Boom! Voices of the Sixties

p. 192

Brokaw muses on the status of women in American homes in the 50s. They often ran the house but were denied the title “head of household,” and especially if they were employed outside their home. The title “was reserved for males and was used to deny, for example, equal pay for single women who were superior schoolteachers because they weren’t the head of household. It was not unusual for merchants who relied on their wives to do the accounting, the clerking, and the merchandising to lock up at the end of the day and go to the Chamber of Commerce meeting without inviting along the women who got them there in the first place.”