Foraging For Female Fictions

Over the past fifty years American women have consumed an abundance of often conflicting imagery about our role in the world and bits and pieces of these mass media representations remain imprinted in each of us.

Throughout the year, I will post a different fragment of the story. Utilizing collage they becomes the perfect expression for the fragmentation we have all experienced. The art work is composed of hundreds of mass media images appropriated from sources as varied as vintage women’s magazines from the 1940s through the 70s, vintage advertising illustration, retro romance comics, pulp fiction novels and vintage children’s books

1950’s media stereotypes of women seeking self definition through motherhood in Sally Edelsteins collage of vintage images

Growing Up Female

Like most women growing up in the 1960s I was fed a generous helping of sugar-coated media stereotypes of happy homemakers who were as frozen and neatly packaged as the processed food they served their Cold war families.

Within a decade’s time, these same images would be thawed out under the hot glare of a woman’s movement only to be joined by a heaping helping of new conflicting media representations of how a girl’s life should be.

A Grim Fairy Tale

Skillfully weaving fairy tales along with the Grimm Brothers the MAD Men of Madison Avenue spun a yarn or two themselves. Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater may have put his wife in a pumpkin shell ( … and there he kept her very well ) but the Cold war media had a hand in keeping her there too.

Of all the fairy tales I grew up with the one about “Becoming a Woman” was the best fairy tale of all.

I am honored to be a part of a very timely exhibition at the National Steinbeck Center , in Salinas CA. entitled “Honoring Women’s Right: Echoing Visual Voices Together” showcasing art work that examines and explores the social, political, and economic issues related to women’s activism.

Like most women growing up in the 1950s and 1960s I was fed a generous serving of sugar-coated media stereotypes of happy homemakers who were as frozen and neatly packaged as the processed foods they served their cold war families.

The Feminine Mistake 1960

In the years before I went to Kindergarten, I shadowed my mother Betty  everywhere she went.

Within her suburban sphere of influence I was a contented little satellite, spinning in her orbit.

Whether shopping or schlepping, picking up or dropping off, I would follow in her footsteps…literally. The task I enjoyed tagging along with the most was her weekly appointment at the Glam-A-Rama Beauty Parlor.

Glam-A- Rama Beauty Parlor

The beauty parlor was a unique universe unlike any place else, where unfamiliar, strange-looking equipment was being used by familiar neighborhood women looking strange.

All dressed alike, their ordinary clothes replaced by identical leopard print smocks, it was a universe with its own uniform.

A universe where gossip was as hot and swift as the air blowing through the missile shaped hairdryers, a world where I was privy to carefully guarded grown up secrets.

Strange intimacies grew between women who organized carpools and now found themselves sitting, captive under pink hair dryers.

These conversations were unlike the hurried confidences exchanged as Friday’s schedule was switched with Tuesdays, pick-ups and deliveries reversed, or when a tired mother deposits the last child and stayed for a quick cup of instant coffee.

It was over the roar of the dryers in the afternoons while casseroles simmered in automatic ovens back home that these women gave full voice to secret whispering fears. Somehow dread words could be spoken and reassurances offered.

In the shadow of the hairdryers, as nails were polished, calluses scraped and hair teased, dread words could be safely spoken.

Post War Periodicals

(R) Ladies Home Journal 5/52 illustration Al Parker

Sinking into a padded turquoise swivel styling chair, I sat next to Mom, carefully watching as Miss Blanche the hairdresser, combed and teased, bombarding Mom with hairspray.

This was truly a space age hair-do with its propulsion accomplished by strenuous backcombing.

Mom would sit in the hydraulic  chair reading 2 month old, dog-eared copies of McCalls and Good Housekeeping, while  Miss Blanche maintaining a steady flow of mindless chatter as she worked.

Magazine Madness

Tucked within those pages, the periodicals promised the modern mid-century housewife would find exactly the right information and products that would give her the knowledge to excel in her role as wife and mother.

Glancing at her favorite magazines at the Glama-Rama only seemed to confirm what Mom knew in her heart to be true- that love, marriage, and children is The career for women.

“Yes,” she would read, nodding in agreement “for today’s homemaker her home is her castle.”

“Snug within it she basks in the warmth of a good mans love…glories in the laughter of healthy children…glows with pride in every new acquisition that adds color or comfort pleasure or leisure to her family’s life.”

“And, she’s always there! She’s an up to date modern American homemaker.”

Breathing in deeply of the beauty parlor air heavy with the cloying sweetness of perfume diluted by the acrid smell of singed hair, Mom sighed contently.

Home Work

Of course, the gals all agreed, some poor mothers had to work to provide for their families.

The big talk that day that set tongues wagging concerned Shirley Birnbaum who was pregnant and planned to go back to work as a teacher after she had a baby!

“But the ones I’d like to talk about,” our neighbor Estelle Wolfson said between puffs of her Parliament  pointing to an article in one magazine, “are those who feel that household and community activities are for “squares.”

The curler clad ladies nodded in unison.

Can This Marriage Be Saved

By the fall of 1960 there had began to appear some quiet rumblings among some unhappy housewives across the country.

Now and again Mom would read an article, usually in the Can This Marriage be Saved column, about those few unfortunate women who felt stifled and lonely in their marriage.

“Feminists” or anyone who couldn’t find fulfillment in the Lady Clairol colorful cold war world of carpools, cookouts, cream of mushroom soup casseroles, and catering to contented children and happy-go-lucky husbands, were disturbed.

Flipping through one magazine, she noticed that September’s Redbook offered a $500 prize for the best essay on “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped.”

It triggered an unexpectedly large response 24,000 entries.

Another magazine, Good Housekeeping   also tapped into this vein of unhappiness with a September article of its own. “I Say: Women Are People Too.”

The article caught Moms eye.

It noted “a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning” by American women, a sense that there must be more to life than raising children and maintaining a clean comfortable home.

The magazine urged its readers to overcome their malaise by taking charge of their lives. “She can’t live through her husband and children.” It said of the typical housewife. “They are separate selves. She has to find her own fulfillment first.”

The author of the Good Housekeeping article was by another Betty, Betty Friedan, a 39-year-old freelance writer from NY suburbs

Friedan was asked to assemble a booklet for her Smith college class 15^th reunion in 1957. She sent out questionnaires expecting to be inundated with cheerful stories about successful careers and young families. Many classmates responded with tales of depression and frustration. It was Friedans first clue than many thousands of women shared her own dissatisfaction.

The Smith questionnaire inspired her to undertake a detailed examination of what she called “the problem that has no name” interviewing hundreds of women in NY Chicago and Boston.

The Good Housekeeping piece sprang from this research. She had started a book manuscript by Oct 1960.

The book entitled The Feminine Mystique wouldn’t be published until 1963.

Duz She or Duzn’t  She

Mom dismissed these grumblings and put down the magazine.

She never felt constrained.

She saw her life as full of choices after all she as free to choose- automobiles, clothes appliances and supermarkets.

Freedom was all around her.

Suddenly she was carefree with her automatic dishwasher, there was freedom from brushing between meals with Gleem toothpaste, you could relax if its Arnel with new ease of care, sofas covered with Velon plastic, meant she was no longer a slave to delicate upholstery, even her waist whittling calorie curve cuttin’ Playtex girdle promised her new freedom.

And best of all there was freedom to choose from a dazzling assortment at the supermarkets.

Thinking the Unthinkable

Patting her lush brown bouffant coif floating like a gentle cloud above her head, Mom left the beauty parlor happy. With a new recipe for cheese Fondue clutched in her hands and a sure-fire solution for removing ring around the collar, Mom was content. For now my mother Betty would follow in the footprints of another Betty, Betty Crocker, satisfied in her role as housewife and mother. 

The problem that had no name was so unfathomable no one even thought they had a problem. It was buried as deeply as our missiles underground, and would cause the same explosion when they were released.

Copyright (©) 2013 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

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Illustration Saturday Evening Post Feb 16 1957 Steve Dohanos illustrator

Before Domestic Diva Martha Stewart instructed American women in how to be the perfect homemaker, high school girls were required to take Home Economic classes.

Since every girl had dreams off being the perfect homemaker, it was perfectly natural to prepare these girls for the duties of married life. And High schools across the nation willingly obliged with essential life training classes as folding laundry, making hospital corners, setting a gracious table and mastering the perfect flaky biscuit.

Two back to back Saturday Evening Post covers from February 1957 perfectly illustrate that ideal of the life that lay ahead for a well brought up mid-century girl.

Cover illustration Steve Dohanos Saturday Evening Post Feb 16 1957

Cover illustration Saturday Evening Post Feb 16 1957

The text that accompanies the illustration by Steve Dohanos in this Feb 16, 1957 cover explains :

“Every girl should study the art of gracious homemaking, but as there is little time for this at home on account of take home schoolwork, time is set aside for it in school.”

“There, a girl learns how to bake an upside down cake that doesn’t turn out right side up, how to create a dress which doesn’t resemble a gunny sack, and how to make a table setting fit for a king or a husband. Illustrator Steve Dohanos has a theory that girls should not only be pretty but also pretty good cooks.”

Saturday Evening Post Illustration George Hughes Feb. 9,1957

The description for the previous weeks cover illustration  by George Hughes speaks volumes:

“It is the duty of every girl to talk to boys on the telephone, kindle romantic sentiments, round-up potential husbands and thus help perpetuate the race by assuring that by and by she will become a homemaker.

Therefore it is comforting to see Sister applying herself earnestly to homework. Of course she should get in some bookwork, too; math for instance, is useful in budgeting, so that two can live as cheaply as-er-possible.

Well, she’ll do alright, for American girls are pretty wonderful at getting good grades in both education and romance”

Not that any matrimonial minded girl had to be talked into taking Home Ec, but in 1955  an educational film was produced entitled “Why Study Home Economics” Made in Lawrence Kansas, it was intended for distribution to High School students.

It tells the story of an adolescent girl Janice who decides whether or not to take home economics. When Janice is asked why she is interested in Home Economics she responds; “If I’m going to be a housewife for the rest of my life, I want to know what I’m doing!”

Copyright (©) 2013 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

Related articles

• Occupation: Housewife (envisioningtheamericandream.wordpress.com)
• Matriculating Into Mid-Century Matrimony http://envisioningtheamericandream.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/matriculating-into-mid-century-matrimony/
•  The Real Housewives of the Cold War http://envisioningtheamericandream.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/the-real-housewives-of-the-cold-war/

Vintage ad 1948 Cavalier Cedar Chests -Perfect to pack away all your lovely things for your new married life.

