Esther lives in New England; she grows up in the 1930s and 40s, arrives in New York City just before her last year in college, and works on an apprenticeship for a fashion magazine. The year is 1953, before the popularity of the birth control pill, before women's liberation, and before all the major social movements of the 1960s. Esther Greenwood has achieved success in her academic endeavors and has won prizes for her writing. But her future and her female role are not clearly laid out for her. Indeed, how is she supposed to fuse her scholastic success with being a truly "feminine" creature of her era? That is a very real problem for Esther. She is plagued by her "fig-tree" metaphor/concept, in which each "ripe fig" represents a different female role, and Esther cannot pick just one. As a result, she is afraid that they will all shrivel and drop off the tree before she can decide which one to choose.
Esther reaches maturity in the early 1950s in an America where women's roles were rigidly assigned. Basically, American women fell into two groups: the good girls and the bad girls. Good girls married well and had 2.5 children, possibly more but not too many more. They kept nice houses, cooked proper, nutritious, and economical meals, went to PTA meetings, and, in general, were dutiful "wives." If they were successful in life, they became very much like Mrs. Eisenhower, or Mrs. Nixon, or Doris Day. The bad girls, in contrast, were sexy, bosomy, probably blonde, and they did not marry proper lawyers and doctors and politicians. They might, if they were clever, become lesser Marilyn Monroe types. Then there were also a group of women who were not really considered women. These were the spinsters and librarians and social workers and old maid school teachers. These intelligent women, these Ethel Rosenbergs (cited by Esther in the first paragraph of the novel), were doomed in society. They were not classified as good or bad because they did not "play the game" for male attention.
