Essay: Equal opportunity for women following World War II

A realization of a movement towards equal opportunity of women took place against the backdrop of the post World War II expansion, in which growing educational and job opportunities alongside a tight-knit construction of the family served to re-define American society. The participation of black women in activist groups such as the Black Panther Party coupled with their entrance in the work force, as described by Donna Jean Murch in her text Living for the City, allowed for the social mobilization of African-American women and provision of their own households. However, this was complicated by the concept of intersectionality which placed the burden of selecting their race or gender on black women in the fight for civil rights. Untroubled by intersectionality, white women faced the challenge of reversing the postwar societal norm of the male supported housewife chronicled by Elaine Tyler May in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. Feeling trapped by societal norms, white women struggled to reevaluate the stigma that there was un-Americanism tied to the independent self-supportive woman. In this essay I will discuss the methods of domesticity, entrance in to the labor force, and political activism through which women across racial lines, though differing in their levels of success, shared aspirations of self-determination in their lives.
The postwar period brought economic prosperity and an embrace of household family life, especially for black women. Through precedents set by slavery and the Jim Crow era, many black women were forced to work in white households preparing meals, cleaning, and taking care of the white family’s children—taking on the role of the “Mammy.” The work of the Mammy was viewed as reimagined female slave labor where the black woman remained powerless under white superiority yet acted as a consenting woman. However, contradicting the discriminatory stereotypes of inferiority and primitiveness which characterized black people under slavery and Jim Crow, the Mammy was defined by her nurturing care taking abilities, support, selflessness, and strength.
The economic benefits of World War II not only put black men in the workforce, which allowed for ample earnings and wealth accumulation, but removed black women from white homes and placed them in factories and shipyards. After the war was over black women returned to the household, but this time it was their own. This granted African Americans the possibility of family life and domesticity in their own homes. For black women domesticity defined independence and freedom, as the household served as a refuge from white racist America. Having control and power within their own home allowed black families and especially black women to “live with dignity, pride, and comfort” and define for herself, what it meant to be a black woman in the family.
In comparison, the post war ideologies of female domestic containment within the home proved oppressive for white women. This contradicted the superior male view that women were emancipated in the home, whereas men argued that they felt oppressed, alienated and subordinated by the corporate workforce structures that emerged after World War II. The reality of the matter was, in fact, that white women found the expectations of being a housewife as exploitative.  Prior to the war, the Great Depression created opportunities for a number of single women to become independent  by means of entering the labor force. In turn, working women were not only able to be self-reliant, but could support their families as well. Nevertheless, the postwar ideology corrupted the “strong, autonomous, competent, and career-oriented image” of the woman and shaped it to become that of a housewife who lives to make a man’s life easier. In this era women were to “cultivate looks and physical charms to become more sexually attractive housewives and consumers under the capitalist system” in order to submit to domestic ideals of the wife, not woman.
White women struggled to seek emancipation from the home and independence as a method to achieve self-determination because their fight was thought to contradict quintessential American superiority which rested on the home, distinct gender roles and capitalism under the context of the Cold War. Even though the employment of women—who were once housewives—spread, their earnings and “domestic authority remained secondary” to their “bread-winner husbands.” The World War II era did, however, give women a new status of recognition for their successful work and practices on the home front. And yet, in the shadow of recognition came male superiority telling white women to remain humble and in the home to uphold the domestic discourse and mitigate the consumerist and capitalist lifestyle. Domesticity proved to be nearly intractable as a mechanism for the self-determination of white women during the postwar era, however, the domestic containment ideology brought a spark to fire that was female revolution—for white and black women.
Out of the postwar era in the 1960’s emerged a political consciousness that, rooted in the education of black youth, laid the foundation the well-renowned Black Panther Party (BPP) in which black women played important leadership roles in the pursuit of self-defining the black american woman. Three years in to the Black Panther Party’s founding, Black women made up 60 percent Party’s leadership due to the imprisonment or murder of its male members and chapters began spreading across the country headed by educated and experienced women activists. The career of Ericka Huggins exemplifies the black female activist as she joined the southern California chapter of the BPP because the West Coast characterized new extensive and inclusive possibilities that brought to the forefront the most critical political issues of the sixties. Following a racially charged shoot out at a southern California university Huggins and her infant daughter moved to the east coast where she established a liberation school rooted in the concept that “children should learn not what to think but how to think.” This educational ideal has transmitted through education systems and serves as a foundation for the all important skill of critical thinking.
