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were not able to ask questions. And at that historic rally for equality, not one woman was among the ten speakers, although “Mrs. Medger Evers” did introduce a tribute to six “Negro women fighters for freedom,” who stood silently on the stage.
    In 1957, the federal government finally passed an act ensuring women’s right to serve on federal juries, but when The Feminine Mystique came off the press six years later, only twenty-nine states allowed women to serve equally with men on city and state juries. In 1963, women, who
were 51 percent of the population, composed just 2 percent of U.S. senators and ambassadors and 2.5 percent of U.S. representatives.
    Advice books for girls and women hammered home the idea that a woman’s greatest goal should be to get married and that she should bury her own interests and impulses in order to please and flatter a man into proposing. Even today some advice books for females are based on this idea, but such books stand out today precisely because they are out of step with mainstream mores. In 1963, Helen Andelin self-published Fascinating Womanhood , which became a runaway best seller when it was picked up by a mainstream publishing house in 1965. Andelin counseled women that the way to a happy marriage was to become “the perfect follower.” She urged them to cultivate a “girlish trust” in their man and never to “appear to know more than he does.” A woman should never let her voice exhibit such qualities as “loudness, firmness, efficiency, boldness.” While it was okay to get angry, she told them, you should be sure to display only “childlike anger,” which included “stomping your feet” and scolding your man in terms that flattered his sense of masculinity, such as “you big hairy beast.”
    An article in the January 1960 McCall’s , “Look Before You Leap,” presented a list of questions for prospective brides to answer before they married. The magazine urged the woman to be sure she would be able to press her husband’s trousers, iron his shirts, and cook meals he liked. It also asked: “Has he pointed out things about you that he doesn’t like, and have you changed because of what he’s said?” The correct answer, of course, was yes, but women’s magazines and advice books were unanimous in warning women against pointing out anything they didn’t like in their mates.
    Once they were married, women’s work was truly never done. Typical of the advice to wives at the dawn of the 1960s was a piece in the December 18, 1960, issue of Family Weekly magazine, inspired by the fact that the student council of New York University’s college of engineering regularly presented “Good Wife” certificates to “worthy” wives whose “encouragement, collaboration, and understanding” had helped their husbands complete their degrees. “Could You Win this ‘Good Wife’
Certificate?” asked the author, a noted marital advice authority of the day. He proceeded to enumerate what it took to make the grade: A good wife makes her husband “feel that he is the boss at home.” She “shares her husband’s goals, fitting them to her own. She is willing to wait patiently for the ultimate rewards.” She understands that “physical love is a symbol of devotion rather than an end in itself, and she is aware that such physical need is usually greater in the male.” For this reason, she “never makes him feel inadequate.” In conversations, the good wife permits her husband “to take the lead” without interrupting. “She follows an open door policy” for his friends, “even if she finds them dull or sometimes disagreeable.” But she also respects her husband’s need for privacy, so “she learns when to keep quiet.... If he’d rather read or watch a ball game on television, she avoids disturbing him with idle chatter.”
    Above all, like the women described in the December 1962 Saturday Evening Post article, a “good wife” considers “homemaking her