Course Pack 7

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(1)Western Political Thought. Dr. John Paul Tabakian Political Science 5 Course Pack #7 Los Angeles Mission College 13356 Eldridge Avenue Sylmar, CA 91342 www.tabakian.com [email protected]. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 2 of 41. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(2) TABLE OF CONTENTS Meridel Le Sueuer Evening in a Lumber Town .....................................................................................3 Cows And Horses Are Hungry .................................................................................6 Murder In Minneapolis ...........................................................................................10 Salvation Home .......................................................................................................13. Agee & Evans, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [& Women] (1941) ........16 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “The Four Freedoms”......................................................17. Betty Friedan, from The Feminine Mystique – Chapter 1 (1963) ..............18 William Whyte's The Organization Man Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................28 Chapter 2: The Decline Of The Protestant Ethic ........................................35 J.C. Holmes, from Nothing More to Declare (1958)..................................40. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 2 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(3) Meridel Le Sueur: Evening in a Lumber Town Published: New Masses, July, 1926; FOUR streets in the lumbertown, run from the lumber mills on the bay, between sunken houses, and end abruptly where the forest begins. The sound of the mill, grinding and screaming....the mill fires never stop except on every seventh day on the Christians’ Sunday. At dawn the men go down these streets to the mills and come back at twilight stooping a little. In the evening the night shift men leave the homes and in a steady, living stream move towards the mills. The half sunken homes – the rain seems to rust and the elements to torture them – lean with the wind and sink into the hard, black northern loam. Within them I se large women moving; from them comes a living odor such as animals produce, an odor of flesh, of dark human stenched interiors. The door slits are blackened by human touch, the wood is worn over the thresholds by the passing of very heavy feet. In the shadow of a porch a woman sits, her face lifted in a kind of idiocy of poverty. Three more women with broad faces like cows sit far back close to the house, half hidden by the dark foliage, their faces are distorted and swollen. This life of excessive labor has marked them. Children run from the doorways add play and scream along the streets. The very young children are not so violent. They smile shyly, with, naive peasant grace. Two little boys edge up to me, their heads are shaved, round as bullets, they wear black shirts. They seem like animals come to sniff at me, to look at me from out their bland stricken little eyes, and then at last to come and stand without embarrassment in front of me, looking at me very serious. A little boy with smooth poll and bright bland face, bright but uniformly pale, runs by with a dog, turning his elongated face to me as he runs backward, disappearing in the dusk. Poverty is grotesque. It is violent and abnormal. These faces are the faces of nightmare. This scene is the dark half mad back-ground of a Goya. Poverty is like a violence producing a terrible dwarfing of nature. Two young girls, with wide toothless mouths and shaggy-hair which leaves their pale faces encased, witchlike, come down the walk beneath the low trees, giggling, they lean upon each other. Their sharp faces have a senseless look that endless labor breeds into the faces of women. Their dirty aprons hang against their bare legs; their bodies beneath are slim and crooked, with a warm odor like little animals. The houses, now darkening quickly, seem to have become alive with swarming children. Their faces peer out of the gloom, sharp and wizened. They run and flutter past me. Very small children run like rats through the dusk, scurrying across the streets, crying out to each other, and running upon each other in a wild play, half mad and vicious, striking each other down. A boy with blood on his mouth gets up from the path and runs through the gloom screaming. Small eerie faces with cold inhuman eyes, misshapen heads – these are children conceived in a brawl and delivered by hags. A man slams the door of a house after him and walks out into the street. He is lean and intense – one of the younger men. He walks with his lean stark face thrust forward. There is a terrible kind of beauty in his face, the spare tragic beauty that is moulded by terror and horror of necessity. Now the whistle screams. Now the workmen come from the mill, down the streets close together, huddled together. Their black loose clothes are all alike. Like a dark moving mass they come shuffling along heavily, heads lowered, arms hanging, their dark half-drunken faces thrust out. They look drunk, drunk with a deadening concentration. There is the unnatural flush and sullenness of drunkenness. Their concentration is the concentration of themselves against everything, against hungers and terrors...and hourly fears. It is a hard combative identity in them..... Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 3 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(4) Six of them come down the street now close together, moving together like a pack, swiftly and silently, all in black hanging clothes, heavy with perspiration, dark faces under low caps, walking side by side, slouching; all alike; all with small pails, sullen faces, their eyes like the eyes of beaten animals. They come swiftly and darkly down the narrow street from the mill. A great fatigue seems to pull them down from the chest towards the ground, towards the center of the earth. The younger a man is the less, he carries the mark of that fatigue. The older a man the more he moves in that slouch, his great hands hanging in front, his head bent from his curving back. The younger men look almost drunk with the sullen combative fever, but in the elders there is less of that fever in the eyes. The older men have given in, and in giving in have escaped a little. Three men exactly like the others come from the far end of the street, walking together, their heads bent as if all were listening to the same sound. They come up to me and pass me, veering a little from their path. I see their faces quite close – the dead look. I think a queer thing as they pass me. I am shocked at first by such a thought. Then it seems quite natural. I think that they remind me of Charlie Chaplin. He may be a wag but he says a great deal about these men, about the exigencies of poverty, the humiliation, the tragic, comic pathos. The shoes, the trousers, the shy defenceless attitude, – all Chaplin’s, in the best sense, terrible comedy. The street is dark now and confused with the moving of this dark stream of men, huddled, moving together toward houses. The sound of the saw mills seem to increase as the sun sinks. With night the very young men come out boldly upon the streets, lean as wolves. A young girl with an orange scarf around her neck sidles by. Still the dark men go silently and swiftly, a living stream. Now that I can no longer see them their odor drifts with the other odors. Their large bodies approach, loom, pass me and disappear. There is something bare in them. They are kept close to life, close and intimate to life with its raw hungers. In them is no self consciousness. They do not celebrate their being. They adhere so closely to the terrible, natural things that they are impersonalized, nullified. There exists in them the unconscious vitality of those hungers they live by. Genius might spring from such men, from such spare soil – genius too is born of such stark necessity, a humble necessity, a despair. Despair and humbleness make good ground for hardy growth. Poverty humbles a man low so that nature has her way with him. By her hungers she pulls him to her so he does not forget he was born of her. She keeps him her child. Life here is kept to the bone and the marrow. No excess consciousness, only the blindness of necessity. To be bound by hungers is beautiful but to be bound by physical hungers only is too low a state for man. But if, going beyond these physical hungers, one could keep this closeness to the need and its fulfillment, still adhere simply to the hunger and its exact satisfaction, life would be purer. These men have the dreadful simplicity of their physical hungers. For they are dreadful. They live too near the bone. Tragedy is their meat. Defeat is their wine. They are crucified and hung on the black tree of necessity. They die before they are born, and their living on the earth is a black death. They so home into dark, intimate houses. There is no song and no gaiety. They sit within their close, dead houses. Their women do not laugh. They, the men and women, sit large and silent in the low hanging houses. It is not a bad town. The houses are not bad houses. They are good houses, made of wood; but they are unkempt. Something in the houses has died, and the houses die also. Their people live too close to a menacing reality which makes houses of no consequence. Pride and possession is gone from them. They are afraid of the luxury of pride or they have no energy for it. These are bare houses without a flower...with bare ground before them.