Looks like the gal graduate in this ad was one smart cookie and not just because she earned a college diploma.

Betty Coed knew college was the best place to snare a man to marry. Maybe the Princeton Mom was onto something.

Of course this ad ran in 1948, only confirming that Susan Patton’s silly advise to husband hunt in college is as antiquated as the notion once held that girls went to college to get their MRS degree.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014.

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Occupation: 1960 Housewife

Mad Men’s Peggy Olson Big Time Career Girl (R) Vintage DC Comics
“This is the big chance I’ve been waiting for! I mustn’t fail this time! Not love or anything else is going to keep me from success!”

We have watched with pride as Mad Men’s Peggy Olson has risen from the ranks of treading water in the secretarial pool to swimming with the big fishes on Madison Avenue.

As the Mad Men at Sterling Cooper & Partners implode all around her, Peggy’s star is rising.  Last seen in season 6 sitting behind Don Draper’s vacant desk, one wonders, who’s wearing the polyester pant suit now?

You’ve come a long way, Peggy Olson, from Miss Deaver’s Secretarial School to  head copywriter at  SP & Partners. and now with Don’s absence poised to become Creative Director.

You’ve Come A Long Way Baby?

In season 5 when Peggy became the new chief copywriter at a rival Madison Avenue agency after leaving Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in the dust, she was handed Phillip Morris’s latest offering to the world of smoking -a cigarette especially for  m’lady.

It was a top, secret as yet unnamed women’s cigarette which of course we all know would be  the Virginia Slims Cigarette account. These new cigarettes were slimmer than the fat cigarettes men smoke, and were tailored slim to fit a lady’s hand, her lips, and her purse.

This Nov 1968 ad for Virginia Slims with its picture of a turn of the century woman sneaking a smoke, presents the following scenario; “In 1915, Mrs. Cynthia Robinson was caught smoking in the cellar behind the preserves. Although she was 34, her husband sent her straight to her room.”

This was the beginning of Madison Avenue attempt to pander to the “New Woman.”

Mirroring the burgeoning women’s liberation movement , the early campaign themes of feminism and women’s lib carried the slogan “You’ve come a long way baby.”

This September 1968 vintage advertisement for Virginia Slims explains just what this extra long cigarette for women is. The text for the vintage photo of early 20th century women is as follows: “1. Mrs Violet Anderson claims to have smoked her first cigarette on May 19, 1910…in the attic of her grandfathers farmhouse. 2.Cynthia Irene Bell smoked her first cigarette behind the old barn out back on Jan. 4, 1912. It was cold. 3. Myrna F. Phillips confesses she smoked March 4 or 5, 1911 out in the country where only a squirrel and a bird could see her. The others offered ‘no comment.’ You’ve come a long way.”

The formulaic ads followed the same theme-bold images of a glamorous, fashionably dressed liberated woman contrasting with pictures of early 20^th century women being reprimanded for being caught smoking by their husband or some other men.

Since it was marketed for the young professional gal, who better to manage this up and coming account than up and comer young professional Peggy Olson, who being single would be willing to work weekends, evenings and holidays.

Vixen by Night

Peggy’s In the Drivers Seat! (R) Vintage ad Body Bu Fisher 1968

But it wasn’t all work for single career girls like Peggy.

Making the scene in groovy go-togethers, her eyes smudged as if with crayolas in iridescent jewel tones of turquoise and sea green, her Yardley slickered lips wet and wild, we got a glimpse this season of Peggy Olson as Vixen by Night. It was clear she was ready to get uninhibited, get liberated and go –go completely Mad!

Coming Attractions 1969

“My place, or yours? Or right here?”
Playboy Magazine Cartoon by John Dempsy

Fast forward to the final season of Mad Men.

It will be 1969 and the sexual revolution was about to get into full swing. Romance and motherhood would become so so passé. You’ve come a long way baby…and babies were definitely not in the picture.

Wake up sister, there was a whole new world out there.

Suddenly it was a liberated world of New Freedom and Peggy would be ready to dive right in to the swinging world of singles. Busting out of her cocoon, and swinging in a butterfly sleeved-A lined mini skirt, Peggy would have her pick from the plethora of dimly lit, Tiffany lamped, singles bars that lined Second and First Avenue on the Upper East side of NY,  foregoing the watering holes of the  wild, wild west of her own Upper West Side neighborhood.

You’ve come a long way from Bay Ridge Brooklyn, Peggy.

Liberated Ladies

Vintage DC Romance Comics

These new liberated ladies were shedding their inhibitions as quickly as they shed their polyester clothes.

There was no place for  squares- virginal Sleeping Beauties were a thing of the past. Gone was the bad girl the one who went all the way and wrecked her whole life. Suddenly it seemed it was a Cold War world of Cosmo girls ready to shake your world, a strange new world of pills and panaceas, of living together, of vibrations and of sexual openness.

(L) Cover Cosmopolitan Magazine model Samantha Jones shot by Francesco Scavullo Dec. 1968 (R) Book- The Sensuous New Yorker by Bernhardt Hurwood Award Books

Uninhibited, stepping out in a leggy little Mary Quant slick and shiny vinyl miniskirts these chicks were girdle-free-garter-free-free-to be you-and-me: they were part of the new freedom generation, a beltless, pinless, fussless generation.

Puffing on her pretty as a picture New Eve cigarettes ( like Virginia Slims, cancer made especially for the ladies) the liberated lady lit her own cigarettes and opened her own doors.

On the go, these sensuous women had no time for pregnancy and no time for cramps. With their birth control pills in one hand, their Midol in the other, these grooving chicks in eye-catching EZ care Quiana polyester in get-him-and-keep-him colors were ready for anything in their quest looking for Mr Goodbar in any of the dozens of crowded single bars that sprouted up in cities everywhere

 Women’s New Freedom

Women’s Liberation (L) Cover Newsweek Magazine March 1970 “Women in Revolt”
(R) Vintage ad for Massengil Feminine Deodorant Spray “Freedom Now! The ad claimed their product was the better way to be free to enjoy being a woman.” You like freedom don’t you?” they asked.

It didn’t take long before companies began creating products and marketing strategies that exploited the idea of the liberated “new woman.”

A seasoned copywriter and smart cookie like Peggy would likely snag onto the hottest new products being marketed to the liberated lady in 1969.  Feminine Hygiene Products. The newly liberated Cosmo Girl could come on strong.

Sexual freedom came at a price.

The drug and cosmetic industry expanded from the underarm deodorant to a more private part of the body. The most “girl part” as they described it. The problem that had no name only 5 years earlier now had a slew on products to help a liberated gal feel confident and feminine.

Feminism and Femininity

(L) Vintage ad for FDS 1969 “This new product will be as essential to you as your toothbrush” (R) DC Romance Comics

By 1969 being confidently close was never nicer. “It’s a freer, more natural, more out in the open world and we’re on you’re side,” the makers of new Feminine Hygiene sprays assured women.

In the body to body environment of the singles scene, competition was fierce.”We know it’s a rough race. And we want you to win!” promised another Feminine spray ad. “Lets face up to the problem like it is. The days of hush-hush are over. Today single and married women have been liberated-in their attire…in their attitudes…in their relationships”

(L) New answer for the intimate embarrassing problems married women face- Vintage 1966 ad for Norforms tiny germicidal suppositories to keep the Mrs. fresh as a daisy

The age-old problem of “intimate embarrassing odor problems” once faced only by married women whose husbands wanted their wife to be feminine…in every sense of the word, was now the sexually active liberated ladies dilemma too.

This was the dawning of the age of FDS.

A welcome new addition to the world of feminine freshness, was this personal deodorant for the ultimate social security. It was, manufacturers were hoping, to become as essential to the new woman’s daily life as a bath and shower.

“Today’s young woman…committed to total femininity is entitled to total confidence,” the ads stated boldly. “With the creation of FDS a whole new era of feminine confidence begins”

Why take a chance Make this your passport to popularity…and to your peace of mind about being a girl. An attractive, nice-to- be- with girl.”

(L) Vintage Ad 1969 Feminique Feminine Hygiene Spray (R) Vintage ad White Horse 1968

Making the scene with FDS was Feminique. Their full-page ad announced provocatively: “ Five years ago most women would have been too embarrassed to read this page”.

“This is a page that will tell you about an external vaginal deodorant spray. A product that would have made your grandmother faint and your mother blush. All it should do to you is make you happy. Very happy.”

“Because now that ‘The Pill’ has freed you from worry, The Spray will help make all that freedom worthwhile.”

“The spray is called Feminique. The name is feminine which is precisely what this product will make you. Feminine in every sense of the word.”

Woman’s New Freedom-Pristeen Is Part Of It

Vintage Pristeen Ads 1969

No one marketed Feminine Hygiene Sprays more aggressively than Pristeen made by Warner Lambert pharmaceuticals.

In 1969 they ran a series of bold ads for the little lady with the headline “Unfortunately the trickiest problem a girl has isn’t under her pretty little arms”.

The text continues: “That was solved a long time ago. The real problem, as you may very well know, is how to keep the most girl part of you- the vaginal area- fresh and free of any worry-making odors.”

“Now finally there is a way. It’s called Pristeen. A brand new vaginal spray deodorant that’s been especially developed to cope with the problem. “(Or create a problem when none really existed)

Vintage Pristeen Ads 1970 Judith Crist talks about woman’s new freedom

The following year in 1970 Pristeen enlisted highly respected movie critic Judith Crist  to talk about “woman’s new freedom” and naturally Pristeen is a part of it. As Ms. Crist espouses on the portrayal of the new woman in films, the ad somehow manages to fit Pristeen into the picture with a starring role. “Now that women have the ‘courage’  to look a little different” to behave a bit more honestly”, they want products to do just that…products that didn’t exist even 5 years ago”

By 1970 there were 30 brands of feminine deodorant sprays on the market and Americans were spending well over $67 million annually in an attempt to be more “feminine”.

Copyright (©) 20014 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

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Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly has some advise for all the single ladies out there.

Quit yer whining about the gender pay gap!

All you husband hunting gals listen up – accepting a lower paycheck is a small price to pay for finding a better breadwinner husband.

Give Me That Old Time Anti Feminism

Vintage Advertisement Honeywell Heaters 1951

Yes marriage advise straight from the same Phyllis Schlafly, Nemesis of NOW, veteran of the anti feminist movement from the 1970’s who successfully mobilized opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

This relic of the gender wars recently penned a piece for the Christian Post making the case that the Gender Pay Gap ultimately helps women.

