women’s identity and were the source of some of women’s greatest pleasures—a legacy in part of the
1920s cultural shifts. Still, midcentury social justice feminists knew that women had left home for paid
work and were not going back. The postwar realities of women’s lives—combining caregiving and
breadwinning—were here to stay. The reforms social justice feminists pursued in the decades ahead
reflected these new postwar circumstances: they wanted to make it possible for all women to have both
satisfying family lives and good jobs.
The 1946 U.S. Women’s Bureau Labor Advisory Committee included, among others, Frieda Miller, chair (seated, third from left), Pauline
Newman (standing, first from left), and Esther Peterson (standing, third from left). Library of Congress.
In pursuing these reforms, the new postwar women’s movement remained attentive to how class and
cultural differences shaped women’s choices about home and employment. For low-income women, the
choice was not between home and a satisfying professional career but, for example, between home and
dealing with the crabby clientele at the local diner. Many would have loved to spend more time as
housewives and mothers but could not afford to do so. Elite and professional women, by contrast, often
saw housework as a worse option than the salaried careers they might find. In her 1963 blockbuster, The
Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan spoke for many college-educated women relegated to housework and
denied the professional careers they hoped to obtain. Instead of a satisfying career, they felt reduced to
being servants and maids.
Yet for those women who actually held jobs as maids, taking care of their own household and children
rather than someone else’s could seem like a liberatory step. Having the “opportunity” for a low-paying
service or blue-collar job was not the feminist revolution low-income women had in mind. Postwar
social justice feminists recognized that women had different ideas about what liberation meant, and they
sought to create better options for nonprofessional women as well as more choice for all women. In their
view, solving the “double day” for nonprofessional women meant creating more good jobs—jobs with
higher wages and shorter hours—and greater access to them for all women. It also meant recognizing and
revaluing mothering and the work of the home.
As the next chapter recounts, 1970s feminists would focus on the “feminine mystique” and on how
certain ideals of womanhood kept women tethered to the home and created unachievable and undesirable
expectations for them as mothers and wives. In contrast, midcentury social justice feminists criticized