in 1945 10 million American soldiers returned home after a long and brutal war men and women were eager to embrace a new kind of Life do you swear to love me forever and ever I do I [Music] do I swear suddenly for the famous and not so famous marriage became a kind of national Obsession in the first year of Peace 2.2 million Couples married soon after the average marriage age dropped to 18 between the war's end and 1950 32 million babies were born this marriage in Baby Boom was to solve the dislocations of the war American men and women would live happily Ever [Applause] After or would they come on baby let the good time roll come on baby let me thr your soul come on baby let a good time roll roll all night long come on baby yes this is me this is something I just gave me come on a baby let the good time roll roll all night long come on baby [Music] while [Music] come go ahead and drool it's Miss America time the shapel Beauties in all America 51 of them parade at Atlantic City for the title overpowering all opposition is strapping 541 143 found Miss Utah nearby Asbury Park holds a quest for Mrs America she's got to cook as well as look 32 married lovelies show they know potatoes have to be peeled bed making comes next into the beds go the testers the best beds by Mrs New York City H feels comfortable but it's the Body Beautiful That's the Criterion for the well-rounded Mrs [Applause] America and finally the winner watch out Mrs America Mrs America was more than a contest it was a new way of life women found themselves on a peculiar pedestal honored as sexy ferle Homemakers yes wife can be beautiful Mrs America set impossibly high standards a loving mother she had a figure like an hourglass and was as efficient as a sewing machine she wore high heels when she scrubbed the floors and was as clean and pure as laundry detergent she was to be the ultimate symbol of the new affluence by the mid-50s half the families in America had entered the middle [Music] class My Love Has Come [Music] Along women turn to magazines to learn how to adapt to their new roles in the Land of Plenty I think the mass magazines was in their interest to create this ideal American family because their interest was to sell consumer goods the advertising is almost all directed at women there's always a woman standing in front of a new refrigerator a woman standing in front of a car it was extremely [Music] powerful my heart was wrapped up in Clover the night I one woman who eagerly bought the message sold by the mass magazines was a young writer from New York Betty fan in 1952 like so many other Americans she and her husband Carl moved to the suburbs we bought a house in Rockland County and I did all the things that women has supposed to do with those and enjoy them you know uh shuffering the kids and the school board battles and and uh T to fish casseroles and and and and and liked it it was enjoyable I had three kids and I i l my kids as far as that was concerned and liked having kids but uh it was like an itch I couldn't quite suppress that I that despite the fact that I now wrote housewife on the census blank I wrote for freelance for women's magazines sort of like secret drinking in the morning fedan was popular with her editors until she began to write pieces about women who tried to balance a career with motherhood uh I wanted to write once an article about a woman who was a sculptor I could write about her painting her child's crib but I couldn't write about her serious work it'll be nice to be just a housewife well there'll be no great demand for either Talent OR brains but Ellen Douglas that's the silliest thing I've ever heard you say of course you don't mean it certainly I mean it all you have to know is what switch to turn what buttons to push and what cans to buy does Bill know he marrying a can opener instead of a wife who he's in love with [Music] me M laar graduate Betty fan returned 15 years later for a class reunion she was working on an assignment to find out if the Ambitions of her classmates had been fulfilled she asked them a series of questions what difficulties have you found in working out your role as a woman what are the satisfactions and frustrations of your life today what do you wish you had done differently in response her classmates most of them Housewives were deeply dissatisfied there was a whole lot of women evidently each one thinking she was alone who uh didn't somehow experience an orgasm throwing the powder into the dishwashing machine Lop lollipop during the reunion for Dan was also struck by the attitudes of the Smith [Music] undergraduate lop lop lop [Music] lop according to one survey half of all America's co-eds had dropped out of college either to marry or to avoid a iring knowledge that might frighten men I remember at the reunion I was talking to some of the seniors that were then graduating and I said which courses do you get all excited about and these young girls would say to me oh we don't get excited about things like that I spend every weekend with Jack engageed to and want to go have three kids or four kids and when I heard this and I thought hey what's [Music] happened in the ' 50s even teen magazines pushed the idea of wedded bliss by the end of the decade over 14 million girls were engaged by the age of 17 we want to get marri but