Unlike other Republicans at least she doesn’t dispute the fact of a gender pay gap.

In fact she thinks it’s a good idea.

A bigger pay gap between men and women is necessary she claims, so women won’t have as hard a time finding a boyfriend or husband.

“The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap, she declares”

Feather Your Nest

Vintage illustration from 1960 Ad

“While women prefer to Have a higher earning partner, men generally prefer to Be the higher earning partner in a relationship,” she wrote.

“Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.”

“If a higher earning man is not available, many women are more likely not to marry at all,” we are warned.

Adjusting wages to help with husband hunting instead of encouraging women to be financially independent makes no cents!

Happily Married

Vintage ad Simtex Cloths

The 1950s notion of marriage with man as breadwinner as the template for the ideal family seems to be the model that Schlafly still hold as the gold standard.

Lets nestle back to that comfortable cold war era of containment where once upon a time patriarchy ruled and the American housewife was perceived as the most envied gal in the world.

Though times have changed for sure, like a toxic overspill some remnants of that mind-set obviously persist.

The Weaker Sex

Vintage Ad Lee Mens Clothes 1947

For the up to date Mid Century American homemaker and helpmate, pretty and perky dressed in a festive apron and a fresh coat of pretty in pink lipstick it was a life of comfort and convenience, flameless, frostfree ,touch-tone, push button ease.

With everything so automatic no wonder she looked to a Man to be in control. Despite this life of ease, she seemed often to be a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by Dudley Do Right.

Who’s in the Drivers Seat?

Vintage ad Mercury Cars 1950

For a successful marriage it was important that the proper Cold war Corporate Housewife understand the tensions of her husband’s job as breadwinner.

When it came to who was in the driver’s seat, there was no question who was in charge.

This  advertisement for Mercury Automobiles from 1950 offered up perfect post war matrimonial advise:

”Dollars to donuts the man of the house takes the wheel especially if it’s a Mercury. ”

“It gives his ego a gentle boost…it feeds his need for a sense of power…it lets him know he’s in control!”

“It’s just one of the little things that make marriage easy to live with”

Vintage Ad Saginaw Power Steering 1953

They even offer a Marriage Quiz?

“Do you ever question your husband’s business judgement they ask? ( if he insists on a Mercury you Know how good his judgement is)”

“Are you sure your husband loves you? It’s a pretty good sign he does , if your next car is a Mercury You’ll know he wants to be proud of the way you look (dreamy, in a Mercury) he wants you to take it easy and he wants you to feel secure)”

In the retro world of Republicans, women still take a back seat .Without any safety precautions its a dangerous ride indeed. Does it matter who’s at the wheel…you betchum.

Note: Though the post “Prominent Republican: Women Need to Be Paid Less so They Can Find Good Husbands” first appeared in ThinkProgress, the advise originally appeared in women’s magazines in the 1930s-1950’s.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Collage Detail from Womens Lib- A Storms Approachin’ collage by Sally Edelstein

Nearly 45 years after the women’s liberation movement stormed onto the scene opening a floodgate of discourse about women’s rights, it’s déjà vu all over again.

Nothing brought this home more than the outpouring of support for Oscar winner Patricia Arquettes impassioned speech about women’s rights and wage inequality.

And not just from card-carrying feminists!

Collage Detail; Women’s Lib-A Storm’s Approachin’ by Sally Edelstein

It’s hard to believe that systemic gender inequality still exists today and women are still being moved around like so many pawns in a political game that seems to be played by men only. The denial of reproductive rights, sexual violence and domestic abuse are still very much a part of our current dialogue.

Why are women’s lives so difficult even now in the 21th century?

Ironically because feminist ideas are so taken for granted few women think of themselves as feminists. The persistent stereotype of 2nd wave feminists as male bashing, make-up-less angry and non domestic was the same stereotype perpetrated by the media at the time.

It is worth remembering their struggles.

Views From the Edge: Women, Gender and Politics

“Women’s Lib-A Storms Approachin” collage 48″x84″ artist :Sally Edelstein. On view at Sarah Doyle Gallery at Brown University March 2- March 28, 2015

I am honored to be a part of a very timely exhibition: Views From the Edge: Women, Gender and Politics at The Sarah Doyle Gallery at Brown University.

The Women’s Caucus for Art and Karen Gutfreund Art present an exhibition featuring the art of 24 artists advocating for gender equality, women’s rights and social justice, these expressions provoke, and challenge assumptions about women’s lives in today’s global society.

Women’s Liberation

Collage Detail: Women’s Lib- A Storms Approachin’ by Sally Edelstein

My collage “Women Lib: A Storms Approaching” takes a look at a  time pivotal time period when women became conscious not only of the inequality but how our identities had become fragmented by a media insistent on dictating ever-changing standards.

When women grapple with gender inequality they often find themselves turning to a rich 10 year period of modern history – the 1970s. Before the 1970’s a woman could not keep her job if she were pregnant, get a credit card, report cases of sexual harassment  or have a legal abortion.

The piece, part of a series called “Media Made Women” is a pastiche of postwar American imagery, a time when confining and conflicting images of media stereotypes of women littered the pop culture landscape that was erupting in a women’s liberation movement.

These images helped shape the female psyche in setting standards of how women should imagine their lives, think of fulfillment and arrange their priorities.

Collage as Expression

Collage promotes collusion’s of realities; by dissociating the images from their intended use, I can exploit the iconic effects of the imagery. Collage Detail: A Storms Approachin by Sally Edelstein

Collage becomes the perfect vehicle to deconstruct these fragmented messages.

Like most Americans, I have consumed vast amounts of pop culture imagery over the decades; as an artist and a collector I have amassed a formidable collection.

Like a toxic overspill, fragments of these countless mass media images remain imprinted in all of us.

Using collage as a means of deconstructing myths and examining social fictions, the piece is composed of hundreds of images appropriated from vintage advertising, periodicals, newspapers, vintage school books, old illustrations, comic books, pulp fiction and all sorts of ephemera.

Media Matters- Media Made Women

Collage Detail: Women’s Lib- A Storms Approachin’ by Sally Edelstein On view at Sarah Doyle Gallery at Brown University March 2- March 28, 2015 Views From the Edge : Women, Gender and Politics

Like most women growing up in the 1960s I was fed a generous serving of sugar-coated media stereotypes of happy homemakers who were as frozen and neatly packaged as the processed foods they served their Cold war families

Within a decades time these same images would be thawed out under the hot glare of a woman’s movement only to be joined by a heaping helping of new conflicting media representations of how a girl’s life should proceed.

What did it mean to be a woman in the wake of the woman’s movement; what kind of woman should we be? How assertive and ambitious should we be, and how accommodating to men.

Gender Warfare

I do not use Photoshop in creating the collages preferring to create the pieces the old fashioned way by Exacto knife. Collage Detail: Women’s Lib- A Storms Approachin’ by Sally Edelstein

This ideological warfare about women’s proper place was the prevailing subtext of American popular culture in the 1970’s.

Just as the right has demonized liberalism, so the backlash convinced the public that woman’s liberation was the true American scourge.

The back lash against feminism was filled with cautionary tales about what happens to women who are too angry or outspoken, and get too much freedom and attempted to push women back into acceptable retro roles .

The result was we were ambivalent toward femininity on the one hand and feminism on the other.

The media’s stereotypes about feminism turned the images into caricatures. They certainly played a central role in turning feminism into a dirty word and stereotyping the feminist as a karate chopping, Nair-rejecting bitch, with bad clothes, a perpetual snarl and a larger than life chip on her shoulder.

The media has long presented conflicting contradicting images of women and we have had to navigate the plethora of images offered up to young girls and young women suggesting what a desirable worthwhile woman should be.

Contrary to Popular Belief

Collage Detail: Women’s Lib-A Storms Approachin’ by Sally Edelstein

The irony is 45 years later the contradictions still exist and the media continue to provide us with images and rationalizations that shape how we make sense of the roles we assume in our families, our workplace and our society.

The media continues to be relentless in their assault on the imperfections of the female face and body while our bodies continue to be a battleground in the political arenas.

The current backlash against women and their reproductive rights still inform our dialogues and re-markets old myths about women as new facts.

If you are near Providence, Rhode island please stop by the Sarah Doyle Gallery to view the show.

Sarah Doyle Gallery
Brown University
26 Benevolent Street
Providence, Rhode Island

Opening reception Monday March 2nd from 6-8:00p.m.
Show runs till March 28th 2015
Gallery is open Monday- Friday 9-5p.m.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Views From the Edge: Women, Gender and Politcis

Like most women growing up in the 1950s and 1960s I was fed a generous serving of sugar-coated media stereotypes of happy homemakers who were as frozen and neatly packaged as the processed foods they served their cold war families.

The Feminine Mistake 1960

In the years before I went to Kindergarten, I shadowed my mother Betty  everywhere she went.

Within her suburban sphere of influence I was a contented little satellite, spinning in her orbit.

Whether shopping or schlepping, picking up or dropping off, I would follow in her footsteps…literally. The task I enjoyed tagging along with the most was her weekly appointment at the Glam-A-Rama Beauty Parlor.

Glam-A- Rama Beauty Parlor

The beauty parlor was a unique universe unlike any place else, where unfamiliar, strange-looking equipment was being used by familiar neighborhood women looking strange.

All dressed alike, their ordinary clothes replaced by identical leopard print smocks, it was a universe with its own uniform.

A universe where gossip was as hot and swift as the air blowing through the missile shaped hairdryers, a world where I was privy to carefully guarded grown up secrets.

Strange intimacies grew between women who organized carpools and now found themselves sitting, captive under pink hair dryers.

These conversations were unlike the hurried confidences exchanged as Friday’s schedule was switched with Tuesdays, pick-ups and deliveries reversed, or when a tired mother deposits the last child and stayed for a quick cup of instant coffee.

It was over the roar of the dryers in the afternoons while casseroles simmered in automatic ovens back home that these women gave full voice to secret whispering fears. Somehow dread words could be spoken and reassurances offered.

In the shadow of the hairdryers, as nails were polished, calluses scraped and hair teased, dread words could be safely spoken.

Post War Periodicals

(R) Ladies Home Journal 5/52 illustration Al Parker

Sinking into a padded turquoise swivel styling chair, I sat next to Mom, carefully watching as Miss Blanche the hairdresser, combed and teased, bombarding Mom with hairspray.

This was truly a space age hair-do with its propulsion accomplished by strenuous backcombing.

Mom would sit in the hydraulic  chair reading 2 month old, dog-eared copies of McCalls and Good Housekeeping, while  Miss Blanche maintaining a steady flow of mindless chatter as she worked.