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 4 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(5) I wonder if they have any pomp about death, whether there is anything beside this acceptance in their giving up to death – if they have any consciousness of death, or if they are stark and bare without excess in death too. They must above all like to die together. They move together in life so swiftly, so silently. They must shuffle into death much as they shuffle to work. They must have a living satisfaction in dying together in mines and factories because in life they are always so close together. One of these men, going to work alone, or dying alone, might stop and think. Isolation so startling would start the germ of revolt... I have seen the face, of men, stiff and proud, already glistening like minerals, dying together as they work, swiftly, huddled against each other and silent.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 5 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(6) Meridel Le Sueur: Cows and Horses Are Hungry Published: American Mercury, September, 1934. I When you drive through the Middle West droughty country you try not to look at the thrusting out ribs of the horses and cows, but you get so you can’t see anything else but ribs, like hundreds of thousands of little beached hulks. It looks like the bones are rising right up out of the skin. Pretty soon, quite gradually, you begin to know that the farmer, under his rags, shows his ribs, too, and the farmer’s wife is as lean as his cows, and his children look tiny and hungry. Drive through Elbow Lake, Otter Tail County, Elk River and Kandiyohi County, Big Stone County, Yellow Medicine County and Mille Lacs, and you’ll see the same thing. These are only the counties that are officially designated as in the droughty area by the Federal government. This is only in Minnesota. In the Dakotas they say cattle are leaning up against the fences. There is a shortage of water as well as of pasturage. If you are officially in the droughty areas you will come in on the government purchasing of starving cattle. On May 31, the day after the last hot wind and the temperature at 112° in some areas, the papers announced the working plan of the machinery set up by the Federal government to aid farmers in the drought stricken areas of the Northwest. The animals will be bought and those that are not too far gone will be fattened and given to the F. E. R. A. for the relief departments. If you’re on the breadlines you’ll be getting some starved meat for your own starved bones. They could feed you some choice farmer’s ribs, too. But you can’t buy up farmers and their wives and shoot them. Not directly. The government has been pushing straw into these communities all winter to keep the cattle from starving for lack of grain until the pasturage came in. Well, now there is no pasture. The grass is brown and burnt as if it might be mid-August instead of May and June. The farmer is milked at one end and given relief at another. Well, the farmer says, they wanted a scarcity, and by God, now they have it. They shot off the pigs and cows, they tried to keep what was left alive because they couldn’t feed them, now they’re trying to keep them from dying off and rotting on the ground and making too big a stench. The farmer can’t sell his cattle to the stockyards. They’re too far gone, too thin. The cattle thus turned over to the government will be left temporarily on the farms, fed by the administration and then moved to the packing houses or redistributed to other farmers or turned directly over to relief channels. The administration of this plan seems similar to the other plans, with a regional director for seven Northwest States, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska; with State directors from the farm-schools working through county agents. The county director will have an advisory committee made up of the members of the corn-hog allotment committee that functioned in the county. This organization will appoint township committees that will visit the farms, check the stock, classify, appraise the value and fix the purchase price, secure necessary farmer and creditor signatures to sales contracts, and arrange for final check to see that the animals have been disposed of as agreed. They will also approve vouchers for payment. The same old rubbish. Committees and committees and committees. But the farmer will keep on starving. He has been rooked by nature and now he will be rooked by the Federal government.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 6 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(7) II THE farmer has been depressed a long time. For the last three years he has been going over into the abyss of pauperism by the thousands. This spring after a terrible winter there was no rain. The village where I live has not exchanged money for two years. They have bartered and exchanged their produce. Last year some had nothing to exchange. We cut down trees in the front yard for fuel and tried to live off the miserable crop of potatoes of last year. Since April there has been hope of rain and even up until the day after Decoration day, until that bitter afternoon when the hot winds came and made any hope after that impossible. During April the farmers said that the winter wheat would be all right if it would rain even next week. The peas went in. They raise a lot of peas for the canneries both in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The peas came up a little ways and then fell down as if they had been mowed down. We waited to put in the corn day after day. Then came a terrifying wind from the Dakotas, blew tens of thousands of dollars worth of onion seed away and half of North Dakota blew into Ohio with the spring sowing. That wind was a terror and blew dust and seed so high you couldn’t drive through it in mid-day. A kind of terror grew in the folk. It was too much, added up with the low prices they got, the drought, heat and high wind. A peculiar thing happened. Very much like what happened in the flu terror after the war. No one went outdoors. They all shut themselves up as if some terrific crisis, some horrible massacre, were about to occur. The last day of the wind, the radio announced every half hour that there was no menace in the dust, it would hurt no one actually. The wind died down, but it didn’t rain. Well, they said, it will rain. It has to rain sometime. The winter wheat and rye began to whiten. A thin stand. You could sit in your house and look about and see the fields whiten and the wheat seemed to go back into the ground. You could see it stand still and then creep back into the ground. But the farmers kept on ploughing in case it would rain. First you had to plough with two horses and then with four. You couldn’t rip the earth open and when you did, a fume of dust went up like smoke, and a wind from hell whipped the seed out. Some planted their corn, though, in corn-planting time, some waited for rain. They waited until the day after Decoration day. Every day the pastures became worse. The grass became as dry as straw in May and the cattle lost their flesh quickly. They weren’t too well padded because of scarce food all winter. You had to look for a green spot every morning. Children were kept out of school to herd the cattle around near streams and creeks. Some farmers cut down trees so the cattle could eat the leaves even if they were poor picking. The leaves on the trees are poor, falling off already in some places due to the searing, driving wind and the lack of moisture at their roots. The man up the road has turned his cows into his winter wheat which is thin as a young man’s first beard anyway. On Decoration day the wind started again, blowing hot as a blast from hell and the young corn withered as if under machine gun fire, the trees in two hours looked as if they had been beaten. The day after Decoration day it was so hot you couldn’t sit around looking at the panting cattle and counting their ribs and listening to that low cry that is an awful asking. We got in the car and drove slowly through the sizzling countryside. Not a soul was in sight. It was like a funeral. The houses were closed up tight, the blinds drawn, the windows and doors closed. There seemed to be a menace in the air made visible. It was frightening. You could hear the fields crack and dry, and the only movement in the down-driving heat was the dead writhing of the dry blighted leaves on the twigs. The young corn about four spears up was falling down like a fountain being slowly turned off.