetics line and dubs her the “Gillian Girl”. Her climb to the top is easy and it allows her the perspective to be the narrator of the story and remain the stabilizing influence throughout the film for her girlfriends who struggle with depression and addiction to alcohol and pills. Nonetheless, Anne is in love with a dashing New Yorker whom she met at the agency, and their relationship continues across both coasts as their careers rise and take shape.
Once again the women are lured into sex by an array of exciting men, and Anne succumbs to the wooing of the agent Lyon Burke, played by actor Paul Burke. The difference between the relationships of the 1950s and the 1960s is that now the woman is less a victim of the sexual encounter and the lovemaking is decidedly consensual. What does remain from the “Old School” thinking and morality is that the man is still seen as a cad and a bastard if he does not want to get married within weeks of the first penetration. With all the lip service to liberation and truly a new “improved” role for women on the screen, the old propaganda still remained… namely that women needed to find the right man to marry and create a home.
In the film, the Patty Duke character, Neely O’Hara, climbs to the top of the charts as a pop singer only to destroy her talent and career with pills and alcohol. She alienates her husbands and friends and is last seen in the film an incoherent mess, lying in any alley, shouting her own name and lamenting her irreversible mistakes.
In the last scene of the film, world-weary Anne returns to her pristine home in Connecticut, having left the man in her life, Lyon Burke, because he was not what she wanted and his marriage proposal came too late. By 1967 the agenda was not about getting him to marry you, but rather about finding the man you, as a woman, wanted to marry.
Feminist Gloria Steinem is famous for saying: “The women of our generation have become the men we wanted to marry”. This statement perfectly embodies the new philosophy for women…. not what he wants but what she wants. Women no longer strove to be the women he wanted to marry but rather to find a man that reflected what the woman wanted in a mate and partner. In “The Valley of the Dolls” the men are no longer “bad men” for not wanting to marry or for treating a girl in an unacceptable way, but are now merely the “wrong man”, and therefore nothing more than a disappointment.
But how was Madison Avenue’s hold on the purse strings of the women of America affected by the rise of the women’s movement and true liberation from the role of the domestic little wife? IT WASN’T AT ALL!
With men comfortably returned to their positions of power, after the war, advertisers no longer needed to make the home the attractive choice for the discerning woman. It could now approach a whole new generation of up-and-coming young women with products made just for them. The focus was no longer on selling detergent and cleaners for the home and family but on new products that women would now need in the workplace…”L’eggs” panty hose, “Charlie”(note the new masculine very Yang name) cologne and “Virgina Slims” cigarettes became the new best sellers. Women also began to compete with men in the world of fast and easy sexual fantasy and new “women’s” magazines like Viva and Playgirl began to appear on the newsstands. Women now had a real taste of personal and professional freedom and Madison Avenue would continue to thrive by waving the bright new standard…”It’s all about you baby” with memorable slogans like the L’Oreal catch phrase…”Because you’re worth it”.