Magazine Madness

Tucked within those pages, the periodicals promised the modern mid-century housewife would find exactly the right information and products that would give her the knowledge to excel in her role as wife and mother.

Glancing at her favorite magazines at the Glama-Rama only seemed to confirm what Mom knew in her heart to be true- that love, marriage, and children is The career for women.

“Yes,” she would read, nodding in agreement “for today’s homemaker her home is her castle.”

“Snug within it she basks in the warmth of a good mans love…glories in the laughter of healthy children…glows with pride in every new acquisition that adds color or comfort pleasure or leisure to her family’s life.”

“And, she’s always there! She’s an up to date modern American homemaker.”

Breathing in deeply of the beauty parlor air heavy with the cloying sweetness of perfume diluted by the acrid smell of singed hair, Mom sighed contently.

Home Work

Of course, the gals all agreed, some poor mothers had to work to provide for their families.

The big talk that day that set tongues wagging concerned Shirley Birnbaum who was pregnant and planned to go back to work as a teacher after she had a baby!

“But the ones I’d like to talk about,” our neighbor Estelle Wolfson said between puffs of her Parliament  pointing to an article in one magazine, “are those who feel that household and community activities are for “squares.”

The curler clad ladies nodded in unison.

Can This Marriage Be Saved

By the fall of 1960 there had began to appear some quiet rumblings among some unhappy housewives across the country.

Now and again Mom would read an article, usually in the Can This Marriage be Saved column, about those few unfortunate women who felt stifled and lonely in their marriage.

“Feminists” or anyone who couldn’t find fulfillment in the Lady Clairol colorful cold war world of carpools, cookouts, cream of mushroom soup casseroles, and catering to contented children and happy-go-lucky husbands, were disturbed.

Flipping through one magazine, she noticed that September’s Redbook offered a $500 prize for the best essay on “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped.”

It triggered an unexpectedly large response 24,000 entries.

Another magazine, Good Housekeeping   also tapped into this vein of unhappiness with a September article of its own. “I Say: Women Are People Too.”

The article caught Moms eye.

It noted “a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning” by American women, a sense that there must be more to life than raising children and maintaining a clean comfortable home.

The magazine urged its readers to overcome their malaise by taking charge of their lives. “She can’t live through her husband and children.” It said of the typical housewife. “They are separate selves. She has to find her own fulfillment first.”

The author of the Good Housekeeping article was by another Betty, Betty Friedan, a 39-year-old freelance writer from NY suburbs

Friedan was asked to assemble a booklet for her Smith college class 15^th reunion in 1957. She sent out questionnaires expecting to be inundated with cheerful stories about successful careers and young families. Many classmates responded with tales of depression and frustration. It was Friedan’s first clue than many thousands of women shared her own dissatisfaction.

The Smith questionnaire inspired her to undertake a detailed examination of what she called “the problem that has no name” interviewing hundreds of women in NY Chicago and Boston.

The Good Housekeeping piece sprang from this research. She had started a book manuscript by Oct 1960.

The book entitled The Feminine Mystique wouldn’t be published until 1963.

 Duz She or Duzn’t  She

Mom dismissed these grumblings and put down the magazine.

She never felt constrained.

She saw her life as full of choices after all she as free to choose- automobiles, clothes appliances and supermarkets.

Freedom was all around her.

Suddenly she was carefree with her automatic dishwasher, there was freedom from brushing between meals with Gleem toothpaste, you could relax if its Arnel with new ease of care, sofas covered with Velon plastic, meant she was no longer a slave to delicate upholstery, even her waist whittling calorie curve cuttin’ Playtex girdle promised her new freedom.

And best of all there was freedom to choose from a dazzling assortment at the supermarkets.

Thinking the Unthinkable

Patting her lush brown bouffant coif floating like a gentle cloud above her head, Mom left the beauty parlor happy. With a new recipe for cheese Fondue clutched in her hands and a sure-fire solution for removing ring around the collar, Mom was content. For now my mother Betty would follow in the footprints of another Betty, Betty Crocker, satisfied in her role as housewife and mother. 

The problem that had no name was so unfathomable no one even thought they had a problem. It was buried as deeply as our missiles underground, and would cause the same explosion when they were released.

Copyright (©) 2015 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

On a recent chilly Sunday women started disappearing from ads, magazine covers, billboards and posters directing readers to Not-There.org. Part of a powerful ad campaign to raise awareness of gender inequality, it was a graphic reminder to women “we’re not there yet.”

It’s a déjà vu for the real housewives of the cold war.

70 years ago images of working women suddenly disappeared from the media and it took them over 30 years to return.

During WWII women might have thought that they were finally there…until they weren’t.

Women went from serving the country to serving hubby a beer. L) Vintage ad Canada Drive 1944 (R) Vintage Schlitz Ad 1953

One day, dedicated working women were glorified, proudly featured in articles and advertisements; the next they vanished, replaced by dewy-eyed brides, and happy homemakers with nothing more taxing on their minds then getting rid of ring around the collar.

In a blink of an eye women went from serving the country to serving hubby a beer.

But this wasn’t a campaign to raise awareness. It was a tactical decision.

Most of these women didn’t opt out of working; it was more like they were pushed out by Uncle Sam: “Here’s your pill box hat. What’s your hurry!”

As fierce as Uncle Sam’s Rosie the Riveter campaign was  (deployed in WWII to recruit women into the depleted work force) once  victory was in view a decidedly different, equally aggressive, operation was launched aimed at these same women.

Women transitioned from working woman to homemaker with push buttons ease. (L) Woman war worker -Vintage ad General Electric 1943 (R) Housewife vintage ad

Not unlike like the post war US defense policy, the media went on a permanent war footing against positive portrayals of women in the workplace.

It was now all out war to get the ladies back into their soon to be fully-loaded Kelvinator kitchens and into high heels.

It would be more than a decade until this secret campaign would reveal itself: “Operation: June Cleaver” would be a huge success!

My mother Betty along with millions of other women of the greatest generation would be one of it’s casualties.

All Out War

Vintage WWII Recruitment Poster

It was wartime.

The patriotism was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Everywhere you looked, posters, ads and articles appeared applauding the resourcefulness and ingenuity of Americas working woman, that patriotic lass who had stepped up to fill the shoes of the boys who had gone off to war.

Rosie the Riveter rides the greyhound bus to her job

No effort was spared to get these ladies out of their homes and into the defense plants.

The campaign orchestrated by  Uncle Sam’s Office of War Information in collaboration with Madison Avenue,  women’s magazines, radio producers and Hollywood, tried overnight to make wearing overalls and operating a lathe glamorous.

When Uncle Sam came calling, these ladies “leaned in” and took over the man power.

Working girls were the new glamor girls and for impressionable teens like my mother Betty it was empowering.

What a difference a year makes. McCalls Magazine went from table setting tips pictured on the left 1941, to a war worker plotting her blueprint for a bomber on the right, 1942. Women were no longer pictured as weak, non mechanical incapable of leadership or unsuited for the challenges of the world.“The day of the lady loafer is almost over.” boasted Margaret Hickey chairperson of the Women’s Advisory Committee to the War Manpower Commission

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, our very notion of woman’s place was  decimated.

A public more accustomed to seeing their women depicted in dainty dresses while luxing the family dishes, were now being bombarded with images of hardy gals dressed in coveralls and bright bandanas doing a mans job

There was nothing a woman couldn’t do and the media couldn’t stop gushing about her.

You’re No Sissy Now!

Typical of these positive ads was one from Kotex.  Geared to high school girls like my mother, it typified the wartime emphasis on female strength: “Remember when the boys used to say that girls were made of sugar and spice and all things nice? Those days are gone forever…you’re no sissy now!…”

Talk about girl power!

For a 16-year-old girl it was all thrilling . All around Betty were wives mothers and older women actively engaged in non traditional work; women who had a feeling of accomplishment proud to be part of the war effort. These jobs gave them confidence and a new sense of their capabilities.

Betty Co-ed

(L) Vintage Illustration 1948 by Harry Fredman “Women’s Home Companion” (R) Vintage Brenda Starr Comic Book 1940s

By the fall of 1945 Betty was a college freshman who took her studies seriously.

As editor of Erasmus  High School newspaper she had dreams of being a star reporter for a big city daily. But no sob sister stories for her- she didn’t want to get stuck covering the usual girl beat of weddings and social clubs.

No sir, she fancied herself more as a glamorous foreign correspondent type like Martha Gellhorn one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century and the only woman to land at Normandy on D Day. Married to Ernest Hemingway they traveled the front lines together.

Perhaps, Betty pondered, one day she might even report from the front lines standing by her beau Stanley a Marine serving overseas.

A Fellah Needs a Girl

“Hats off to the Woman of the Year” begins this 1942 ad from Mutual Life Insurance, lavishing praise on Americas working woman.

Our fighting boys were proud of these women.

Throughout the war, the armed forces newspaper, The Stars and Stripes had been bursting with pride with uplifting, home-front stories of the swell of patriotic cuties in blue overalls and hair bandanas, standing shoulder to shoulder with their men, taking up the load for Uncle Sam.

But as the war drew to a close, Uncle Sam started whistling a different tune, as in a widely circulated War Dept. brochure proclaiming that : “A woman is merely a substitute, like using plastic instead of metal.”

Fueled by fears there wouldn’t be enough jobs for returning servicemen and that Depression conditions might return, the campaign to get women out of the workforce began in earnest. That, coupled with pent-up desires of both women and men to start a family were unleashed, producing an unprecedented idealization of the nuclear family.

The ideal of the family served as a national unifier becoming a symbol of what the American system was all about. It’s what they were fighting for.

Motherhood and the proliferation of baby images were churned out from 1944-1946. Women were about to be enshrined as wives and mothers .

With the same secrecy of the Potsdam conference, a final meeting between Uncle Sam and his media allies commenced  to clarify “the post war administration of women” and the rebuilding of the American family.

Those same glowing home front stories, now took a more scolding tone accusing these same patriotic girls of doing “unwomanly” jobs and taking jobs away from the returning men.

The Way We Were

GI Joe gets his job back ((L) Vintage Texaco ad praising the working woman 1943 . R) Texaco ad 1945 “I’ll be a Texaco service man again when I get home.”

Articles and advertisements began to appear, that seemed to speak directly to the battle fatigued boys overseas. One ad for instance featured a soldier in combat wistfully daydreaming about the peaceful world he has left behind, yearning for the familiarity of home: “I want my girl back just as she is.”

