20 Harsh Realities 1950s Housewives Faced Behind Closed Doors

In 1956, the median age of a first marriage for women hit a record low of 20.1, according to census data. For decades, high schools had been training American girls for that moment: girls in high school learned how to cook, sew, and budget through classes in home economics. Boys took shop. School had been a runway straight into marriage, not a detour from it.

Before the tract-house suburbs were built, many new couples moved directly into converted military Quonset huts (curved corrugated-metal buildings), or into cramped university-housing barracks provided under the GI Bill. These were emergency measures to deal with a post-war veteran housing crisis. The suburban dream home came later, if ever.

In the 1950s, a married woman could rarely open a checking account, get store credit, or apply for a mortgage without her husband’s signature. No federal law required this, but it was just standard commercial banking practice that went unchallenged for decades. And it stayed that way until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974.

In the 1950s, no state in the U.S. had a no-fault divorce law, and that wouldn’t change until 1969. A wife who wanted to divorce had to establish fault before a judge, such as adultery or physical cruelty. Compounding the problem, all 50 states also had a common-law provision that barred prosecution of a husband for raping his wife, leaving a wife no legal recourse against it.

Housing tracts such as Levittown were off-limits to Black families through racially restrictive housing covenants and discriminatory mortgage underwriting, both of which continued in effect long after the Supreme Court declared racial covenants unconstitutional in 1948. When Bill and Daisy Myers became Levittown, Pa.’s first Black residents in August 1957, they were greeted by violent protests from white residents.

By the 1950s, housewives were using washing machines, vacuums, and modern ranges their mothers never had. But even then, time-budget studies, most famously historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s, showed that women still spent 50 to 60 hours a week on housework, not much less than in the 1920s. There were no longer servants or extended family members to help, and cleanliness standards had risen. Machines made the work easier; the amount of work did not.

Using the invisible enemy of germs and the threat of epidemics such as polio, advertisers in the postwar era sold women on the notion that daily deep cleaning, carpet vacuuming, and heavy use of chemicals were their essential duties. It worked, and it moved the nation’s idea of a properly clean house far beyond what prior generations would have envisioned.

Appliance manufacturers dispatched salesmen and female home economists to homes to show off their new agitator washing machines, electric timers, and newer oven controls. It wasn’t an optional service: the machines were really brand-new to families who had just come from using washboards and stoves lit by hand.

Postwar cleaning-product ads depicted women in full dress, pearls, and heels, scrubbing hard. But verified clothing records show that housework was actually performed in plain cotton house dresses, button-front duster aprons, and flat shoes. This pristine image of a homemaker was a selling tool; it did not represent what any woman was doing on any given Tuesday.

C.A. Swanson & Sons launched the frozen TV Dinner in late 1953 and sold 10 million of them by 1954. Campbell Soup Company home economist Dorcas Reilly created green bean casserole in 1955, and Jell-O molds stuffed with vegetables or canned meat were pitched as the most up-to-date and sanitary way to serve food. Yet, no one was guaranteed a shorter prep time with any of those innovations.

The percentage of married women in the labor force rose from 22% in 1950 to 31% in 1960, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data; by 1960, married women were 55% of all working women in the nation. Most women were still housewives, but the trend was moving in the other direction.

The married women who were entering the workforce in the 1950s tended to be middle-aged mothers taking part-time clerical, retail, or light-manufacturing jobs, not young women vying for corner offices. Their incomes often went toward paying off the suburban mortgage, buying the new refrigerator, or saving for their children’s college educations. Ambition wasn’t the point. The budget was.

Tupperware’s plastic was invented by Earl Tupper. Brownie Wise, a divorced mom, was hired as Tupperware’s VP of marketing in 1951 and came up with the business model. The Tupperware Home Party allowed thousands of housewives to become salespeople and start businesses out of their homes. In April 1954, she was the first woman on the cover of Business Week.

More than 80 percent of households in the U.S. accepted the free S&H Green Stamps that were given away in supermarkets and filling stations. Housewives would collect the stamps, paste them into 24-page stamp books, and then exchange them for home appliances, furniture, and cookware, a form of savings that never touched the bank accounts they had little or no control over.

The American fertility rate reached its peak in 1957 at 3.77 births per woman. In that year, 4.3 million babies were born, at the height of the postwar Baby Boom. That new life brought with it new hours of childcare piled on top of the 50-to-60-hour housework week previously recorded. It was just more work.

In the 1950s, doctors commonly diagnosed exhausted and lonely housewives as suffering from “housewife fatigue” or “housewife syndrome.” The diagnosis converted social issues, unpaid labor, isolation, and poor support structures into individual illnesses. Treatment was usually a change of attitude. Sometimes, a pill.

Meprobamate, which was marketed under the brand names Miltown and Equanil, was approved by the FDA in May 1955. By the end of 1956, 1 out of every 20 Americans had taken the drug. By 1957, doctors had filled 36 million prescriptions for it, making tranquilizers like it roughly a third of all prescriptions written in the U.S. that year. Discovered by accident, meprobamate was widely prescribed for anxiety. Because of gender norms, women ended up being disproportionately affected by the drug.

The family doctor would prescribe Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine) to keep women slim and alert during the day, and would usually prescribe a sedative for use in the evening to get them back down. Cigarettes were also marketed directly to housewives by tobacco companies as a socially acceptable way to suppress their appetite and ease their worries. Since links between smoking and cancer were only just starting to become public knowledge, it was not yet considered bad to smoke in the presence of children.

In the 1950s, there were no reliable forms of oral contraception available to the public. Although the Food and Drug Administration had approved Enovid in 1957 for the treatment of severe menstrual disorders (though some women were using it for contraception), it was not approved as a contraceptive until May 1960. In the interim, state Comstock laws, Connecticut’s included, made the distribution of information or instruments relating to contraception illegal.

In 1957, author Betty Friedan dispatched a questionnaire to her classmates at Smith College in advance of their 15th reunion. Responses revealed widespread unhappiness among educated suburban housewives. That survey led to years of interviews which became the basis for her book The Feminine Mystique, released in February 1963.

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