young dating patterns also began to imitate marriage Before the War uh there was a coupet going steady with one date is okay if that's all you rate if that's all you can get whereas after World War II the rise of going steady was really linked with the rise of young marriage going steady was the mark of success and that was a shocking development to a lot of their parents the first reason the most obvious reason was sex hello Frank listen the family says no but I'll sneak out tomorrow night meet you anyway okay well a lot of the people who got married when they were 18 didn't see it as closing down their options but as escaping into an exciting life where they don't have to live with their parents anymore but can live with their husband or wife and have sex whenever they want to and you know it it was a great life as they saw [Music] it for these increasingly Young wives life was good as the nation was in the midst of an economic boom but in the women's magazines meant to guide young marriage life was almost too good they set an impossibly high standard for family life even as they suggested that homemaking should fulfill all of a woman's hopes and dreams this small narrow domestic World which which does carry a a strong emotional Freight was made to carry more than it should have when families did have problems as they all inevitably did they felt guilty Betty fedan found that many women liked their roles as mothers and wives but resented the idea promoted by the women's magazines that no other role was possible can't you be just a college professor's wife isn't that enough and play goes to your Hamlet oh no I'm not going to sit at home with the four walls and count pennies or alter myself to suit your friends taste my work isn't important enough I'm only a woman he'd like me to be a slave to the house while some cutie on the paper Whispers into his ear what a great big reporter he is as the decade progressed women started going back to work though largely confined to dead- end jobs nearly 70% of all middleclass wives worked outside the household to earn extra money for the family families wanted all the goods that the Abundant post-war America promised and so women often would contribute to the household income um but what you see throughout the 1950s is a real praise of women in the home that keeps pushing the happiness that should come to women from being Homemakers and mothers to describe these contradictory pressures on women psychiatrists identified a new disorder the housewives blight to cope with the problem doctors began to prescribe anti-depressants in record numbers the drug of choice was miltown Mr s to to be so peachy before by 1957 3 years after the drugs release Americans had consumed 1.2 million pounds of [Music] miltown becoming more and more aware of a growing discontent Benny fedan tried to interest some of the women's magazines in an article on the issue but none of her regular Outlets would publish her findings the only thing I saw was an outline that said women have been brainwashed into being Housewives and it seemed to me pretty extreme and so I said to her agent I don't know what's happened to Betty uh but I really am not interested in this and red book said well she's always Always written good stuff for us before but she's gone off her rocker only the most neurotic women will identify with this to Fran part of the problem was that almost all of the women's magazines were run by men who were practicing a kind of unconscious censorship what I realized is that that somehow that what I had written threatened the basic Foundation or the Bas boundaries of women's world as as seen in perpetual uated by the women's magazines uh which uh I called then the Feminine Mystique she set out to write a book with the same title when it was finally published in 1963 it became the handbook of a new feminist movement what I underestimated was how that book as a scream of pain would resonate with so many women for so many years and lead them to rethink their [Music] lives what do you mean what's happened to me I don't know except that you've lost your guts and all of a sudden I'm ashamed of you Tom and Betsy wrath should have been happy they had managed to buy a new house they had healthy children and a rising income how about but for reasons they couldn't understand they were deeply dissatisfied with their lives Skol without talking about it much Tom and Betsy wrath began to think of their house as a trap and they no more enjoyed refurbishing it then a prisoner would Delight in shining up the bars of his cell the mystery of a growing dissatisfaction was at the heart of the most famous 50s novel The Man in the gray flannel suit it became a bestseller in a popular movie because it captured in very human terms a certain desperation that lingered behind the new affluence the more money Americans made the more they seemed to spend no paycheck and no house ever seemed to be big enough the book was written as a protest against the conformity in which I felt I was being shoved and I didn't reason that all out at the time I thought it was just autobiographical especially the first part of it when Sloan Wilson returned from the war he and his wife like Tom Betsy wrath in the novel were deeply insecure about what they had working at a steady but dull job Sloan