The media assured the boys  the American Dream would be there when they returned, that “life would be just as you left it.”

Including your job…and your best girl.

Blue Print For The American Dream

“… Yes these were the things I was fighting for, waiting for…the soldier asserts.” Vintage ad Kelvinator 1945

No series of advertisements  served up a bigger helping of the post war  American Dream than the brashly sentimental ads of Nash-Kelvinator.

The ads took on the tone of a letter often written by the hometown gal he left behind who had plenty to dream about too.

In this ad from 1945 the soldier pleads that once he comes home:

“…don’t let anyone tamper with a way of living that works so well.”

“Never fear darling,” – his sweetheart writes him back, that’s the way we all want it. Everything will be here, just as you left it, just as you want it…when you come back to me!

And when you come back from the war you will find, just as you left them, everything your letters tell me you hold dear.

….inside in the living room you’ll find your easy chair, your footstool and your slippers, just as they always were each night before you went away to war.

When you come back you will find nothing changed. Those at home promised that. Here in your town your children are still free to sleep and laugh and play…still free to look at the sky, clear-eyed and unafraid…our house still stands lovely as it always was…

“…Yes, back home to the same town to the same job , you liked so much…to the same America we have always known and loved…where you can work and plan and build…where together we can do things we’ve always dreamed of…where we and our children are free to make our lives what we want them to be…where there is no limits…

…where nothing has changed.

And We’ll Live Happily Every After

”You’ve said, That’s the America I want when I come home again. Ads promised GI Joe that His wife and son will make life what it ought to be once more.

“That’s the America I fought for…that’s the America I’ll be looking for when I come home.”

The way things were.

But the fairy tale American Dream didn’t include working woman.

I Want My Girl Back Just As She Is

Overseas, Betty’s beau Stanley worried.

With Victory in Europe nearing, Seargent First Class Stanley began to echo his GI buddies concerns: “Exactly what was getting into these dames anyway?”

Looking longingly at the pin-up of Betty Grable on his Barracks locker, he began to question what the heck they were fightin’ for if all the girls back home had their heads filled with a lot of hot air and plain baloney.

Would the women be willing to return to the home after the war, they worried in unison.

Even Hemingway was resentful of his glamorous wife Martha Gellhorn’s long absences during her reporting assignments. He famously wrote her “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed? Needless to say They divorced in 1945

Stanley thought about Betty away from home, at college susceptible to all kinds of ideas and nonsense.

He knew she had her heart set on being an ace reporter, solving mysteries and having fabulous adventures. But he didn’t really want her globetrotting around the world in search of sensational stories, not to mention the steamy romances.

And even if Betty did stay at home in N.Y. and get that job as a reporter for a daily paper, he still worried.

Newsrooms were he-man territory. They were smoked filled, grubby joints with spittoons on the floor and racy pin ups on the wall.

He imagined her going out after work with the boys, downing whiskey at some smoky watering hole, staying out late betting on some palooka. This Sergeant First Class  didn’t want his wife  shouting at boxing matches when she should be home darning his socks and cooking a casserole for him. …and taking care of the children.

Back Home For Keeps

The big push back

Stanley was right. Back at school Betty’s head was being filled with all kinds of ideas and nonsense. But not what he feared.

Operation June Cleaver had begun on the homefromt .

Suddenly it seemed, wherever you turned a fierce campaign was being launched with ominous warnings aimed at the modern women.

It was now important to keep your man in the drivers seat. It was soon feared that the masculinization of career women would drive him away.

The women’s magazines once filled with glowing stories of courageous women  were now filled with  threatening articles implying that careers and higher education were leading to the masculinization of women with dangerous consequences to the country, the home, the children.

If a woman held an important professional position, they implied, she would lose her womanly qualities affecting the ability of the women as well as her husband to obtain sexual gratification!

And if a career woman had children, watch out.

She turned them into “juvenile delinquents,” “criminals” and “confirmed alcoholics.”

Or worse…she could end up an old maid.

The Tide had Turned

(L) Vintage Magazine cover Colliers 1944 (R) Vintage Tide ad

With victory the tide had turned against working women.

Gone were the ads telling women they could do anything a man could do. Gone were the ads congratulating women for performing double duty on the homefront so brilliantly.

Instead ads began appeared affirming  the new conventional wisdom – there was no more important job than wife and mother.

7-UP ads ceased claiming it would produce a good disposition in women in order to win a better job as the ad on the left proclaims, to boasting the beverage would help them be happy homemakers and bring good family cheer.

Up In smoke

Womens aspiration would soon go up in smoke. During the war Chesterfield had frequent ad supporting military recruitment and factory work. By 1946 they featured a bride.

Nuclear Family

The ideal of the family served as a national unifier becoming a symbol of what the American system was all about.

It’s what they were fighting for.

After Rosie the Riveter finished her stint on the assembly line, Uncle Sam wanted her to keep up the same wartime production…only this time, in bed.

Family was about to go nuclear.

Here Come the baby boomers Vintage ad Swan Soap 1945

Ashamed at even thinking of being a career girl, Betty worried not only had she lost  femininity, but whether Stanley would  leave her when he returned?

Betty felt so dull and droopy.  Now all she could dream about was marriage and a warm and cozy home together, just like she and Stanley talked about.

With Victory here all thoughts turned to the future.

Post War Promises: Occupation:Wife

There was no more important job than being a wife and mother. So important in fact that in 1946 The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company offered “wife insurance” in case the poor widowed hubby was left having to cook, clean, shop, do laundry, …etc for himself!

Like many war born romances Betty’s relationship with Stanley soon fizzled out.

But in the fall of 1945 with a post war bounce in her step, Betty returned to school more determined than ever to excel, clear in the things that were really important.

She came to the realization that the highest value and only real worthwhile commitment for a woman was the fulfillment of themselves as wives and mothers.

A barrage of books and an onslaught of articles  bombarded the media convincing women to stay home. Working women became the target of vehement attacks by academia, industry and politicians. In fact now the  conventional wisdom was that women who wanted to continue working outside the home were neurotic.

Women’s magazines soon replaced the WWII working girl with a loving Mother who became the reigning cover girl for years, solidifying the only real worthwhile commitment for a woman was the fulfillment of themselves as wives and mothers. L) McCalls Cover 1942, (R) Ladies Home Journal cover 1946 illustration Al Parker

In her Junior year in college a crippling cloud of pessimism had drifted over the fate of the modern American Woman and the American family.

According to a 1947 bestselling book both were in dire danger.

In sociology classes all across the country earnest student like my mother cast aside Margaret Mead and devoted college papers to a dense cerebral book co authored by Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, a shrink and sociologist, called Modern Woman:The Lost Sex.

If there was unhappiness and uncertainty in modern life they wrote, it had a sexual reason: modern woman had denied her femininity and her womanly role.

Only by accepting her place as wife, mother homemaker and by erasing her “masculine aggressive” outside interests would woman be content. Women who avoided this natural state were “neurotically disturbed women”.

Feminism was, “at it’s core, a deep illness.”

Mission Accomplished

Operation: June Cleaver – Mission Accomplished. (L) Vintage 1944 Saturday Evening Post Cover of Rosie the Riveter illustration by Robert Riggs (R) Vintage 1955 Saturday Evening Cover – illustration by Steve Dohanos

Operation June Cleaver was a success! Mission Accomplished!

During the post war years, the Culture of Containment was not just a foreign policy but applied to women and their identities as much as it did to the Soviets. Women were to contain their aspirations

It would be a long fifteen years before another, young Jewish woman named Betty, would step forward and write about “the problem that has no name.” So for now my mother Betty would follow in the footsteps of yet another Betty, ol’ reliable Betty Crocker, and become the perfect homemaker.

A tale of 2 Betty’s (L) Betty Crocker Vintage Ad 1950s (R) Betty Friedan

Copyright (©) 2015 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

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Matriculating into Matrimony

As the rumblings of the embryonic women’s movement began to be heard in 1970, some women in the workplace began quietly grumbling too.

Even as working women began taking baby steps in their Enna Jenkins pumps, their male colleagues still felt entitled to leer lasciviously under their Bobbie Brooks skirts as they slowly climbed the corporate ladder.

Sexism was still flourishing in 1970 as the recent scene in Mad Men demonstrated. In a cringe worthy scene where Peggy and Joan struggled to be taken seriously while pitching new ideas for a pantyhose account, they were subjected to lewd, lecherous comments at the all male business meeting.

As Joan simmered with a slow burn, Peggy tried to plow her way through the double entendres and frat boy humor with smiling professionalism. Later, fuming in the elevator feeling frustrated and humiliated, the girls wanted “to burn the place down.”

A few blocks away on Madison Avenue another group of fed up with business as usual business women took action; if they didn’t burn the place down, they went one step better they filed a landmark lawsuit.

In March, a mere month before the Mad Men’s girls humiliating business meeting, 46 females with the help of attorney Eleanor Holmes Norton sued Newsweek Magazine for sex discrimination.charging it was a segregated system of journalism that divided the work solely on the basis of gender .

At the offices of Newsweek magazine at the time there were 2 categories of employees who sat at their typewriters – men who were the writers and the women who were the researchers, sorting mail, collecting newspaper clippings. Despite their equal qualifications, the women’s jobs came with lesser status and lower pay scale

Vintage ad Pitney Bowes 1958

The magazine’s well educated highly qualified women were no longer satisfied answering phones and checking facts for its male staff of writers and editors.

Meeting secretly, a group of women that would eventually grow to 46 female employees, teamed up with a women’s rights lawyer challenging the sex segregation jobs, becoming the first group of media professionals to sue for employment discrimination based on gender under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Media savvy, they called a press conference, filing the suit on March 16, 1970 the same day their magazine Newsweek ran an issue whose cover story ironically enough was entitled “Women in Revolt.”

Take My Secretary, Please!

“And I was so afraid that working for a giant corporation would be an impersonal, cold, inhuman relationship.” Vintage Playboy cartoon 1962 by Sokol

It’s hard to imagine that Peggy or Joan were unaware of this highly publicized incident, but at the time sexism and sexual harassment at the office was sometimes invisible because it was so darn normal the leering eyes suggestive remarks and creepiness of male workers sexual harassment was a near daily ordeal faced by women in Mad Men workplace.

In fact it was the stuff of great humor.

The world of sexist jobs, businessmen men objectifying and infantilizing women, lascivious philandering and wild office parties was fodder for comics and cartoonists alike.

Misogyny was easily laughed off as office antics.