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 7 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(8) There was something terrifying about this visible sign of disaster. It went into your nostrils so you couldn’t breathe: the smell of hunger. It made you count your own ribs with terror. You don’t starve in America. Everything looks good. There is something around the corner. Everyone has a chance. That’s all over now. The whole country cracks and rumbles and cries out in its terrible leanness, stripped with exploitation and terror – and as sign and symbol, bones – bones showing naked and spiritless, showing decay and crisis and a terrific warning, bare and lean in Mid-America. We kept driving very slowly, about as slowly as you go to a funeral, with no one behind us, meeting no one on the road. The corpse was the very earth. We kept looking at the body of the earth, at the bare and mortgaged and unpainted houses like hollow pupas when the life has gone. They looked stripped as if after a raid. As if a terrible army had just gone through. It used to be hard to look at the fat rich-seeming farms and realize that they were mortgaged to the hilt and losing ground every year, but not now. Now it stands a visible sign. You can see the marks of the ravagers. The mark of that fearful exploitation stands on the landscape visible, known, to be reckoned with. The cows were the only thin flesh visible. They stood in the poor shade of the stripped and dying trees, breathing heavily, their great ribs showing like the ribs of decaying boats beached and deserted. But you knew that from behind all those drawn blinds hundreds of eyes were watching that afternoon, that no man, woman or child could sit down and read a book or lie down to any dreams. Through all these windows eyes were watching – watching the wheat go, the rye go, the corn, peas, potatoes go. Everywhere in those barricaded houses were eyes drawn back to the burning windows looking out at next winter’s food slowly burning in the fields. You look out and see the very food of your next winter’s sustenance visibly, physically dying beneath your eyes, projecting into you your future hungers. The whole countryside that afternoon became terrifying, not only with its present famine but with the foreshadowing of its coming hunger. No vegetables now, and worst of all, no milk. The countryside became monstrous with this double doom. Every house is alike in suffering as in a flood, every cow, every field mounting into hundreds, into thousands, from State to State. You try not to look at the ribs, but pretty soon you are looking only at ribs. Then an awful thing happened. The sun went down behind the ridge, dropped low, and men and women began to pour out of the houses, the children lean and fleet as rats, the tired lean farm women looking to see what had happened. The men ran into their fields, ran back for water and they began to water their lands with buckets and cups, running, pouring the puny drops of water on the baked earth as if every minute might count now. The children ran behind the cows urging them to eat the harsh dry grass. It looked like an evacuated countryside, with the people running out after the enemy had passed. Not a word was spoken. In intense silence they hurried down the rows with buckets and cups, watering the wilted corn plants, a gargantuan and terrible and hopeless labor. Some came out with horses and ploughs and began stirring up the deadly dust. If the field was a slope, barrels were filled, and a primitive irrigation started. Even the children ran with cups of water, all dogged silent, mad, without a word. A certain madness in it all, like things that are done after unimaginable violence. We stop and talk to a farmer. His eyes are bloodshot. I can hardly see from the heat and the terrible emotion.... How do you think my cows look? he asks. I think they are a little fatter today. I try not to look at his cows at all. Pretty thin, though, he says, pretty thin. I can see the fine jersey pelt beginning to sag and the bones rise out like sticks out of the sea at low tide. We both know that a farmer across the river shot twenty-two of his cattle yesterday, and then shot himself. I look at him and I can see his clavicle and I know that his ribs are rising out of his skin, too. It is visible now, starvation and famine. So they are going to buy the starving cattle and shoot them and feed the rest to the bread lines. A man isn’t worth anything – but a cow.... Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 8 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(9) We drive on. When I shut my eyes the flesh burns the balls, and all I can see is ribs – the bones showing through. The banks protest the Federal government’s price for starving cattle. From six to twenty dollars, with your pedigreed bull thrown in. No difference. Hunger levels all flesh. When the skeleton shows through, all meat is worthless. The banks don’t like this. Most of the cattle are mortgaged and they won’t get much. The banks are protesting. All this sounds different in the language of the banks... They say in their bulletin....We report further deterioration of crops since the May 1 report. In addition, weather conditions in a large part of the Ninth District, which embraces the States of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Montana and part of Wisconsin, are bad.....And abandonment of 16% in Montana and 60% in South Dakota of winter wheat acreage....Reports from grain, trade and railroads serving the grainraising areas show condition poor of both winter wheat and rye. In addition, weather conditions in the Ninth District have been more than usually favorable for the hatching of grasshopper eggs and tend to increase the seriousness of this menace.... In human terms, of life and not credit and interest, this means – winter wheat and rye gone, pasturage gone, cattle gone; wholesale prices low, retail prices soaring; the government piles in feed, straw, and now buys up the lean cattle, but they milk the farmer faster than they resuscitate him. Starvation stands up in the blazing sun naked at last; and bare and lean ribs for all the coming winter.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 9 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(10) Meridel Le Sueur: Murder in Minneapolis Published: New Masses, August 7, 1934. WITHIN the sound of a gunshot from where I am writing, Chief of Police Johannes’ gun squad is on call; two blocks west the military is massed under the dictatorship of Governor Olson, supplied and instructed in the use of machine guns, gas, vomit gas, and all the instruments for class war; six blocks away, in the center of the business district, in an old garage, opposite a swanky clubhouse, where more money changes hands in a poker game than these men have ever seen, are the striking truckmen, now denied the right to picket, standing in a dark, swarming dive. But something further has been known in Minneapolis since the strikers on Tuesday buried their dead. Henry Ness, shot down by order of Johannes, stool and slave of the Citizens Alliance, an organization of employers and fascist-minded middle class backed by the two biggest banking interests in the Northwest, a vigilante organization in embryo. Henry Ness was shot down on Friday, July 20, when Johanne fired into a squad of peaceful picketers who were bare handed, observing Father Haas’s truce while negotiations were under way. Over forty were blasted and turned into sieves by buckshot in the back. Again it has been demonstrated that negotiation and arbitration are paid for by the blood of the workers, the muffling of the