Wilson felt a terrible social pressure to do whatever it took to earn more money buy a bigger house and drink a better brand of Jin I had friends who got involved with uh large boats yacht clubs country clubs Mansions all this this stuff and went broke on 200,000 a year and then found themselves owing back tax money this was really quite a common disaster during the ' 50s a new consumer's Aid was invented the credit card for the first time in history average Americans could buy now and pay later by the end of the decade Sears had issued credit accounts to one one out of every five American families a nation of Savers had become a nation of debtors hustling to meet their monthly payments I hear there's a spot opening up in public relations where I work in United broadcasting what would it pay oh I don't know 8 10,000 I guess something like that I could certainly do with 8 or 10,000 but I don't know anything about public relations who does you got a clean shirt you bathe every day and that's all is to it the higher a man gets in business the harder the moves get climbing the ladder to success was a grim business in the 50s it was called the rat race a competition to see who could be the best company man the man in the great flanel suit touched the n it's a great title am I a colorless man am I a functionary at a high level have I lost control of my life do I belong to the corporation I work for rather than to myself have I made the right choice or have I settled for something I mean most of us worked for big corporations in those days and uh the big Corporation was in some ways more authoritative than the armed services were glad to have your board Tom thank you Gordon I was working for time in life shortly after I got out of the service and a uh young man from the Personnel Department was dispatched to tell me that I was not dressed properly he said you really ought to go to Brooks Brothers and and get a great flannel souit we'd like to see something else perhaps uh do gray but I I suddenly realized it was a uniform of the day that I was back in the service that I had to dress like this and I began very much to resent it I've always I suppose like many writers Wonder wondering you know what kind of man Am I who am I and I looked in the mirror one day I said I know what I am I'm just a man in a gr flannel suit one more in the novel Tom wrath could never escape the memories of War come on Tom we got to get out of here all right get out of the way it's strange I was only in the service four years and I'm 75 years old it's a tiny part of my life but maybe half of everything I've written is about the war the feeling that you were a white knight it was a wonderful feeling that we are fighting the the forces of evil uh and winning and to uh get yourself together and uh run a good part your own tiny part of the whole military machine but to run it right in my case a small ship we were jumped by a Japanese plane and we shot it down it does confer a certain dignity upon a young man you're left with all these powerful churning emotions and somehow the whole scene has gone you know it's like somebody put off the movie projector suddenly Wilson the war hero like so many others had become just another man on a train every day Suburban office workers streamed into the city every night they staggered home relieving the Relentless pressure in the bars I'd rank a lot in those days and uh almost everybody I knew did if you had to wait in Grand Central to get a train well you waited at a bar and had a drink then you get on the train that's boring so you go in the bar car and have a drink then you get home and there's a certain tension in getting home and seeing what's happening there so you have a martini there so you've had a lot of drinks before you even start drinking good evening children Tom r and Sloan Wilson were haunted by The Emptiness of their lives they were living a lie because they could not reveal to their wives the passion and the romance of their wartime [Music] memories you remember the terrible hunger not just for sex but For Love or for something good in your [Music] life I think everybody feels that he or she has some Shadow over them you know that we can't quite get rid of and I think what the Resonance of this book is something that's applicable to a lot of his fellow Americans at that time something did happened to me in the war something I've never told you about I have another child Betsy a son in Rome I've never heard from his mother since we left there but now she's written to it I don't know how to make you realize the way things were then nobody knows who wasn't in the war I killed 17 men I was actually looking at looking right straight at them not enemies at a distance that I couldn't see but persons persons like you see in the train in the elevator was having a child worse than things like that I don't know only the child is happy to me in the novel Tom and Betsy wrath solved their problems by confronting them honestly Sloan Wilson faced the truth of how trivial his life had become when a rival Junior executive beat him to the job of holding the Hat of Wilson's boss I realized I'd been one uped and that he had seen that the hats should be taken and I said to him meekly can I hold my man's hat and then I started to laugh and nobody had any idea why I