Not a one of these cartoons would pass HR today

Vintage Sexist Office Cartoons

“Take an Indecent proposal!” Vintage Playboy cartoon 1966 by Interlandi

“You’re hired Miss Olson and may I escort you to our annual office picnic tomorrow?” Vintage cartoon Esquire Magazine 1951

Bosses Portrait Vintage 1966 Playboy cartoon by Interlandi

A take on IBM’s classic slogan, advising the boss to think as he chases her around the desk. Vintage cartoon Esquire

Many of these cartoons were never meant to be glimpsed by the girls, appearing in male magazines like Playboy and Esquire, to be read at men’s clubs or the Barber shop where an earlier generation ogled the Police Gazette.

“You certainly have a one track mind, Me. Bree!” Vintage Playboy cartoon 1962

“Guess what Mom. I’m Miss Magic Lift of 1958!” Vintage Playboy cartoon 1958

Christmas Parties

“Looks as though the Entertainment Committee has come up with some fresh ideas for this years Xmas party!” Vintage Playboy cartoon 1967 by R. Taylor

“Last year we gave him an electric shaver.” Vintage Playboy cartoon

“Miss Beverly, I want an option on you for the Christmas party.” Vintage Playboy cartoon

The fear that computers would end up replacing office antics would be proven wrong. Vintage Playboy cartoon 1962

Mad Men may have offered us a front row seat to the world of mid-century misogyny but it has hopefully  opened the dialogue to recognizing that sexism still exists today despite its subtlety.

And it is no joke.

Copyright (©) 2015 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

Stay Tuned : In 1970 Newsweek was ground zero for a movement that was supposed to break at least one glass ceiling. The story Next

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You’ve Come A Long Way Peggy Olson

Girls, Games and Career Guidance

Learning to Count Equal Pay Day

Collage by Sally Edelstein for Huffington Post

Shirley Chisholm, Flo Kennedy, Bella Abzug, oh my!

An amazing documentary that had been lost in time….until now.

A  documentary that disappeared more than 40 years ago is finally available to everyone for the first time – a gift to modern-day feminists thanks to The Huntington Post.

Filmed at the Democratic Convention in Miami Beach in July 1972, NY representative Shirley Chisholm has just completes a groundbreaking campaign for the presidency Feminists are trying to leverage women’s power at a political convention for the first time.

Entitled Year of the Woman  it’s belligerent, hilarious and at times a real hoot. A must see.

collage for Huffington Post by Sally Edelstein

With an interesting essay written by Rebecca Traister, it is illustrated by me.

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How To Spot a Feminist

   I am pleased to be part of a new Exhibit “Who’s Afraid of Feminism ” opening Sept. 10, 2015

WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR ARTS, WITH A.I.R. GALLERY, PRESENTS:

 WHO’S AFRAID OF FEMINISM?

 VENUE: 155 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 | info@airgallery.org | | (212) 255 6651 | Wed – Sun 12-6pm

 DATES: September 10–October 11, 2015

 Please join us for the opening of “Who’s Afraid of Feminism?”       

ARTISTS’ RECEPTION: Thursday, September 10, 2015, 6–8 pm

JUROR: Catherine Morris, Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art since 2009

 EXHIBITION DIRECTOR: Karen Gutfreund

JUROR Catherine Morris states: The exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Feminism?” celebrates the resilience of feminism. Sometimes it seems that the death, or at least the irrelevancy, of feminism is trumpeted through some form of media on a weekly basis.  Even in the face of a profound shift in our understanding of gender identity, feminism endures as a vital social, political and economic necessity. In the art world, one tenacious model of feminism’s endurance is the group show devoted exclusively to women artists.  The strategy of the (self-identified) women only show hasn’t really changed in more than forty-five years – they are a direct response, a straightforward method of correction to the overwhelmingly male metrics of representation in the mainstream art world. The relevancy of the model is routinely questioned and yet, like feminism, they endure, understood by the artists who participate in them as offering personal opportunities to present work as well productive occasions for community building. “Who’s Afraid of Feminism?” acknowledges the complicated ways we position ourselves, while also simply acknowledging artists’ pragmatic desire to share their work with the world within the context of support systems such as the Women’s Caucus for Art and A.I.R. Gallery, which continue to provide significant and necessary opportunities for women artists.

 WCA and A.I.R. Gallery present art from cross-generational, self-identified women artists that addresses feminism with a contemporary spin. These works incite the viewer to question the current social and political landscape, and the continuing need for gender equality. The exhibiting artists, using a variety of media, elucidate where feminism has been and where it is going, and explore feminism’s political, personal and formal contexts. With a surge of interest about the place of women in the art market and art world, with a record number of discussions throughout social media channels, WHO’S AFRAID OF FEMINISM highlights what still needs to be done to influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes about women in the arts.

 Online Catalog: http://issuu.com/karengutfreund/docs/whos_afraid_of_feminism_for_issuu

Online Gallery: http://www.nationalwca.org/nationalshows/whoseafraid.php#gallery

 The artists in the exhibition at A.I.R. are: Shonagh Adelman, Tara Booth, Amy Cannestra, Katherine Cooksey, Julie Sinclair Eakin, Sally Edelstein, Christine Giancola, Lucy Julia Hale, Coco Hall, Maiza Hixson and Lauren Ruth (The Shaft), Kristina Lenzi, Sinan Leong Revell, J. J. L’Heureux, Sarah Maple, Sandra Matthews, Brittany Prater, Carly Ries, Trix Rosen, Cecilia Rossey, Lisa Seidenberg, Gwen Shockey, Meg Stein, Rhonda M. Thomas, Nikki Thompson, Marie Tomanova, Margi Weir, and Ellen Wetmore.

 WCA Exhibition Director Karen Gutfreund says, “Art can be a powerful, productive force instrumental in sparking change or critical thinking. The Women’s Caucus for Art is committed to supporting local, national, and global art activism to help us to understand what is happening in our society, who we are, where we come from and where we’re going. Women have been written out of art history and are clearly underrepresented. My goal is to change that, one show at a time, focusing on ‘female only’ shows until we see an equal playing field. The mission of the WCA is to create community through art, education, and social activism.”

   About Women’s Caucus for Art:  The Women’s Caucus for Art was founded in 1972 in connection with the College Art Association (CAA). WCA is a national member organization unique in its multidisciplinary, multicultural membership of artists, art historians, students, educators, and museum professionals. The mission of the Women’s Caucus for Art is to create community through art, education, and social activism. As a founding member of the Feminist Art Project, WCA is part of a collaborative national initiative celebrating the Feminist Art Movement and the aesthetic, intellectual and political impact of women on the visual arts, art history, and art practice, past and present. For more information about WCA, please visit:   www.nationalwca.org/

ABOUT THE GALLERY: A.I.R. Gallery (Artists in Residence, Inc.) was established in 1972 as the first not-for-profit, artist-directed and maintained gallery for women artists in the United States. A.I.R. Gallery’s goal is to provide a professional and permanent exhibition space for women artists to present work of quality and diversity. A.I.R. is an artist directed and maintained gallery, providing a sense of community for women and serving as a model for other alternative galleries and organizations. Through lectures, symposia and a Fellowship Program for emerging women artists, A.I.R. Gallery sustains a political awareness and voice, and brings new understanding to old attitudes about women in the arts.

 Purchasing a catalog: You may purchase the catalog from CreateSpace here:  https://www.createspace.com/5543909

Vintage Comic Young Romance, 1970. Art by Don Heck and John Verpoorten

Due to a faux pas on Friday, a feminist icon found herself in a very politically incorrect moment.

Gloria Steinem got into hot water when she commented that young women are supporting Bernie Sanders for only one reason… to meet boys, as if the Sanders campaign was the new Tinder for millennials.

Steinem quickly apologized for the regrettable remark clarifying on Facebook that she had not meant to imply “Young women aren’t serious in their politics.”

Grateful for the clarification, it still stings a bit.

That such a retro remark worthy of a Republican could come from the mouth of a brilliant feminist was all the more ironic, because Steinem is certainly aware of the long sexist history of women activist in politics.

Politically Correct in the Sixties and Seventies

Women who were activist in the 1960 and 1970s and were subjected to sexist treatment. Young Romance May 1973

In the 1960s and 1970s when women were politically active they were often dismissed in the campaigns; ironic because of that very dismissal the women’s movement would grow.

In that tumultuous time of political upheaval, the presidential election of 1968 and 1972 stimulated a massive youth involvement and young women participated in droves

Did girls sign up to work for Gene McCarthy because of the abundance of cute boys or volunteer to work the mimeograph machine for McGovern because of the cool dude with James Taylor locks? Possibly, but doubtful.

Politically Incorrect…Literally

During that time, young women were thoughtfully active in the anti-war movement, the student power movement, and the civil rights movements. Within all these movements, however, women activists were denied the recognition and the responsibility that they deserved and that they had earned.

Despite their commitment and contributions they were all too often refused leadership positions, treated as second class citizens. Gender subordination was rampant. Women in campaign offices were often relegated to “female” tasks such as running the mimeograph machine, typing and fetching coffee.

Most men didn’t take the women that seriously.

Sexism

I Am Woman Hear Me Roar. Activists Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Photo by Dan Wynn 1970

By the middle 1960s many of these women began to react to and organize responding to the contradiction within these social movements which fought for self-determination and equality and yet which denied these same basic rights to women in these organizations.

First in the civil rights movement, and soon afterward in the anti-war movement, SDS, and other social movements, women radicals began to demand equality and respect as activists.

Women argued that sexist assumptions – that they were followers and men leaders, that women naturally were “better” with children and men “better” at organizing, that women should type and men should discuss issues – that all these assumptions were deeply political, denying women not only equality within these progressive movements, but even more basically the freedom to choose for themselves what they could and should think and do.

On Our Own – Women’s Liberation

When most men refused to listen, many women left the movement to, as they put it at the time, “organize around our own oppression.”

They began a liberation movement dedicated to eliminating the ways in which women were constrained and harmed by sexist assumptions and behavior.

A movement Gloria Steinem is quite familiar with.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016.

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How to Spot a Feminist

As this presidential election has made abundantly clear, sexism is not just some feminist fantasy.

In a tumultuous campaign year of blatant misogyny where boys behaving badly have both demeaned and objectified women, and sexual misconduct along with  sexual harassment have gotten more air time than economic policy, this cartoon from 1971 seems sadly relevant today.

In 1971 the women’s movement had gathered steam with women asserting themselves and questioning the patriarchal system. Like much of the media at the time  Cosmopolitan magazine jumped on the Women’s Libbers band wagon running a cartoon features  called “Right On Sister.”

