I truly don't know. I tend to think it's a little of both.
By trying to place myself in those days, empathizing with men from that period, at once I get an overwhelming sense of responsibility. It's like I have a family of children who all depend on me. If I assume that, "No wife of mine is going to
have to (note: it's not, "
want to." Most men thought no woman would
really want to work outside the home and if they did after marriage, it was because they were forced to. A working wife with an able-bodied husband was something for her husband to be ashamed of with rare exception) work outside the home!," as many men did, I get a few very particular and strong feelings.
The first is the importance of social stability. My entire family depends upon me to see to them. My kids need school, my wife wants nice things, and all of them are dependent upon me. On Fridays I take my check, put some in the bank, put some in my wallet, and then give the rest to my wife to pay for things my family needs. I know this system and it's important that this system continue so that I know how to function within it.
Part of that stems from an overwhelming feeling of loneliness. I have my friends, my dad, my brother and they will help me with good advice, but when I come home, I still feel very alone because everything I see, from the house itself, to every knicknack and stick of furniture, to my wife and children's clothes and food, all depend upon me. Provision for them is my utmost priority in life and it frightens me no end. Were I to become incapacitated or die, my family would be left defenseless. Though I understand it, I enormously resent that my wife would likely have to remarry. She is important to me, we talk, she reassures me, she keeps me going, but she is not my equal. In many ways she's a child to me and just as dependent as the children upon me to live.
One other sense I get is that the social order is important to me because it tells me how to live. The Joneses are very important to me because if we all have and do the same things, then it means I'm on the right track. It's reassuring to me; I feel less lonely. That extends not just to gender roles, but racial and religious ones as well. That's an odd feeling for me. We go to the same churches, the same vacations, shop at the same places, have similar cars, clothes, and homes. Job stability is of enormous importance to me. I need to know I will have a job when I walk in every day at 9am. I need to know what my pension will be, what benefits I will have when I retire 45 years from now. Knowing that, I can plan long in advance, knowing just how much we will be able to afford in the coming years.
That little exercise taught me a great deal about the social dynamics of the time in ways I didn't expect. Feminism must have been terribly frightening because it upset the dynamic that men came home to. The home is a refuge, a place away from the world where I can be reassured that I'm doing what's right for my family even if I harbor doubts and anxieties. I may not have the last word anywhere else, but having it in my home helps to keep my ego reinforced for all the crap I have to deal with outside the home where I have to kiss ass to customers, bosses, and other authorities. To reject that social dynamic is to reject all for which I'm working so hard and going out on a limb every day to accomplish. That my wife wouldn't want to work or wants to have equal say in our finances or day to day living (beyond home matters) makes me feel like I've failed her and my children. Maybe I think my wife is driven more by emotion than logic. Maybe I patronize her intelligence when she ventures out of women's traditional spheres of competence. I worry that she doesn't know what she's demanding because men like myself try to keep our wives from the cold reality of the world. To reassure her I don't tell her about the worst things that go on in my daily life. I don't want her to worry because it will disrupt the family.
This is an oversimplification in many ways. There are dramas and more complex issues all throughout my life as Ward Cleaver, yet I have been raised to expect life to be this way and I don't know how to cope if it isn't. The most frightening aspect of this is that I wouldn't know how to provide for my family were things different, and they are the entire reason I do everything I do.
Living through the civil rights era as an adult man must have been one hell of a shock. Race, religion, youth, politics, economies, sex, and feminism hit men from every single angle of their being. Nothing but nothing was certain as it seemed it would be. The wife wants a job, your son has longer hair than your daughter, nobody goes to church any more, McCarthyism, the red scare, and the Vietnam war pit the country against itself. Jobs are being lost, "lay off" becomes a word, inflation eats at your earnings, cousin Frank moves to Greenwich Village and seems unusually close to his roommate, and the wonderful suburbs that promised so much are now the focus of derision in popular songs. Then comes the energy crisis, a major recession, the technological revolution, and a popular magazine asks if, "Is God Dead?" How absolutely horrifying! Wasn't this the country that defeated Germany and Japan not long ago? Didn't we weather a depression? Surely that we survived and prospered enormously following those two events proves that the system worked. Why fuck with it? What more can we, as men, do to make things right? Men are fixers, providers, protectors, and to have so much change at once is taken as a personal insult that we've somehow not done anything right when we've sweated and worried and broken our backs to do our best for our family, friends, and society.
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What now comes to my mind wasn't that feminism occurred, it was how it occurred in the context of everything else. I can almost imagine husbands turning to their wives and recoiling in horror, "Not you too!" Feminism came at time when there was so much social upheaval that it seemed just another stone to be thrown at middle class men who were being blamed for all other ills of society. Feminism grew out of a greater social change that ruined not men, but the expecations of men who had been raised since birth with the promise that if they followed the rules, they would be successful at having happy families, a modicum of prosperity, and a sense of fulfillment that they did well at their jobs, provided for their families, and could earn a retirement without regrets. That was the dream they were given and worked their entire lives to accomplish. Losing that to some unknown social dynamic just rocked their world. Now men are left without the reassurance of a script to follow. You'll be judged on an adlib preformance in this life.
I don't think men have recovered from that. I think the GOP's current platform is a reaction to that change. I think many social institutions from marriage to nuclear families, to health, child, and elder care, to even the shapes and sizes of our houses and cars, to how our government addresses social needs, to our tax and legal systems, have not yet recovered nor been reogranized to anyone's satisfaction. They're all still operating on a model that is now all but obsolete no matter how much conservatives try to resist it.