was laughing he he didn't think it was funny he said yes you may hold your man's hat and I thought I got to get out of here you know this is this is not this is not a life for me and the next day I did quit Sloan Wilson decided to become a full-time writer when his first marriage ended in divorce he sold his house and bought a sailboat where he now lives now remarried he has produced a number of well-regarded novels but none as successful as the man in the gray flannel suit I would think that if you ask son Wilson he would tell you that for the rest of his life people came up and told him your book spoke to me you are the one that defined Our [Music] Generation by 1956 one year after the release of Grey Flannel suit there was a sense that the country was opening up interstate highways fanned out across the country the US Army replaced its mule unit and messenger pigeons with helicopters new franchises opened up Burger King Midas Muffler Kentucky Fried Chicken along with the first indoor shopping mall remote control Banking and TV soap opers began the first Godzilla movie arrived from Japan as AEK sold its first videotape recorder there were new words brainstorming head shinker Industrial Park tranquilizer Dear Abby began dispensing advice amidst all this America's Traditional Values were about to be shattered by a housewife from new they were worship God by singing number 219 L of our fathers in the mid 1950s the image of small town America as a pure Incorruptible place was almost [Music] sacred then in 1956 in one small town in New England a writer known as Pandora in blue jeans set free the roing passions that lurked below the surface of America's Heartland Indian summer is like a woman ripe heartly passionate but fickle she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all nor for how long she will stay going to make love to me oh yes yes of course I will one year early in October Indian summer came to a town called Payton [Music] place people were ashamed to be seen reading it everybody was talking about it it was sort of an atomic pile and you dared not go anywhere near it I remember the diamond hard nipples in the famous beach scene nipples were they I can't remember what her name was I don't names were unimportant parts are what counted everybody was Furious and my editor up at the citizen he called me in and he said you've written so many articles about this book coming out he said I don't see how you could do that that's a dirty book I don't see how any woman could write a book like that the unlikely author of Payton place was a New Hampshire housewife with three children named Grace matalas in a way that was unusual for the time time Grace had written portraits of independent passionate women and revealed shocking details about small town life to a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture but if you go beneath that picture it's like turning over a rock with your foot everybody who lives in town knows what's going on there are no secrets but they don't want Outsiders to know you I didn't care more than words Grace was born in 1924 in the French Canadian ghetto of Manchester New Hampshire the famous amus textile mills had drawn so many workers from Quebec that the west side of town was known as Little Canada to escape from the Grim life of the Mills and to Shield herself from the Tantrums of her alcoholic mother Grace retreated into the world of books and dreamed of becoming a writer in high school Grace Met George matallic he was poor and he was of Greek descent something which horrified Grace's mother but he was handsome and he had a car Grace's dreams of romance withered in marriage in the small town of gilmont New Hampshire George's annual salary as a high school principal only $3,000 I'm trapped trapped in a cage of poverty and mediocrity if I don't get out I'll die Grace found her Escape in her writing a mother of three she had little interest in keeping up with the appearances suggested for a woman in the 1950s she wore a man's checked shirt red and black a pair of jeans and shoes of some sort and that's how she dressed all the time Grace had started her novel before she moved to gilmon but she began to draw more heavily on local stories there was a lot of sex where you go with somebody's husband and uh maybe produce a child of his it was done a great deal in town here don't you say things about my father he was a wonderful man wonderful and fine and good that's what I told you well I lied I lied about him because I was ashamed of him and of myself well then why did you marry him I didn't and he didn't marry me because he already had a wife you had all these people that were supposed to act perfect in front of other people and then behind closed doors you had wife beating you had alcoholism you had child abuse you had all kinds of really nasty stuff going down she was writing about battered women before we even had the term battered women writing about domestic violence before we had them she was writing about the Feminine Mystique and we didn't have that term um she was writing about things that we had no names for one of the most Sensational local stories concerned a young girl who had murdered her father Grace wrote it as I told it to her and it concerned a farm family here what had happened was that the father molested