In an odd way, 1971 seems less quaint and more familiar.

Girls Were Girls and Men Were Men

That year a  public was deluged with revealing leaks, the Pentagon Papers – the Wikileaks of it’s time – exposing the long sordid history of our involvement in Vietnam.

A misogynist, xenophobic, white racist from Queens, N.Y. was the most popular figure on TV, albeit it a fictional one named Archie Bunker and in the very first issue of a new magazine called Ms, an editorial declared: “Eliminating the patriarchal and racist base of the existing social system requires a revolution not a reform.”

Well sisters, we know the revolution hasn’t been won.

That a woman’s lib era cartoon should resonate as much today as it did  when I first saw it as a 16-year-old, is a sad state of affairs.

Viewed through a hopeful teenagers eyes whose burgeoning  consciousness was only slightly being raised, I was certain moving forward things would change for the better for women; that certainly 45 years later this cartoon would be laughably outdated, a relic of an archaic time and behavior.

But I’m not laughing now.

“Grab Then By The Pussy!”

October 8, 2016 Headline NY daily News

Like many women I have had a visceral reaction to Donald Trump and his demeaning, lewd comments reminding each of us of the various times in our lives when we’ve been treated in a way that told us as a woman our ideas will never be given as much consideration as our body… at least with certain men. It was both a demoralizing and disempowering feeling.   Now those feeling  are brought to the surface again, feelings not only from the past but  from the present.

That these issues of gender and sex should be brought up now should astonish no one.

No one should be surprised that with the real possibility of  first female president all the dormant and not so dormant sexism and  misogyny in this culture have been as brought to the surface; nor that Hillary ended up going  face to face with a cartoonish poster boy for misogyny.

Despite all the glass ceilings broken by women since 1971, Trump continues to targets women, accomplished women, objectifying them, reducing them  to their basic body parts.

Sure there is less tolerance today for sexism and retrograde comments. Today they are likely to be called out on Twitter or else where.

But the fact is misogyny is deep in our psyche, interwoven  into the personal aspects of our lives. It’s very nature is insidious , making it difficult to acknowledge and eradicate.

It’s why 45 years later this cartoon is right on!

Scroll down for more cartoons from this series Right On Sister:

When this cartoon appeared, Roe v Wade was 2 years off, with abortion still illegal in many states. 45 years later a woman’s right to choose is still a hot button issue in this campaign election.

In 1971 Representative  Shirley Chisholm who would go on the following  year to become the first Black woman to run for President from a major party  was quoted as saying  “I’ve suffered more as a woman than as a black.”

Feminism isn’t a cause only for women, or only for women who have been victimized by men like Donald Trump and his merry band of misogynists.

Feminism is a cause on behalf of all women and  all men too. It’s a cause that belies what Donald Trump thinks about the America we want to be and the more people who come together to unite behind that cause, the closer we can get to finally stamping out sexism like Donald Trump’s.

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Donald Trump and the Mad Men World of Sexual Harassment

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

When this ad appeared in 1943 women weren’t allowed to own credit cards, serve on juries or open bank accounts. Now show your vitality that I’m With Her and wear those white pumps to the polls to vote for the first female POTUS.

Thanks to climate change the unseasonably  warm fall on the east coast has discouraged me from putting away my summer whites.Now breaking a long-standing taboo of never wearing white after Labor Day, I will be dressing in head to toe white tomorrow to proudly cast my vote for the first female candidate for president of the United States.

Like other Hillary supporters I will be rocking white to vote on election day as an homage to both Hillary Clinton and the brave  women suffragettes who fought so hard for the right for women to vote.

Hillary’s all white attire is likely a reference to the gold, purple and white clothing worn by woman suffragette movement whose uniform was white. Vintage program booklet 1913

It has been noted this campaign cycle that Hillary has often worn all white on many occasions ( including her nomination acceptance speech). It is likely a reference to the white clothing favored by the woman suffragette movement.

Already female Clinton Supporters have been spotted in white ensembles at early voting polls and started a social media movement #WeWearWhiteToVote encouraging other women Clinton supporters to do the same.

In solidarity with American suffragettes who adopted the color as one of their signatures and fought for what has now finally come to fruition – the first woman as a major party’s candidate for president on the ballot, I am happy to ditch social convention, don white and show “I’m With Her!”

I’ve got my white pantsuit on and I’m ready to Vote. #I’mWithHer

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Sexism, So Whats New

Nasty Women vote.

So do women who are not “tens,” who’ve been called pigs, dogs and slobs. You know, women not worthy of being “grabbed by the pussy” by that repugnant, overweight Republican candidate for president.

Suffragettes were called a lot worse things than nasty in their attempts to attain the vote for women.

And they won. Despite public discourse and unflattering propaganda  perpetuating stereotypes that feminists were ugly, angry, neglectful wives and  bad mothers, who only wanted to emasculate men.

Sound familiar?

Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

So nearly 100 years after women won the right to vote, even as women continue to assert themselves, men’s sexual comments, objectification and bad behavior insert themselves into this campaign, into public discourse and consciousness. That despite  the fact that a woman is running for president. Or perhaps because a woman is running for president.

Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

It’s hard to think about Hillary’s history making run without considering that the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote was ratified just 96 years ago. Clinton’s mother Dorothy Rodham was born on the same day the amendment was passed by Congress.

A chance to wear your own pantsuit. Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

A few weeks ago #RepealThe19th started trending on Twitter meaning there were men who wanted to revoke the Amendment which let women vote. So women,  you have the right to vote, to speak your mind, and to stand for what you believe is right. Your voice matters.

It’s worth taking a look at a collection of  anti suffrage postcards  from the collection of Catherine Paleczewski  from the early 20th century, when men tried their best to silence women’s voices.

Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

Vintage Suffragette Postcard. Postcards from Palczewski, Catherine H, Postcard Archive University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA

So all you nasty women, get out your vote, be heard and show this joke of a candidate the last laugh will be on him.

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Wear All White To Vote

Women’s March on Washington Graphics by Sally Edelstein and Karen Gutfreund

Americans and citizens around the world  are marching tomorrow to challenge Trump’s administration.

We are here and we are watching.

One day after Donald Trumps  inauguration, the  Women’s March on Washington will bring hundreds of thousands to the capital to “demand protection of our rights our safety our health and our families.”

I proudly join them.

Women’s March on Washington Graphics by Sally Edelstein and Karen Gutfreund

As we enter the Trump presidency, women across the country have felt empowered to rise up and resist normalization of racism, sexism and hate.

Trump’s agenda threatens the welfare of women, immigrants LGBT  and through his climate denial the very health of the planet itself. We are talking about the rights and lives of millions of Americans at stake.

Women’s March on Washington Graphics by Sally Edelstein

Anchored by a VP who has vowed to relegate Roe V Wade to the dustbin of history, Trump’s administration is openly hostile to women’s health and reproductive freedoms.

Women’s March on Washington Graphics by Sally Edelstein

Women’s March on Washington Graphics by Sally Edelstein and Karen Gutfreund

We are living in a very different America one in which many of the tenets on which this nation was founded such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and equal justice for all are seemingly under threat.

We will continue to be heard.

As a 30 year old single working woman, Mary Richards acted as a kind of stand in for a new American female for a generation of women. TV Guide May 1977

With the turn of a TV dial, Mary turned the world and my childhood on with her smile.

A constant presence on my TV screen, Mary Tyler Moore and her winning smile, shepherded me through  my Kennedy era childhood, my tumultuous teens and straight into my early adulthood.

Laura Petrie

Oh Rob! Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke TV Guide Dec. 1961

Who didn’t love Mary as Laura Petrie, the New Rochelle housewife who defiantly  traded in the per-requisite starched dress and pearls of other TV housewives for a more fetching pair of capris.  After several seasons of stuffy and often stilted  TV sitcom  moms like June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson,  Laura was a breath of fresh suburban air.

Mothers it seemed,  could attend PTA meetings and be sexy to boot.

Mary Richards

TV Guide Cover Feb. 1972

Then in 1970 smack dab in the middle of my teens, in the midst of the burgeoning feminist movements and my own burgeoning consciousness as a female, CBS introduced Mary Richards to TV.  Suddenly Saturday nights became must-see-TV, truly proving  she could take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.

Sure by the mid 1960’s there had been some independent career girls on TV like Marlo Thomas’s struggling actress on  That Girl and Dianne Carrol as Julia the first African-American woman who was a widowed nurse making it on her own.

But generally career girls on TV- and the media in general- were portrayed primarily as husband hunters.

No Mad Men era  girl  wanted to end up a spinster and smart single gals knew a job could be a space age launching pad for snaring a husband.

TV Guide Dec. 1973 The girls of Mary Tyler Moore Show- Georgia Engel, Mary Tyler Moore, Valerie Harper

What made The Mary Tyler Moore Show so original was that it was the first sitcom where a female character’s primary relationship was with neither her family nor her male love interest but her friends and co workers. “Love was all around.”

A female perspective was crucial to the shows  success so it was no coincidence that the show was also one of the first sitcoms to employ a stable of female writers.

Mary was  a kind of stand in for a new American female.

To a young girl just starting out on her own path wondering “How will you make it on your own? This world is awfully big, girl this time you’re on your own,” Mary Richards offered a blueprint.

It’s time You Started Living

When Mary Richards, single and gasp…30, moved to Minneapolis and started working as associate producer at the WJM-TV, she did something that no female character on television had done before.

She had left her fiancé, put her job before romance and made it clear that she would rather spend evenings alone than in a series of bad dates.

Of course  some things were pretty familiar. She was often tasked with typical office grunt work like fetching coffee  and typing 60 words a minute on her IBM electric typewriter, and initially she was never quite confident enough to speak up to her oafish boss and often un-evolved male co workers. The girls often  fretted over their weight and appearance.

But for the first time ever, these women were real. They had hopes, dreams, and ambitions.

“You just might make it after all!”

It was this winning combination of girl next door and spunk that made it  easy to embrace to  introduce TV viewers to feminist consciousness and many were happy to see Mary embrace her own power more fully as the show progressed. Whereas TV’s Maude, another 70’s feminist icon, was abrasive, gritty and in your face, Mary was both easy on the eyes and easy to digest. Feminism light, but no less important or powerful.

Mary Richards proved to a whole generation of girls, myself included,  that  “…you can have the town why don’t you take it. You’re gonna make it after all!”

The tale of two cities was the tale of two hats

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

It was two days in January  where two worlds threatened to collide.

Alternative lifestyles and alternative truths co-mingled. But the two worlds didn’t so much clash as coexist. Inauguration weekend 2017 in Washington DC was a tale of two cities.