Though Huggins was a pioneer in her representation of black female power and leadership, her advancements were also met with unprecedented government oppression. Arrested for conspiracy charges due to her activist ideals, Huggins spent almost two years in jail before charges were dropped against her for lack of evidence. Her case marked a pivotal juncture for black women. It exemplified that female Panthers, and black women alike, faced the “same brutal state repression as their male counterparts”  due to the “incarceration and physical abuse at the hands of authorities.” Furthermore, Huggins’ story elucidates the dilemma black women faced (and still face) in their experience with intersectionality. In the fight for civil rights, black women often chose alliances with black men rather than white women (fighting for gender equality) because racism was a more immediate, violent, and consequential aspect of the black female experience. In conjunction with selecting race over gender, the involvement of black women in African-American associations provided for an exploration of the black consciousness. Black women sought a variety of mechanisms to eradicate crossover, in other words to not let whiteness define blackness, for example adopting their natural hair as their hair wear of choice instead of straightening it. Even in the face of institutional barriers and the challenges of intersectionality, small acts such as wearing their hair natural combined with big acts of political activism allowed black women the opportunity to make progress towards complete success in self-determination.
White women, seeking liberation from the constraints of the domestic household, could focus their energy exclusively on a feminist agenda under the Civil Rights Movement. When white women in the 1960’s were questioned about their marriage many felt resentment from their husbands for the desire to pursue a career, while others felt daunted by the limited opportunities for women to excel. Even if women were unhappy in their marriages, they would try “to make the best of the situation and [focus] on what she had gained” as a housewife. However, after reflecting on the reality of their situation, many of these women found that “professionalized homemaking was not enough to keep their minds alive” and the consensus on their motherhood and female experience left them wanting to leave a different legacy for their children. Betty Friedan, a political activist and journalist, “enabled [these] discontented white homemakers across the country to find their voices.” Her critique of domesticity urged women to get educated, pursue careers, and resurrect the opportunities of female self-reliance and self-definition that were alive prior to World War II; in other words, her book ignited an emergence of female political activism.
In the prewar era, white female leaders such as Margaret Sanger paved the way for women to define themselves and their families with the birth control movement which initiated a force of women to be reckoned with in the postwar period. Birth control eliminated the fear of pregnancy, contributed to women’s self-satisfaction and channeled female power. This allowed for women who aspired to have a family to possess control in family planning, and for other women to have a say over their body’s destiny. The feminist and socialist roots of birth control also served as bedrock for further means of societal and political change, for example the “Women Strike for Peace” organized by postwar middle class white women. The strike took place in late 1961 and its participants were comprised of fifty thousand ordinary looking American women. Since the movement’s socialist ideals were promoted against the back drop of the Cold War the leaders of the strike were called under questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Before the committee, these women turned America’s domestic ideology against the assumptions of the cold war and spoke as mothers with the desire for their daughters “‘to grow up in a society where she will have a comfortable and important place.’”  Having achieved self-realization, these white women and white mother’s found the method of political activism to be particularly liberating; and, even if they could not entirely accomplish self-determination their participation in the feminist movement would allow their daughters to reach this aspiration.
During the postwar era, the domestic and homogenous principles of white America were what shaped the dominant economic and political institutions of the nation. However, through domestic emancipation, be it inside the home or outside, driven and career oriented women across racial lines participated in political activism to remold the institutions that had governed their lives.  Black women were successful in achieving self-definition in the domestic sphere by, instead of working as the “Mammy” in white households, they were able to for the betterment of their own home. Though plagued with discrimination outside of the home at the hands of institutional authority, accompanied with intersectionality and the refusal of crossover, black women achieved positions of leadership in the Black Power Movement that have successfully left a legacy of opportunity and accomplishment. On the other hand, white women found emancipation outside of the home, and their active participation in politics advocated for the demand of professional careers, equal pay and “railed against the sexual double standard” that governed society. This political movement gained momentum and set precedent for mother’s daughter and the self-determinant women women of the future. In spite of their fundamental differences in race, black women and white women shared common alliances and agreement in their aspiration of self-determination. Black women achieved self-definition in terms of blackness, a confidence that spilled over in to the feminist movement lead by white women. White women held hope for equality to the standard of man but they were less successful in self-determination due to the patriarchal society they lived in and we continue to exist in today; nevertheless, black women and white women alike laid a strong path towards redefining the norms of American society.