Having It All · Episode 1 of 10 · 25 min
The Promise: What Boomer Women Were Told They Could Have
American girls born in the baby boom were raised on a script of home, husband and children, then watched it flip mid-childhood into a promise of love, family and career. The episode follows that promise from Adlai Stevenson's 1955 housewife speech through Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique to Helen Gurley Brown's 1982 bestseller, which turned having it all into a slogan.
Who's who
- Betty Friedan+1 more episodeAuthor of The Feminine Mystique, which named the problem that has no name
- Helen Gurley BrownAuthor and Cosmopolitan editor whose 1982 book made the promise a slogan
- Adlai Stevenson IIPresidential candidate whose 1955 Smith College speech praised the housewife role
- Anne-Marie Slaughter+1 more episodePrinceton scholar whose 2012 Atlantic essay became the promise's epitaph
- Marlo ThomasActress and producer behind Free to Be... You and Me
Where it happens
- Smith College, MassachusettsSite of Stevenson's 1955 commencement address
Timeline
- June 1955Adlai Stevenson tells Smith graduates their task lies in the role of housewife
- 1962Helen Gurley Brown publishes Sex and the Single Girl
- February 1963The Feminine Mystique is published
- 1965Gurley Brown takes over Cosmopolitan
- 1982Having It All is published
- 2012Slaughter's 'Why Women Still Can't Have It All' appears in The Atlantic
Still debated
The 'two million copies in three weeks' sales claim for Sex and the Single Girl cannot be independently verified, and Gurley Brown did not coin the phrase 'having it all'; it circulated in advertising before her book.