Secret alcoholism, punitive gynecology, and other secrets of smiling 1950s American housewives

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Many conservative Americans recall the fifties with nostalgia as a world of well-fed, tidy children, courageous men and lovely smiling women. However, sociological studies show that this same decade was a time when American women sat tightly on sedatives and doctors calmly conducted the strangest experiments on them.

The mystery of femininity

America in the twenties was the country where young women made records, like the pilot Amelia Earhart, in the thirties - amazing discoveries like Cecilia Payne in the forties - showed that they can literally everything, replacing men who went to the front in many areas of work, from factories before science. However, in the fifties, high school students, when asked by a journalist who they would like to become, hesitantly answered that they would most likely get married. They did not even imagine that a woman could become someone, as if there had not been three decades of breakthrough before.

After the war and the return of men from the front, very quickly - largely thanks to the developed advertising industry - a stereotype of a happy life was formed: a house is a full bowl. Sparkling, well appointed, spacious, with two or three kids and a table full of food. In fact, such a house meant the daily painstaking work of the mother of the children - after all, with so many babies, she still could not work, which means she would stay at home and work with her husband and father overtime. Unique circumstances made it possible to make the long-standing ideal of the bourgeois family a reality for many Americans.

And this reality looked exactly like in advertising. Housewives not only had time to take the children to school, lick the house and cook a hearty dinner, but they also watched their hair, manicure and makeup all day so that they always look like in the picture. Some, as in the advertisements, even wore high-heeled shoes around the house. It was even considered useful: they say, flat feet develop from house slippers, and the heel preserves the leg.

The dark side of this glossy life was revealed very quickly. Women not only did not feel happy - they were deeply unhappy. The husband, who appeared at home as if only to scatter things and turn into nothing the fruits of labor in the kitchen (adding work in the form of dirty dishes), did not evoke tenderness. Children have become a constant test: if they do not behave like a family TV show and do not look like the picture, then you are a bad mother. Routine was exhausting, long-buried "unfeminine" dreams of art, science, just a career or travel and adventure ached in the soul like a long-standing chronic inflammation.

The husbands were not much happier at home. To provide life like the picture, they worked overtime and returned home irritated. Any little thing pissed them off and seemed like a sign that their efforts were not appreciated and that they themselves were not respected. Coupled with the fact that the beating of the "wrong" wives was an unspoken social norm, there could be no question of any family love.

Psychotherapists who have become widespread have discovered one more thing. The ever-smiling, beautiful, and well-done women in America were chronic alcoholics, and they also drank the sedatives prescribed to their children (at their insistence). Literally half of the country was on Prozac and Vino. This is the only thing that helped to cope with constant stress, neurosis due to the impossibility of being ideal and happy at the same time, like those women in advertising, husband's aggression and feelings of guilt in front of children.

In 1963, a big scandal was caused by the book The Mystery of Femininity, which described this problem, written by feminist and journalist Betty Friedan. The artificial happiness of the nation in it appeared to be built on quite real misfortunes, and above all - the unhappy life of women.

Punitive gynecology

Alcoholism and the uncontrolled use of antidepressants were not the only problems for American women in the fifties. Gynecologists, who were supposed to help women, often tortured and maimed them. It is difficult to imagine, but in the fifties, female circumcision was practiced in a far from Muslim country for purposes that were declared as medical, but in fact were ideological and religious.

First, a clitorectomy - the very operation that removes the head of the clitoris - was done for very young girls. Parents, having discovered their daughter for the fact that she touches her genitals with a real or imagined parental purpose of pleasure, could easily take the child to the doctor. And he offered to carry out an operation as a wonderful way to save the girl's morality.

In addition to mental trauma, a strong decrease in the sensitivity of the vagina and anorgasmia, clitorectomy also led to such a side effect as scarring of the tissues of the vulva, which prevented the woman from giving birth on her own. Of course, there were surgeons at her service, but if a woman was not lucky to give birth on her own, then she was then buried with her child. This is not counting the fact that the cesarean section itself is an abdominal operation, after which it takes longer to recover than after a normal birth, and which sometimes gives complications.

Moreover, at the insistence of her husband, a clitorectomy could also be performed on an adult woman - in order to cure her of hysteria (which included even just manifestations of a woman's depressed state, such as tearfulness or her willingness to defend her opinion) or alleged nymphomania.

The services of gynecologists to curb women did not end there. Because of the once again popular moralizing approach to sexuality education, both girls and boys were equally unprepared for family life. The young wives did not really understand what they wanted from them, and were frightened, the young husbands had no idea not that about the foreplay - about the fact that it would be worthwhile to show delicacy, and rudely attacked the women. As a result, the phenomenon of vaginismus was quite frequent - a spasm that prevented a man from penetrating. This is one of the natural defense mechanisms that does not allow a woman to be injured in one of the most tender places, but thanks to the very peculiar development of psychoanalysis, doctors viewed it as a woman's subconscious desire to dominate her husband, dominate him, a resistance to his male power.

The woman was also treated for "domination" by a gynecologist, roughly, without anesthesia, stretching the delicate tissues of the vagina with a steel mirror. One of the nurses, who wrote a book about this practice (and considered it normal and necessary), frankly admitted that the patients were in terrible pain, but they themselves were to blame. It was necessary from the very beginning to submit to the man.

Moreover, it happened that the husband accepted the unwillingness of his wife and they limited themselves to affection, moreover, both were completely satisfied with their family life. But the young mother or her mother-in-law found out about this and took them to the gynecologist so that everything would be as it should be. The woman did not even resist - after all, she was convinced that something was wrong with her and she urgently needed to be cured.

Lobotomy

In the forties, such an operation as a lobotomy gained immense popularity in the United States. She was treated for depression, anxiety, autism, schizophrenia, adolescent naughty and female hysteria. They made it with a knife to chop ice through the eye socket. Psychiatrist Freeman, who traveled across the country in a "lobotomobile", was a real enthusiast of the technique. He used electroshock for pain relief.

Studies in the fifties found that not only mortality rates of up to 6% were a side effect of lobotomy, but also epilepsy, weight gain, loss of coordination, partial paralysis, and urinary incontinence. However, among the side effects were also apathy, emotional dullness, the inability to think critically and proactively, to predict the further course of events, to make plans for the future and to do any work, except for the most primitive, so that as a popular means of "treating women" it lasted almost everything. fifties. If something went wrong and the woman did not just become very calm and obedient, but began to write for herself or fall in seizures of epilepsy, she was simply sent to the clinic for life as spoiled.

Needless to say, there is nothing surprising in the fact that such treatment of women led to a real explosion of feminist rebellion, to the fact that in the sixties thousands of girls from good families left home, joined hippies, worked for a penny in big cities, filming rooms with friends, and refused to broadcast family values, which seemed eternal to society, further.

The United States of the fifties was generally not the most comfortable country for the life of many people, and not only middle-class women. Movies for the colored, Chinatown for the Japanese: this is what racial segregation looked like in old Americathat some Trump supporters are now nostalgic about.