A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz Page B

Amendment.

    The successes of the early-twentieth-century feminist movement permanently changed the discussion of women’s roles in society. Even defenders of traditional gender roles could no longer argue that women were innately incapable of physical heroism and political, professional, or athletic achievement. Few dared to maintain that society had any right to legally prevent women from exercising the same rights as men. Suddenly it was hard to find anyone who had been against the Nineteenth Amendment, even though the vote had been so close that one congressman refused to have his broken arm set for fear of missing the vote, while another left the deathbed of his wife, an ardent suffragist, to cast his vote for her cause.
    The Roaring Twenties were indeed heady times. But Friedan exaggerated the extent of women’s gains. Equal rights may have been increasingly accepted in the abstract, but in practice acceptance of female independence did not gain much traction in the 1920s. Opponents of gender equality shifted tactics and changed their rhetoric, arguing that while the women’s movement had led to necessary reforms, it had gone too far. People who had initially condemned feminism because it encroached on men’s traditional prerogatives now presented themselves as the true defenders of the female sex, faulting the movement for taking away women’s traditional privileges.
    In August 1920, the month the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the Ladies’ Home Journal printed a “Credo for the New Woman.” The editors offered a backhanded endorsement of women’s rights that stressed the limits to equality they felt American women should accept. “I believe in woman’s rights; but I believe in woman’s sacrifices too.” “I believe in woman’s suffrage; but I believe many other things are vastly more important.” “I believe in woman’s brains; but I believe still more in her emotions.” And “I believe in woman’s assertion of self,” as long as “through her new freedom [she] elects to serve others.”
    In November 1923, the Ladies’ Home Journal printed an article by Corra Harris in which she remarked that modern women had been “acquiring a new set of adjectives, such as ‘able,’ ‘efficient,’ ‘influential,’ ‘distinguished. ’” Harris conceded that many of the activities of these
“up-and-coming women of the present moment” were useful, and she even admitted to an “anxious hope” that they would stay in public service long enough to give “the national household a cleaning.” But Harris believed that women must and soon would once more embrace the old adjectives, such as “‘meek,’ ‘matronly,’ ‘maternal,’ ‘kind,’ ‘domestic.’” They would recognize, Harris predicted, that nothing was to be gained from reforming the world at the price of their “mental and spiritual” happiness, and they would return to “the ancient duties and pleasures” of home.
    “We can amend the Constitution,” Harris concluded, “but it is my belief that we cannot change the nature of women by doing so. They belong to love, goodness, faith in all things.... They will never endure the revolting revelations of political life nor the fierce competitions of public life. They are only trying on a new-fashioned garment to see if it becomes them. It will not. Therefore they will not wear it or pay for it.”
    Not everyone shared Harris’s confidence that American women would get over their infatuation with the new freedoms. As the 1920s progressed, warnings about the excesses of feminism became more strident. One especially popular ploy in agitating against further progress was to publish testimonies of purported former feminists, or daughters of feminists, about the costs of “too much” liberation.
    Typical was “I Rebel at Rebellion” by Marian Castle in the July 1930 Woman’s Journal . Castle acknowledged that an older generation of women had become understandably “tired of