UF Researcher: Popular Pundits For Women Are Usually Behind The Times

July 5, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Women seeking fresh advice from the mainstream media are actually getting stale news, says a University of Florida researcher who studied pundits ranging from Martha Stewart to Benjamin Spock.

Maxine L. Margolis, a UF anthropology professor, found that sages who profess to advise women are followers, not leaders, who alter their wisdom to fit social and economic realities that already exist.

“Wherever I looked, from Colonial times to the present, I found that advice-givers shifted their instructions to fit underlying changes in American society,” said Margolis, author of a new book “True to Her Nature: Changing Advice to American Women.”

She said that throughout the 1950s and 60s pundits preached that women who worked outside the home harmed their children. But as women entered the workforce in growing numbers, the “experts” soon began to follow the trend.

“In the 70s, psychologists and advice-givers suddenly shifted their condemnation of working mothers because a second income had, in many cases, become essential to a middle-class lifestyle,” she said.

Margolis said the number of working mothers with pre-school children has grown from 12 percent in 1950 to nearly 65 percent today. That’s because average male wages have fallen since the early 70s as a result of inflation and the shift from a manufacturing to a service-oriented economy, she said.

“Women didn’t take jobs because the advice-givers woke up and decided it wouldn’t hurt their children,” she said. “It used to be that a man with a manufacturing job could afford to support a wife and children because the pay and benefits were so good. As corporations moved these jobs to the Third World to take advantage of lower wages, replacing them with lower-paying service jobs, two family incomes became increasingly necessary to pay the mortgage and buy groceries, and women’s paychecks filled the gap.”

In the 50s, before employment was considered a solution to maternal malaise, pediatrician Benjamin Spock advised depressed mothers to “go to a movie or to the beauty parlor” or “get yourself a new hat or dress,” Margolis said. Today, advice-givers offer suggestions that reflect men’s growing paternal role as women’s workplace demands have increased, she said.

“Until the 1970s, the few studies there were on fatherhood focused on absent fathers or the consequences of not having a male role model in the home,” she said.

It hasn’t always been that way. Child care was shared during Colonial times when both parents worked on the farm, only becoming women’s responsibility when men’s jobs took them away from home to offices and factories during the industrial revolution, she said.

When labor-saving devices put an end to women weaving cloth, making candles and performing many other tasks crucial to a family’s survival, advice-givers suggested a flurry of “make work” activities to fill up time and justify women’s presence in the home, she said.

Lofty standards of cleanliness prevailed, with floors expected to be “cleaner than clean” and husbands’ shirts “whiter than white,” Margolis said. The syndicated household column “Hints from Heloise” even gave an elaborate recipe for preparing homemade dog food and tips for making birdhouses out of plastic bleach bottles, she said.

Today, with so many women employed, the advice has changed from time-spending to time-saving, Margolis said. New manuals for keeping a house in order warn of perils of perfection that include “mopping migraine” and “dustpan depression,” she said.

Popular icon Martha Stewart, with her elaborate housekeeping rituals that include soap-making, is an anachronism who appeals to people’s sense of fantasy, Margolis believes. “Perhaps one wife in a dual career marriage who watches her show expressed it best in saying, I love to see the domestic life that we don’t have time to live,’” she said.

Conrad Kottak, chairman of the University of Michigan’s anthropology department, called Margolis’ book “a fresh perspective on how and why the roles of men and women have changed historically, especially from the 1960s through Y2K.”