strike, and by giving time for the red herring, now rotten and decomposed, to be drawn across the trail. The Committee of Employers with lying ads in the papers, the Citizens Alliance, the Minneapolis Journal, have held Minneapolis in a barrage of lies, so cunning, so deliberate, and so wholesale that the citizens of Minneapolis, to learn anything of the truth, have had to pass it by word of mouth, and read it in the daily newspaper edited by the strikers themselves. These practiced liars have stated time after time after-time that the strike was over. For answer the pickets went out by the hundreds, tying up the trucking of the city. (With one exception: the alliance between strikers and the Farmers’ Holiday Associations, by which agreement the farmers bring in their goods unmolested directly to the consumers.) They stated that 90 percent of their employees had never quit work. As answers thousands massed at strike headquarters, the picket lines grew twice their former size. The unemployed councils swelled the lines. Words, words have barricaded the city, have been a cover for the bloody tactics of feudal capitalists. There were cries in the press about the small band of strikers who dared dictate who should use the streets, the “insurgents” who forced the policemen to shoot them down along with neutral citizens. There was a great hue and cry about this “small band of insurgents.” At any dinner table you could hear graduates of Yale and Harvard, supposed repositories of nineteenth century culture, saying they themselves would arm and shoot these men down like rabbits who dared ask for bread. But when labor buried its dead this was changed. To the amazement of the Minneapolis Journal, the Citizens Alliance, the banks, etc., forty thousand people marched behind that body of Henry Ness, father of four children. Thousands massed the sidewalks. The Women’s Auxiliary of the strikers marched a block solid, four abreast, with their little children, in the broiling heat, through twenty blocks in the heart of the city, tying up traffic for three hours. There were six blocks solid of marching overalled men. There were cars that took an hour and a half to pass, filled with men, women, children – workers.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 10 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(11) From office buildings leaned business men, aghast. “My God,” they asked each other, who are these people?” An official from the City Hall tried to break that cortege and he was repulsed with anger by the young pickets. “You don’t pass the cortege of labor,” they said. “Nobody breaks our funeral line.” And nobody did. Labor gave its answer to the words of arbitration and negotiation. Following the refusal of the employers to accept the agreement of the Labor Board which Gov. Olson attempted to force upon the two contending forces, the city is under martial law. There are no signs of the employers agreeing to any settlement. Their attitude is barbaric feudal. Gov. Olson said at the first there would he no picketing and no convoying of trucks except by permit, which admits of wide interpretation. Picketing has stopped entirely, under protest by the strikers, and at the same time more and more trucks are being moved by permit of the military. The militia patrols the streets, young boys who are startled by their sudden duties. Two commanders have asked to be relieved of their command and it has been granted. Military courts are being set up. The employers are entrenching themselves bitterly. Amidst this stands the old garage of strike headquarters like a live coal on the dark streets, alive with the its closely packed swarm of men. Cars drive slowly by. Big splendid cars with furtive men and women looking out of them at the strikers. The windows of office buildings are filled with eyes. Everyone knows since that funeral that there is a live, ominous force stirring beneath the city, a mass rising beneath them. This is the power which asks the withdrawal of the militia and calls “General Strike!” On Black Friday, July 20, Chief of Police Johannes, backed by the Citizens Alliance and the mayor, against the sentiments of the Governor and Father Haas, fired into a bunch of pickets who were totally unarmed, without even sticks or clubs. They fired from all sides into the men as they were picketing the market area in the truck drivers’ strike, shooting with sawed-off shotguns, peppering them with buckshot like rabbits. The murder was deliberately planned. The strike was going peacefully. The Citizens Alliance and the advisory committee to the employers (a high pressure and drawing down a good salary) wanted trouble and wanted to force the hand of the strikers. Johannes told his men they had shotguns and they knew what to do with them. The Mayor said: “You are not carrying those instruments for pleasure.” Thursday, the day before the shooting, they deliberately tried to provoke strikers into stopping hospital trucks, using a decoy truck. The drama was prepared beforehand, with cameramen and newspaper men present, and an extra was out almost before the event had happened. A convoy was present of a hundred and fifty policemen with guns sticking out of every car. These to convoy a truck with a hundred and fifty pounds of merchandise in it! But the strikers did not fall into the trap. The next day railroads of armed cops were in the market area. Carloads of pickets matched carloads with them. By noon the market was alive with pickets, sympathizers, cops with guns. It must be remembered that at this time there was presumably a tentative truce while Father Haas was carrying on negotiations. However, the seriousness of arbitration, truces, negotiations as considered by the employers is shown in the Minneapolis strike as clearly as in the Toledo and San Francisco strikes. The employers never have any intention to arbitrate or negotiate. At two o’clock this bevy of cops prepared to convoy a truck, which was obviously a decoy containing only a few boxes; and amidst a crowd of spectators in a clearing in the street an action took place which should he looked at, ignoring all the fine literature of negotiations. This action reveals the real intention of the reactionary business man, who had given over fifty thousand dollars to break this strike at any cost BEFORE NEGOTIATIONS HAD EVEN STARTED. If this strike wins, they say, Minneapolis will be a closed shop!. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 11 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(12) The employers’ truck started moving. The picket squad cars drove toward it; the two crashed in the middle of the street. A couple of blocks away summer business was going on, women were shopping. It was two o’clock. The men, obeying the tentative truce, waiting for the tentative and poisonous and futile arbitration, were totally unarmed. They were baredhanded, peacefully picketing. The police opened fire with sawed-off shotguns, splaying a fire of lead and NOT into the sidewalk, or at the feet of the picketers as the papers contended, but into the unprotected vitals of living men coming toward them with bare hands. When the strikers turned for cover they shot them in the back. Henry Ness who died had thirtyeight slugs in his body. He was shot in the chest and as he turned for cover, he was shot again in the back. In the hot afternoon for five minutes they fired point blank into the bodies of truckmen, most of them trying for cover. The street was littered with bodies. An old man on the sidewalk was seriously wounded, a young messenger boy was shot. Two men were lying in the pickets’ truck, had not even gotten out of the truck, which shows how quickly the police opened fire. Instantly from the picket lines in the face of this fire, which came from BOTH sides of the street and from the center, young pickets rushed forward to pick up their wounded – and were fired upon. The pickets behind them came forward – unarmed men, without compulsion, without orders, advancing again and again in a colossal tide that filled the gap the instant it was opened by a prone man. The strikers picked up what wounded they could and took them, not to the hospital, but to their own headquarters, where they had set up their own hospital. What wounded men the police picked up were instantly arrested – for violence! A great many of these men were veterans and remarked that even in the war they were allowed to pick up their own wounded. The wounds from buckshot are most ghastly. One shot splays and splinters the bone instead of penetrating cleanly, and opens the body in a dozen places like a sieve. One day after the burial of the murdered men, the following communication was sent by the Employers Advisory Committee to Governor Olson: All Minneapolis business firms are endeavoring to carry on their normal and lawful business, keep thousands of employes at work and preserve and maintain industry in this community. The truck drivers union, Local No. 574, has arrogantly assumed to control our streets, prevent operation of business, dictate what, if any merchandise can be transported through our streets, and asssumed to block and shut off streets to travel! The Mayor and Chief of Police are doing their duty to uphold their oaths of office and to clear the streets... We are informed that you are endeavoring to have the Mayor and Chief of Police cease aiding the transportation of merchandise through our streets. Such action only serves to uphold the hands of these law violators by compelling cessation of normal business and yielding to the determination of Local No. 574 to act as the official arbiter of what business shall be permitted to run in Minneapolis. Father Haas and the committee have submitted arbitration to both sides. Governor Olson waited until noon on Thursday, July 26, before declaring martial law.