his daughter for years that time I start teaching you something Lucas Lucas let me go never had nothing I wanted she killed him with the fire irons and she and her little brother dragged him out to the Sheep pen because in the winter you can't bury anybody here the ground is hard but the Sheep lie on the ground in their pen and they keep the ground soft when she finished the book Grace's husband pushed her to send it off to Publishers but no one seemed to know how to take it it contained graphic scenes of sex and violence the main character was a smart independent woman who seemed to enjoy sex and who wanted to work more than she wanted to marry it was rejected by every publisher who saw it then one day in New York City the manuscript found its way to Julian mesner and Company the only New York Publishing House run by a woman she saw the value in the book and had the power to get it published her name was Kitty Messner Kitty was halfway through it she she stayed up a good deal of the night she was caught up by it absolutely electrified by it and she came in the next day if I remember correctly and said here read this I was the editor of adult books for the company and she said I love it and she continued reading it while I went through the first part and I agreed with her that this had a lot of potential I'm not saying that we we thought we had Payton place here kitty mner was an extraordinary person uh far ahead of her time Kitty was tall willowy not beautiful but stunning she wore a beautifully tailored brown jacket and marvelous slacks when no one wore slacks this is 1955 remember she loved gambling she was very liberal politically she had a mouth like a long shoreman but very Charming she was a a woman doing unconventional things in a man's world here was a book that said a woman could do unconventional things in a man's world Kitty mesner called up Grace matalas in New Hampshire and said sweetie I love your book hey there you with the Stars in Your Eyes Kitty mner sent for Grace for the first time in her life Grace traveled to New York City the novel she had written between dishes in New Hampshire was going to be published hey there you so when she arrived in our office for the first time dressed in a sort of flannel plaid shirt and blue jeans it was quite and she calculated that I think she knew that when you come to New York to meet your book publisher you probably ought to wear a dress but she very carefully came down and gave us all the finger both Kitty and Grace were Rebels without a cause they clicked immediately they just were crazy about one another and I think probably the fact that the women was sort of running the show in the book did appeal to both of them when Kitty m edited the book she only asked for two substantial changes she insisted that Grace toned down the incest and pushed her into adding another love scene so she got very annoyed and she went over and sat down at the typewriter and bang bang bang she typed it out your legs are absolutely wanting please she said please and then yes yes yes yes and she pulled it out of the typewriter and said here's your sex and it was a very nice bit of sex between the principal and the girl that ran the dress shop Connie Howard Goodkind thought there might be a publicity angle in the grace metalia story and I said it occurred to me that there are all over the United States thousands and thousands of women saying if only I didn't have these kids I could do something with my life and here's a woman with three children living in what amounted to a tar preer shack up there with a husband making what $23,000 a year a principal in a small school and she a book published I thought that's pretty exciting with $5,000 he hired a new yorkist and set off to gilmont to find a way to sell the novel by pushing Grace's story when we knocked on her door we had to step over a pile of garbage to get in I mean literally little flies every everywhere and off in a corner was her typewriter and her little table and her chair and that's where she wrote this book I I must say my first reac getting over the the first few minutes was to be even more impressed than i' had been before that she had been able to accomplish this as New Yorkers like Goodkind began showing up in gilmon Town's folk grew anxious about rumors that the book would expose local scandals when locals pressured Grace to move and her husband was fired from his job Grace told her reporter it was all on account of pton place now that takes a certain canniness which is unusual for somebody living in gilon New Hampshire and within a matter of a day or two the headlines started to appear about censorship in New England there was a Boston newspaper that had huge headlines teacher fired for wife's book and I've compared those headlines with the headlines I had for World War II and they were about the same size The mesner company took out a full page ad in the New York Times capitalizing on the controversy it stirred up so much interest that advanced orders pushed the book onto the bestseller list even before it hit the bookstores all of her publicity pictures at the time showed her in like Lumberjack shirts and jeans or something and I mean it was a scandal her appearance was as much of a scandal as the book was Howard Goodkind promoted Grace as a Mythic figure