It was a weekend of light and it was a weekend of darkness.

A Tale of Two Hats

Trumps sneering visage stared out at me on Friday, his likeness on all sorts of inauguration related merchandise. R) The Women’s March in Washington DC on Saturday

Inauguration weekend pussyhats and trucker hats co-mingled.  Patriots both, red hatted “America First” Americans walked among progressive, pink pussyhatted marchers. Even without talking, they knew which team they were on.

I arrived by design in D.C. late Friday afternoon. I would miss the inauguration of Donald Trump, sealed in the bubble of my Greyhound bus surrounded in solidarity by other marchers headed down from N.Y. to the Capitol to protest.

Bubbles Collide

Departing the bus at a bustling Union Station, my friend Karen Gutfreund and  I walked out into a red sea of Make America Great Again hats. Streets vendors were busy hawking the de’ rigor red caps  along with T-shirts and buttons that screamed “Bitch, I’m President.”

Trump Merchandise lined the streets of Washington DC

On card tables on nearly every street corner, the newly elected president’s face looked out from just about everything that could stay still. All-American, patriotic mugs, T-shirts, tote bags, posters, calendars, buttons and hats all made in Bangladesh or Vietnam, all vied for attention.

I was surrounded by a crush of ebullient Trump supporters here for the inauguration, a cheerful celebratory bunch of pasty-faced people decked out in Trump merchandise head to toe.

These believers, in their polyester fleece pullovers emblazoned with the official Trump inaugural logo and the USA! Tees all brought from the official Trump Store (and why not? Donald Trump was offering 25% off merchandise for his first 100 days) all believed in their hearts America was on the wrong track and only Mr. Trump alone could make America Great Again; they had no doubt  that this billionaire with the beautiful family had the best interest of the country at heart.

They had bought Mr. Trump’s sales pitch for himself as easily as they bought his tacky merchandise.

Women Together

Along with the masses of travel-weary women departing incoming trains and buses with the military precision of an invading army, were the droves of Trump loving women already here for the inauguration.

The diversity of black, white and brown women arriving for Saturday’s March, made their way through the crowds juggling their rolled up protest signs while maneuvering their American Tourist wheelies packed with their pink pussyhats, as they jostled with doughy white women in mom jeans and American flag sweatshirts.

Carrying  their official tote bags with the gold seal of the 45th president close to their sides, their obligatory made in China red caps perched on their permed hairs, these were the same women who had only hours earlier cheered our new president who called for us to “Buy American and Hire American”

Among all the tacky merchandise, irony was in short supply.

I looked on with curiosity. These women were part of the 53% of white women who had voted for Trump.

These were the same women who were now high fiving one another who had only hours before cheered on a sexual predator as President. They had most likely spent the day at the National Mall watching and applauding the very inauguration I had purposely avoided acknowledging.

The bus ride down to Washington DC was a shared experience of solidarity where strangers morphed into sisters

At high noon as Donald Trump placed his tiny hands on Lincoln’s bible, the mood in my Greyhound bus was still.

There were no cheers, just sighs and bitter silence.  I sat in solitude with a group of once upon a time strangers now connected in solidarity who were simarly fed up with the Trump agenda that threatened the welfare of women, immigration LGBTQ rights, and through his climate denia,l the very health of the planet itself.

There was, at high noon, mainly deep determined silence.

But here now in D.C. was another group of women decked out in their $16.95 Trump red caps. These were women who saw a successful business man as savior, a strong man who would fix what was broken.

These women looked past the threat Trump poses to women, past the pussy grabbing past, his call to punish women who have abortions, past his misogynist name calling, the body shaming. The racism. The xenophobia.

Did they look past it I wondered, or welcome it? It was hard to say.

With pink pussyhats packed away for tomorrow, we walked peacefully among the others.

Tomorrow was our chance to be heard.

Nasty Women Infiltrate

Nasty Women protest and Nasty Women infiltrate. Sally Edelstein with her friend activist and artist Karen Gutfreund at the March and at an Inauguration celebration for Donald Trump

As the daytime ballyhoo dispersed, the celebration continued through the evening with a decidedly better heeled crowd, exchanging Sketchers for Manolo Blaniks. By nightfall the limousines were out in full force as the dozens of official and unofficial inaugural parties began in hotel ballrooms across the city. A day of despair for me was a day of triumph and celebration for the billionaires’ supporters.

Inauguration celebrations for Donald Trump

Prowling the streets with my friend Karen we watched with curiosity as the spectacle unfolded before us. Tuxedoed men and bedazzled women scurried their way through mazes of concrete barriers to reach their prize for an evening of 3rd rate entertainment and red, white and blue cupcakes served on plastic plates.

As the evening wore on we marveled at the legion of Trump supporters in the throes of their victory lap, limping in their tight Jimmy Choos, staggering through darkened D.C. streets in Carolina Herrera ball gowns, their men folk in well-cut Tom Ford Tuxedos all in search of GOP comradery and one last round of drinks.

Under Cover

Watching the spectacle of late night revelers wobble into the W Hotel for one last party, it became irresistible to not participate. Karen and I glanced at one another with scheming looks. We two socially progressive artist activists decided it was time to go under cover as card-carrying Trump supporters and infiltrate the other side. For one evening we would enter an alternative universe.

The celebration at the W’s rooftop lounge was less official but no less Republican. Bravely we weaved our way through the red velvet ropes in the hotel lobby as we headed for the rooftop crawling with Trump supporters. Undeterred by being woefully underdressed among these other gussied up GOP guests, we waltzed in with a brazen air of confidence, admitted into this rarefied world of Republicans by the mere privilege that blonde hair and blue eyes bestow.

The celebration at the W’s rooftop lounge was less official but no less Republican. With our Make America Great Again Hats we fit in seamlessly

We were ready to Make America Great Again.

Quickly snagging some signature red caps that were strewn about, we insinuated ourselves into the crowd. Approving nods soon followed along with, high fives and thumbs up all by virtue of wearing this cheap red hat made in Vietnam.

“Nasty Women” had successfully penetrated a Republican party.

It’s Trump Time Baby!

The room reeked of entitlement. The very personification of the kind of elitism Trump vowed to eradicate from Washington.

Some revelers were refugees of the official ball fortresses, some from state sponsored parties, a diverse crowd of rich white people mingling with richer white people, all taking selfies and proudly posting pictures of earlier encounters with Caitlyn Jenner at the Liberty Ball. The only real celebrity of the night, it did not spare her from the cruel mocking jokes I would overhear later.

Trump Boys Will Be Boys

With the Russian vodka flowing, these red-blooded men in red trucker hats topping off their satin peaked lapel Hugo Boss tuxedos were on the prowl, licking their chops in victory and entitlement like a Superpac of wolves.

Like heat seeking missiles looking to score it didn’t take long before some happy warriors zeroed in on our own red caps and obvious availability.

Grab Em By The Pussy!

The groping would have made our “grab em by the pussy” new president proud as a peacock.

Never taking no for an answer…It’s Trump time baby...they unabashedly and freely fondled us amongst cheers erupting around thru the room.

Don’t You Want Me Baby

My inauguration is bigger than your inauguration!

The music was at ear-splitting decibels and in a burst of Reagan era nostalgia, the electronic sound of Human League’s 1981 hit started blaring and the room burst into dancing and singing.

It wasn’t long before an overweight county supervisor from upstate N.Y. grabbed me to the dance floor. Pressing his oversized and unwelcome pelvis into mine, he sang along boisterously yet plaintively “Don’t You Want Me” the song eerily foreshadowing the oversize insecurities of our newly elected president whose gaping, wounded ego would be on full display the next day, begging us to like him.

You know I don’t believe you. When you say that you don’t need me.

You’d better change it back or we will both be sorry. Don’t you want me baby.

After embraces were rebuffed and sexual advances repeatedly declined, my dance partner whose tender ego mimicked our new Presidents, sneered at me derisively and spit out what he thought would be a cruel retort: “You look like a liberal!” and stormed away.

My integrity intact, it was time for this “Nasty Woman” to leave.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

Womens March on Washington January 21, 2017

On Saturday I stepped into another America and we embraced one another. The Woman’s March was democracy at its best.

Walking into the crammed National Mall filled with hundreds of thousands of people who simply rejected the racist, sexist, xenophobic Trump agenda was an instant balm to the despair that had been my new normal for the past several months.

The pink pussyhats hats reclaimed the loaded term used by Trump.

As far as the eye could see, I was enveloped by a vast blanket  of pink and brown, black and white, a sea of diversity and solidarity, one voice with many issues.

A massive expanse of women and men and children, their pink pussyhats bobbing in a sea of protest choosing freedom over fear.

Photo Credit Amanda Voisard / Washington Post The March was a rebuke of bigotry and call for inclusiveness

Saturday we became a red white and pink nation at the Woman’s March.

These pink pussyhats made right here in American homes in kitchen and living rooms and dens across the entire country by grandmothers and mothers and daughters, the colors of the hats ranging from mauve to powder pink, as diverse as the women who would wear them. These pink woolen hats a part of the Pussyhat project  were a product of good ol’ American ingenuity made right here in the USA with American know how and a bundle of pink yarn, a set of knitting needles and women who wanted to be heard.

Across the country women came hundreds and thousands of them, by planes and trains and automobiles. All showing up to drown out Trump and have their voices heard. Some driving straight through the night from the heartland for 18 hours straight, with no sleep arriving  blurry eyed but energized; they came by the boatload on crowded buses and trains of solidarity among strangers who quickly became sisters.

We are loud, we are nasty and we are fed up

There were no walls that day, no boundaries between gender or class, color, or creed. There was comradery and compassion so that a Trans tax attorney from Brooklyn peacefully mingled with a meat packer from Kansas, war-weary veterans of marches past thier spirits  ignited once again, their sparkling eyes wise and knowing, rubbed shoulders with wide-eyed millennials in their first ever march. They were all there as a repudiation of what Trump is about, walking boldly together, as together we enter dangerous territory.

Stronger Together

The march was a show of force, proof that for however many people are happy about Trump’s inauguration and that number is far smaller than he or his press secretary would have you believe, many more are unhappy.

At the same time I marched in Washington it was empowering to know that across the country and around the globe people were showing up to drown out Trump too.

The author at the Women’s March Washington DC 2017

I was so proud to be part of this patriotic crowd of unified voices and diverse agendas, melded, supported and enhanced by one another.

We will be watching. We will continue to make and keep America great.

Keep your hands off our democracy!

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2017.

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