Women: Second Wind

Nobody is more noisily dissatisfied these days than that symbol of stability—the fortyish housewife with teenage children and a reasonably successful husband. Books are written about her problems, letters columns are filled with her complaints. What does she want? She wants to go back to work, or to take special courses so she can get what she calls “a real job.”

The traditional job for middle-aged Mother—helping out at the charity headquarters, pitching in for the hospital drive, clerking for pin money at the local dress shop—is less and less attractive to the restless new breed of American woman, educated to a level of intellectual expectation that her grandmother never knew. This new U.S. woman had a college education and considered a career—or had a brief one—before marriage. With the children out of the house or at least able to fend for themselves, she is looking for a job that provides her with a sense of accomplishment.

The Revolutionaries. The result is a modest revolution that has already perceptibly reshaped the pattern of U.S. family life. The statistics are impressive. The number of working wives in the U.S. has risen from 4,200,000 in 1940 to 8,600,000 in 1950, to 13,300,000 by 1961. Population increase and early marriage account for some of this growth, but only 15% of all married women were working in 1940 and 33% in 1961. Money is not always the motivation; according to the 1960 census, in families with earnings of more than $10,000, 52% of the wives had jobs. The U.S. Department of Labor, in a 1962 survey of college alumnae about 15 years after graduation, found that as many as 40% of them were already working, and many more said they would be interested in going to work in about two to five years.

Restless Ladies. Working at what? That is the problem. There seem to be more applicants than suitable jobs. Three San Francisco women, Jean Livingston, Apple Walker and Polly Lawrence, with children ranging from 9 to 18, turned their dissatisfaction with charity work to profit by forming a public relations firm called Ideas Inc. to handle publicity for charity benefits and a few commercial accounts. Teaching appeals to many. “Frankly,” says a Mount Holyoke alumna (1946) with four children, “I think teaching is the best bet for me because it’s the best way to use my education and still let me spend the most time with my family. I’ll have the same vacations that my children have.” But the range of jobs that some restless ladies are able to find is wide. The 20 members of one garden club in suburban Atlanta include a therapist in a children’s hospital, an artist’s assistant, a bridal consultant, a silver and china dealer, and an assistant accountant.

Margery Fishman of Los Angeles, 45, is area director for the League of Women Voters, and one of the problems at the League is finding women to fill responsible positions. “So many women are out looking for jobs, or going back to school to get teaching certificates and the like,” she says, “that we’re having a hard time filling seats on the board. Our regulars in their 40s are leaving us for ‘The Search.’ “

The Search “for something more challenging” is what Mrs. Fishman herself is engaged in. She was a social worker before her marriage, and she went with several of her like-minded friends to see the dean of the University of Southern California about preparing themselves for jobs. “We told him we were really floundering,” she recalls. “The schools won’t allow us to bring ourselves up to date in our fields by taking part-time course work; we have to do it fulltime as graduate students. I can’t manage that right now; I still have a great deal of chauffeuring to do with six children.”

New Institutions. The need for guidance and training for job-seeking women in their 40s—both on a fulltime and part-time basis—is giving rise to an outcropping of institutions. The three-year-old Institute for Independent Study at Radcliffe College picks some 20 women between 25 and 65 annually for a year-long project of creative work, out of which have come, according to President Mary Bunting, “nine or ten books and quite a lot of paintings, compositions and scientific research projects.” Boston’s Simmons College School of Social Service gives a master’s degree in social work, which takes about four years, admits about 23 women a year. “They’re the kind of gals,” says the school’s director, Robert Rutherford, “who’ve been in P.T.A., were den mothers and things like that, and they want a job that’s exciting and rewarding and paying.”

In Manhattan the so-called Seven College Conference—the female equivalent of the Ivy League—has set up a series of vocational workshops for about 50 women graduates of “any accredited college or university, who are now ready for activity outside the home.” Participants meet with experts in a ten-session course to explore the job possibilities open to them. The best opportunities, says Director Anne Cronin, are in education, library science and social work, though several of the workshops’ graduates have found jobs in public relations.

How do husbands react to this new restlessness? Fewer and fewer seem to be grousing about the idea of a tired businessman coming home to a tired businesswoman. “In only one or two cases,” says Anne Cronin, “have husbands gotten stuffy about their wives’ going back into careers. For the most part, they’re serious and understanding. We’re not breaking up any homes that wouldn’t break up anyway.”

Husbands had just better get to like it or lump it, according to Anthropologist Margaret Mead. “We’re dragging behind the rest of the world in the use of our womanpower,” she grumbled from behind her stacks of papers in a corner of Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History. “There is great need for the woman in her 40s, who is educated, to come back into a professional career after her children are reared. We need women for all skilled fields. Women’s professional second wind is much more important than the right to vote women received years ago.”