reborn in small town America he dubbed her Pandora in blue jeans the legend is that Pandora was the Goddess that opened the box that she was not supposed to open and it was just as much as it to say that her book let all the troubles that were bothering people out we didn't have any idea at all what was going to happen I think we might end up making $1,500 and sold maybe 2,000 copies ,000 copies that would have been good in the first month Payton Place sold 100,000 copies within 2 years s surpassed Gone With the Wind eventually the paperback would sell over 8 million [Music] copies everything simply exploded everybody wanted to meet this Grace metall people are surprised Grace that a book so full of sex and violence could have been written by you a housewife and mother of three children well for hand sake sex and violence is around all the time she bepr 2 I knew a guy who had a special pocket sewn into his black jacket so that he could put Painting place in there and pull it out and of course it opened to the good parts I used to sneak my copy to school and we take it into the washroom and read it to each other I mean it was very scandalous pton place was banned in rhod island and Fort Wayne Indiana under tariff provision 121 can refused to allow the book to be imported undaunted Canadians smuggled copies in and read them in brown paper rappers what do you think of the Banning of literary Works in general I think it's a rotten idea from the word go I DET test the idea behind it I I hate the feeling that anyone else in the world is going to tell me what I will be allowed to read what I will be allowed to see because this is to me is the same as someone tell me what I'm I'm going to be allowed to think the Defenders of Payton Place defended it on its social merits that this tells what really takes place in a in small town New England I mean it wasn't defended because it was fun to read the sex scenes it was defended because it was honest and true 20th Century Fox bought the rights to the book and produced a sanitized but star studded movie version when she received her rights fee of $125,000 took the check down to the gilon General Store and presented it as payment for a quart of milk is it about the people of gilmon it certainly is not it was 3 quarters written before I ever moved to gilmington where where on Earth then did they get the idea it was about them well I think you can get very Freudian about that if you want to and start talking about guilt complexes and all that sort of thing with me I always simplified it and called it if the shoe fits put it on and apparently this is what the people of gilmon did as a public figure Grace was suddenly open to criticism from people in the town who thought their secrets were being exposed and critics at large who attacked her because as a woman she wasn't supposed to write like a man she told me she said people are going to hate me and that's when she started to drink I remember one morning at 9:00 she arrived here with a six-pack of beer and I had never seen this in her before it was something within Grace that made it impossible for her to take advantage of that success and get some pleasure out of it I I think she searched everywhere for it's a little corny but for some kind of internal happiness which she never seemed to be able to find the times I knew her she seemed excited about her success but never really happy about it I I remember her being in tears a lot right from the beginning later on alcohol and tears Grace wrote a sequel to pton place and two other novels but High living and unscrupulous agent and a continuing battle with alcohol reduced Grace to Poverty once more in a last desperate attempt to generate some cash she opened the pton place motel and went out of business after 2 months on February 25th 1964 Grace metallus died of Liberty disease people would call on the phone and they'd say you know don't bury Grace and gilmon you know get out of town and we don't want her body here things like that it was I mean she was dead wish she going to hurt you [Music] know [Music] you standing [Music] alone without a dream in my [Music] heart without a Love of My Own while a TV series based on pton Place continued to make money for 20th Century Fox Grace had sold all her rights what was left of her estate was sold to pay for back taxes in a final fire sale a man named Joseph Stanton bought metallus precious typewriter for $75 do you think that Payton place will be remembered I doubt it very much you don't think you don't think that 25 years from now the name Will mean anything not at all thank you Grace Grace malalia well thank you for having me my own [Music] in the end the town that Grace had exposed to the world reclaimed her her resting place remains a kind of marker of her struggle to speak honestly about men and women and the pent up passion anger and conflict that lurked below the surface in the 1950s the 50s was sort of a waiting period you had the feeling that the pressure was building up something was going to explode and I think that in a funny way uh Grace may have touched some of that I've met many people since then who who said about their own town wherever it was Mississippi Texas Oregon my town was a Pon place I'd like to know whose town was not a Pon [Music] place [Music] oh [Music] [Music]