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 12 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(13) Meridel Le Sueur: Salvation Home Published: The New Masses, January 10, 1939. The girls looked in at me and sometimes they came in and asked me what was in for. How did it look outside? When was I going to pop? When they came in they had to watch for the matron, and run when she was coming up the stairs. Alice, the deaf girl, and I wrote notes and looked out the black bars at the snow. In the cold mornings I could see the girls about to deliver walk slowly down the hall. Every night you could hear screams from someone in labor and day and night the kids squalled in the nursery and the girls would go down the halls trying to see their babies but they couldn’t. At night the policewoman sat up all night at the bottom of the stairs. Every half-hour she went through the halls with a flashlight. She was a great, strong woman and the girls said she pinched and bent your arms when she got hold of you. I couldn’t sleep in there for thinking they would sterilize me. When I went to the bathroom and back I could see in the open doors and the beds would be drawn close together and I could hear the girls laughing and whispering. Alice said there were electric alarms at the windows. There was certainly no way to escape. I couldn’t sleep so I began dreaming about trying to get something to eat again, and it would make me very sick and I would vomit. I asked the matron for a doctor, because I didn’t want to lose the baby but she said, You are all right, there is nothing the matter with you, you just want to get out of working in the laundry. Alice told me that somebody was leaving the next day and wrote a letter to Amelia and this girl I didn’t know took it out for me and in about two days I got an answer from Amelia. I read it over and over and I showed it to Alice and she knew Amelia. It seems just about everybody knew her. The letter said: Don’t be afraid, baby. U are a maker now. U are going to have a good child, very good child, young dater or son. The day is near. Take hope, comrade. Dr. will see u soon. We see to that. Take sum hope. Workers Alliance meet nex day frum this. Have child happy demand ther be no so bad misry for our peepl like we hev so we can hev our childs in gret city with sum joy. See u very soon, deerhart. Amelia On Easter we had chicken for dinner and we could stay downstairs one hour longer and talk. There were hundreds of funny papers for us to read sent by some woman’s club, and also jigsaw puzzles. Alice showed me all the people, writing funny things on her pad. There was a pretty girl with blonde hair named Julia who made all the jokes. Nobody could get her down. She said last Easter she spent in a beer joint getting stiff with a guy she had never seen before. Couldn’t we have a swell time, she said, if we could push all the tables together and have a beer and something to spike it, with a couple of cartons of cigs, we wouldn’t even need any tails. The radio played “I Love You Truly,” and everyone laughed, and a girl who had one glass eye she lost in a munitions factory said, You son of a bitch if you loved me truly, I wouldn’t be here – and we all laughed. I’ll he glad to get out of here, Julia said, I’ll be glad to say goodby to this. She said to me very polite, I hope you have your kid here, I think we’re gonna pop about the same time. We’ll all go, nuts together in this joint, the girl with the glass eye said bitterly. When are you going to deliver, I asked her.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 13 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(14) Hell, she said, if you work nine hours a day and no fresh air you’re too damned tired to deliver. A girl with yellow hair like straw came in and everyone was quiet. Alice wrote on the pad, A stool. We all began to read the funny papers. The bed bell rang and the major came in to lead us in prayer. She read from the Bible. Some of the girls could talk together on their fingers, clasped behind their backs. The major talked about the great divine joy of Easter and of motherhood and prayed asking the deity to forgive us for the great sin we had committed and be lenient with us and help us lead better lives in the future. Somebody must have made a mistake about the song because it was “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” which is a Christmas song, but everyone sang as loud as they could because it’s a pleasure to sing and everybody sang it, Hark, the herald angels sing Wally Simpson stole our king. and Julia began to giggle so that the major said, You may go Julia – and Julia turned at the door and thumbed her nose at the major and I felt an awful tickle of laughter like I was going to hoot and howl. Alice pinched me and smiled and pretended she was singing. We marched upstairs. You could see all our gingham dresses exactly alike. I undressed and got in the gunny sack and big shoes and I could hear somebody crying in their pillow from the next room and the cries of the hungry babies in the nursery. Alice touched my cheek and showed me a tiny flashlight she had under her pillow. I didn’t led sleepy so we began to “talk." She wrote, Don’t cry. We, the common people, suffer together . I didn’t know what she meant. How did she know I felt sad? She nodded and wrote again. Nothing can hold us apart... See. .. even deafness; then she wrote, Or loneliness. And then – Or fear. I looked at her. I nodded. She held the flashlight cupped by her hand so it couldn’t he seen from the hall. I wrote, How? We are organizing, she wrote. I read it. Then she wrote, Nothing can stop us. The matron came down the hall and her face went dark and you couldn’t hear a sound. When she had passed, the light went on again and Alice was leaning over the pad. I read, I am with the Workers Alliance. I looked at it a long time. I wrote, Amelia too? She nodded and smiled. I chewed the pencil and then I wrote, I worked all my life.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 14 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(15) She read it and nodded and pointed to herself, shaking her head in a quick joyful way, and pointed to her own breast. She grabbed the pad. She looked at me like she loved me, then she wrote swiftly. I took the pad. I was excited. I read, We are both workers! She rolled over, the light went out, and I could hear her laughing. I began to laugh too. When she turned on the light again we could not write fast enough. I wrote, What does it do, the Workers Alliance? They demand food, jobs, she wrote quickly. I looked at the word demand. It was a strong word. I didn’t know what to write. I looked at it a long time. She looked at me and when I looked at her she smiled and nodded like she was going through a woods and I was following her. She leaned over and the light shone through her thin hand. She put her hand under her cheek, closed her eyes, which I saw meant sleep, and then she wrote in a bold hand and turned the tiny light on it. Wake tomorrow!. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 15 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(16) Agee & Evans, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [& Women] (1941) This book is a Depression-era classic of famous photographs and text that examines the live of the rural poor. Poverty in the rural areas is as devastating as poverty in the city. Sharecroppers are also known as “tenant farmers”. One should be aware of the special conditions that result from seasonal patterns of work and production in an agrarian (peasant) society; also, the workers’ dependency on an almost feudal economic system. Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers in their generations giving counsel by their understanding, and proclaiming prophecies; leaders of the people in their deliberations and in understanding of learning for the people, wise in their words of instruction; those who composed musical tunes, and set forth verses in writing; rich men furnished with resources, living peaceably in their habitations -all these were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their times.. The LORD apportioned to them great glory, his majesty from the beginning. There were those who ruled in their kingdoms, and were men renowned for their power, There are some of them who have left a name, so that men declare their praise. And there are some who have no memorial, who have perished as though they had not lived; they have become as though they had not been born, and so have their children after them. Ecclesiasticus 44:1-9 Below are pictures drawn from the book. What impact do they have on you?. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 16 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(17) The "Four Freedoms" Franklin D. Roosevelt's Address to Congress January 6, 1941 In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions -- without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society. This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory. From Congressional Record, 1941, Vol. 87, Pt. I.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 17 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(18) Betty Friedan, from The Feminine Mystique (1963) Chapter 1 – "The Problem that Has No Name" The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?" For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire--no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights--the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children. By the end of the nineteen-fifties, the average marriage age of women in America dropped to 20, and was still dropping, into the teens. Fourteen million girls were engaged by 17. The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped fro m 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar. Colleges built dormitories for "married students," but the students were almost always the husbands. A new degree was instituted for the wives--"Ph.T." (Putting Husband Through). Then American girls began getting married in high school. And the women's magazines, deploring the unhappy statistics about these young marriages, urged that courses on marriage, and marriage counselors, be installed in the high schools. Girls started going steady at twelve and thirteen, in junior high. Manufacturers put out brassieres with false bosoms of foam rubber for little girls of ten. And on advertisement for a child's dress, sizes 3-6x, in the New York Times in the fall of 1960, said: "She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set." By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India's. The birth-control movement, renamed Planned Parenthood, was asked to find a method whereby women who had been advised that a third or fourth baby would be born dead or defective might have it anyhow. Statisticians were especially astounded at the fantastic increase in the number of babies among college women. Where once they had two children, now they had four, five, six. Women who had once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies. So rejoiced Life magazine in a 1956 paean to the movement of American women back to the home.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 18 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(19) In a New York hospital, a woman had a nervous breakdown when she found she could not breastfeed her baby. In other hospitals, women dying of cancer refused a drug which research had proved might save their lives: its side effects were said to be unfeminine. "If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde," a larger-than-life- sized picture of a pretty, vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper, magazine, and drugstore ads. And across America, three out of every ten women dyed their hair blonde. They ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young models. Department-store buyers reported that American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller. "Women are out to fit the clothes, instead of vice-versa," one buyer said. Interior decorators were designing kitchens with mosaic murals and original paintings, for kitchens were once again the center of women's lives. Home sewing became a million-dollar industry. Many women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children, or attend a social engagement with their husbands. Girls were growing up in America without ever having jobs outside the home. In the late fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly remarked: a third of American women now worked, but most were no longer young and very few were pursuing careers. They were married women who held part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons through college, or to help pay the mortgage. Or they were widows supporting families. Fewer and fewer women were entering professional work. The shortages in the nursing, social work, and teaching professions caused crises in almost every American city. Concerned over the Soviet Union's lead in the space race, scientists noted that America's greatest source of unused brain-power was women. But girls would not study physics: it was "unfeminine." A girl refused a science fellowship at Johns Hopkins to take a job in a real-estate office. All she wanted, she said, was what every other American girl wanted--to get married, have four children and live in a nice house in a nice suburb. The suburban housewife--she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife--freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of. In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children's clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rughoolag class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: "Occupation: housewife." For over fifteen years, the words written for women, and the words women used when they talked to each other, while their husbands sat on the other side of the room and talked shop or politics or septic tanks, were about problems with their children, or how to keep their husbands happy, or improve their children's school, or cook chicken or make slipcovers. Nobody argued whether women were inferior or superior to men; they were simply different. Words like "emancipation" and "career" sounded strange and embarrassing; no one had used them for years. When a Frenchwoman named Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called The Second Sex, an American critic commented that she obviously "didn't know what life. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 19 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(20) was all about," and besides, she was talking about French women. The "woman problem" in America no longer existed. If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it. If she tried to tell her husband, he didn't understand what she was talking about. She did not really understand it herself. For over fifteen years women in America found it harder to talk about the problem than about sex. Even the psychoanalysts had no name for it. When a woman went to a psychiatrist for help, as many women did, she would say, "I'm so ashamed," or "I must be hopelessly neurotic." "I don't know what's wrong with women today," a suburban psychiatrist said uneasily. "I only know something is wrong because most of my patients happen to be women. And their problem isn't sexual." Most women with this problem did not go to see a psychoanalyst, however. "There's nothing wrong really," they kept telling themselves, "There isn't any problem." But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, "the problem." And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone. Gradually I came to realize that the problem that has no name was shared by countless women in America. As a magazine writer I often interviewed women about problems with their children, or their marriages, or their houses, or their communities. But after a while I began to recognize the telltale signs of this other problem. I saw the same signs in suburban ranch houses and split-levels on Long Island and in New Jersey and Westchester County; in colonial houses in a small Massachusetts town; on patios in Memphis; in suburban and city apartments; in living rooms in the Midwest. Sometimes I sensed the problem, not as a reporter, but as a suburban housewife, for during this time I was also bringing up my own three children in Rockland County, New York. I heard echoes of the problem in college dormitories and semiprivate maternity wards, at PTA meetings and luncheons of the League of Women Voters, at suburban cocktail parties, in station wagons waiting for trains, and in snatches of conversation overheard at Schrafft's. The groping words I heard from other women, on quiet afternoons when children were at school or on quiet evenings when husbands worked late, I think I understood first as a woman long before I understood their larger social and psychological implications. Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say "I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete." Or she would say, "I feel as if I don't exist." Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes, she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: "A tired feeling. . . I get so angry with the children it scares me . . . I feel like crying without any reason." (A Cleveland doctor called it "the housewife's syndrome.") A number of women told me about great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and arms. "I call it the house wife's blight" said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. "I see it so often lately in these young women with four, five and six children who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn't caused by detergent and it isn't cured by cortisone.". Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 20 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(21) Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn't laugh because she doesn't hear it. I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst's couch, working out their "adjustment to the feminine role," their blocks to "fulfillment as a wife and mother." But the desperate tone in these women's voices, and the look in their eyes, was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation. A mother of four who left college at nineteen to get married told me: I've tried everything women are supposed to do--hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, being very social with my neighbors, joining committees, running PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn't leave you anything to think about--any feeling of who you are. I never had any career ambitions. All I wanted was to get married and have four children. I love the kids and Bob and my home. There's no problem you can even put a name to. But I'm desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I'm a server of food and putter-on of pants and a bed maker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I? A twenty-three-year-old mother in blue jeans said: I ask myself why I'm so dissatisfied. I've got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money. My husband has a real future as an electronics engineer. He doesn't have any of these feelings. He says maybe I need a vacation, let's go to New York for a weekend. But that isn't it. I always had this idea we should do everything together. I can't sit down and read a book alone. If the children are napping and I have one hour to myself I just walk through the house waiting for them to wake up. I don't make a move until I know where the rest of the crowd is going. It's as if ever since you were a little girl, there's always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there's nothing to look forward to. A young wife in a Long Island development said: I seem to sleep so much. I don't know why I should be so tired. This house isn't nearly so hard to clean as the cold-water Hat we had when I was working. The children are at school all day. It's not the work. I just don't feel alive. In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife. In the television commercials the pretty housewives still beamed over their foaming dishpans and Time's cover story on "The Suburban Wife, an American Phenomenon" protested: "Having too good a time . . . to believe that they should be unhappy." But the actual unhappiness of the American housewife was suddenly being reported--from the New York Times and Newsweek to Good Housekeeping and CBS Television ("The Trapped Housewife"), although almost everybody who talked about it found some superficial reason to dismiss it. It was attributed to incompetent appliance repairmen (New York Times), or the distances children must be chauffeured in the suburbs (Time), or too much PTA (Redbook). Some said it was the old problem--education: more and more women had education, which naturally made them unhappy in their role as housewives. "The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one," reported the New York Times (June 28,1960). "Many young women-certainly not all--whose education plunged them into a world of ideas feel stifled in their homes. They find their routine lives out of joint with their training. Like shut-ins, they feel left out. In the last year, the problem of the educated housewife has provided the meat of dozens of speeches made by troubled presidents of women's colleges who maintain, in the face of complaints, that sixteen years of academic training is realistic preparation for wifehood and motherhood.". Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 21 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(22) There was much sympathy for the educated housewife. ("Like a two-headed schizophrenic . . . once she wrote a paper on the Graveyard poets; now she writes notes to the milkman. Once she determined the boiling point of sulphuric acid; now she determine s her boiling point with the overdue repairman....The housewife often is reduced to screams and tears.... No one, it seems, is appreciative, least of all herself, of the kind of person she becomes in the process of turning from poetess into shrew.") Home economists suggested more realistic preparation for housewives, such as high-school workshops in home appliances. College educators suggested more discussion groups on home management and the family, to prepare women for the adjustment to domestic life. A spate of articles appeared in the mass magazines offering "Fifty-eight Ways to Make Your Marriage More Exciting." No month went by without a new book by a psychiatrist or sexologist offering technical advice on finding greater fulfillment through sex. A male humorist joked in Harper's Bazaar (July, 1960) that the problem could be solved by taking away woman's right to vote. ("In the pre-19th Amendment era, the American woman was placid, sheltered and sure of her role in American society. She left all the political decisions to her husband and he, in turn, left all the family decisions to her. Today a woman has to make both the family and the political decisions, and it's too much for her.") A number of educators suggested seriously that women no longer be admitted to the four-year colleges and universities: in the growing college crisis, the education which girls could not use as housewives was more urgently needed than ever by boys to do the work of the atomic age. The problem was also dismissed with drastic solutions no one could take seriously,. (A woman writer proposed in Harper's that women be drafted for compulsory service as nurses' aides and baby-sitters.) And it was smoothed over with the age-old panaceas: "love is their answer," "the only answer is inner help," "the secret of completeness--children," "a private means of intellectual fulfillment," "to cure this toothache of the spirit--the simple formula of handling one's self and one's will over to God."1 The problem was dismissed by telling the housewife she doesn't realize how lucky she is--her own boss, no time clock, no junior executive gunning for her job. What if she isn't happy--does she think men are happy in this world? Does she really, secretly, still want to be a man? Doesn't she know yet how lucky she is to be a woman? The problem was also, and finally, dismissed by shrugging that there are NO solutions: this is what being a woman means, and what is wrong with American women that they can't accept their role gracefully? As Newsweek put it (March 7, 1960): She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of. Her discontent is deep, pervasive, and impervious to the superficial remedies which are offered at every hand.... An army of professional explorers have already charted the major sources of trouble.... From the beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman's role. As Freud was credited with saying: "Anatomy is destiny." Though no group of women has ever pushed these natural restrictions as far as the American wife, it seems that she still cannot accept them with good grace.... A young mother with a beautiful family, charm, talent and brains is apt to dismiss her role apologetically. "What do I do?" you hear her say. Why nothing. I'm just a housewife." A good education, it seems, has given this paragon among women an understanding of the value of everything except her own worth. . . And so she must accept the fact that "American women's unhappiness is merely the most recently won of women's rights," and adjust and say with the happy housewife found by Newsweek: "We ought to salute the wonderful freedom we all have and be proud of our lives today. I have had college and I've worked, but being a housewife is the most rewarding and satisfying role.... My mother was never included in my. