Will this mate embarrass you by nonconformity? The man wants a wife who will not act unbecomingly in public, who knows how to say and do the right thing when other people are present, who will conform to the customs that will cause their neighbors to think well of her. The girl wants a man who is not discourteous or sloppy, who will get to work at the time he is supposed to report, who will not embarrass her in public by doing things that will make them criticized by others.

Happy wives, Adams wrote, quoting one psychologist of the day, “tend to be conventional,” while unhappy wives “seek spectacular activities” and “want to be on the move.”119

Micki McGee, the sociologist, explained that even as nonconformity became a social trend, beginning with the Beats of the 1950s and into the antiwar movement of the mid-1960s, it wasn’t as liberating as it seemed. True, books like Sex and the Single Girl encouraged women to have sex before marriage—a radical notion at the time. But it also admonished women to “light up when a guy calls” and always shave their armpits.120 “Encouraging women to embrace gender norms and pander to male bosses to advance their own social and financial position can hardly be read as a nonconformist position,” McGee said.

Indeed, we seem to always find a way to hammer every nonconformist impulse into just another norm. Goths in high school reject the polo shirts of the preppie world, but they all dye their hair an identical black. Young hipsters in cities eschew cookie-cutter suburbs in order to live in cookie-cutter apartments. (I think I’ve seen the same “unique” IKEA lamp in about ten different “unique” Asian-fusion restaurants in Washington.) In its famous “1984” ad, Apple promised to literally break you free from a monotonous dystopia, but, as McGee pointed out, “when every single person has an iPhone, how is that being different? The paradox of the ethos of finding your own way is that if everyone’s doing that, it’s not actually being different.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century, workplaces evolved from begrudgingly tolerating diversity to awkwardly cheerleading it. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex, companies began sitting their employees down for antidiscrimination trainings, which were initially only aimed at ensuring compliance with the law and preventing lawsuits, as Rohini Anand and Mary-Frances Winters describe in their study121 of the trainings’ history.

But then, the Reagan administration loosened regulations around employers’ antidiscrimination practices. With less federal oversight, companies scaled back their diversity trainings. Trainings in this era focused on making women and minorities fit into the existing corporate culture, rather than the other way around. Women and people of color were urged to be more confident in the face of adversity—but relatively little was said about stopping the adversity itself.