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 22 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(23) father's business affairs. . . she couldn't get out of the house and away from us children. But I am an equal to my husband; I can go along with him on business trips and to social business affairs." The alternative offered was a choice that few women would contemplate. In the sympathetic words of the New York Times: "All admit to being deeply frustrated at times by the lack of privacy, the physical burden, the routine of family life, the confinement of it. However, none would give up her home and family if she had the choice to make again." Redbook commented: "Few women would want to thumb their noses at husbands, children and community and go off on their own. Those who do may be talented individuals, but they rarely are successful women." The year American women's discontent boiled over, it was also reported (Look) that the more than 21,000,000 American women who are single, widowed, or divorced do not cease even after fifty their frenzied, desperate search for a man. And the search begins early--for seventy per cent of all American women now marry before they are twenty-four. A pretty twenty-five-year-old secretary took thirty-five different jobs in six months in the futile hope of finding a husband. Women were moving from one political club to another, taking evening courses in accounting or sailing, learning to play golf or ski, joining a number of churches in succession, going to bars alone, in their ceaseless search for a man. Of the growing thousands of women currently getting private psychiatric help in the United States, the married ones were reported dissatisfied with their marriages, the unmarried ones suffering from anxiety and, finally, depression. Strangely, a number of psychiatrists stated that, in their experience, unmarried women patients were happier than married ones. So the door of all those pretty suburban houses opened a crack to permit a glimpse of uncounted thousands of American housewives who suffered alone from a problem that suddenly everyone was talking about, and beginning to take for granted, as one of those unreal problems in American life that can never be solved-like the hydrogen bomb. By 1962 the plight of the trapped American housewife had become a national parlor game. Whole issues of magazines, newspaper columns, books learned and frivolous, educational conferences and television panels were devoted to the problem. Even so, most men, and some women, still did not know that this problem was real. But those who had faced it honestly knew that all the superficial remedies, the sympathetic advice, the scolding words and the cheering words were somehow drowning the problem in unreality. A bitter laugh was beginning to be heard from American women. They were admired, envied, pitied, theorized over until they were sick of it, offered drastic solutions or silly choices that no one could take seriously. They got all kinds of advice from the growing armies of marriage and child-guidance counselors, psychotherapists, and armchair psychologists, on how to adjust to their role as housewives. No other road to fulfillment was offered to American women in the middle of the twentieth century. Most adjusted to their role and suffered or ignored the problem that has no name. It can be less painful for a woman, not to hear the strange, dissatisfied voice stirring within her. It is NO longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women whose husbands are struggling intern and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers; in wives of workers and executives who make $5,000 a year or $50,000. It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 23 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

(24) It is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and equality with men have made American women unfeminine. I have heard so many women try to deny this dissatisfied voice within themselves because it does not fit the pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them. I think, in fact, that this is the first clue to the mystery; the problem cannot be understood in the generally accepted terms by which scientists have studied women, doctors have treated them, counselors have advised them, and writers have written about them. Women who suffer this problem, in whom this voice is stirring, have lived their whole lives in the pursuit of feminine fulfillment. They are not career women (although career women may have other problems); they are women whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children. For the oldest of these women, these daughters of the American middle class, no other dream was possible. The ones in their forties and fifties who once had other dreams gave them up and threw themselves joyously into life as housewives. For the youngest, the new wives and mothers, this was the only dream. They are the ones who quit high school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no real interest until they married. These women are very "feminine" in the usual sense, and yet they still suffer the problem. Are the women who finished college, the women who once had dreams beyond housewifery, the ones who suffer the most? According to the experts they are, but listen to these four women: My days are all busy, and dull, too. All I ever do is mess around. I get up at eight--I make breakfast, so I do the dishes, have lunch, do some more dishes, and some laundry and cleaning in the afternoon. Then it's supper dishes and I get to sit down a few minutes, before the children have to be sent to bed. . . That's all there is to my day. It's just like any other wife's day. Humdrum. The biggest time, I am chasing kids. Ye Gods, what do I do with my time? Well, I get up at six. I get my son dressed and then give him breakfast. After that I wash dishes and bathe and feed the baby. Then I get lunch and while the children nap, I sew or mend or iron and do all the other things I can't get done before noon. Then I cook supper for the family and my husband watches TV while I do the dishes. After I get the children to bed, I set my hair and then I go to bed. The problem is always being the children's mommy, or the minister's wife and never being myself. A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers' comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me through the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood. Many of my friends are even more frantic In the past sixty years we have come full circle and the American housewife is once again trapped in a squirrel cage. If the cage is now a modern plateglass -and-broadloom ranch house or a convenient modern apartment, the situation is no less painful than when her grandmother sat over an embroidery hoop in her gilt-end-plush parlor and muttered angrily about women's rights. The first two women never went to college. They live in developments in Levittown, New Jersey, and Tacoma, Washington, and were interviewed by a team of sociologists studying workingmen's wives. 2 The third, a minister's wife, wrote on the fifteenth reunion questionnaire of her college that she never had any career ambitions, but wishes now she had. The fourth, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, is today a Nebraska housewife with three children.. Their words seem to indicate that housewives of all educational levels suffer the same feeling of desperation.. Dr. John Paul Tabakian. Page 24 of 40. Political Science 5 - Course Pack #7.

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