The reason for her firing was that her husband could now support her.
Growing up in the fifties and sixties, the only mothers who worked were divorced or widowed. Like my grandmother's generation, the rest made homemaking a full-time job including cookie baking, sewing clothes, cooking nutritious meals and keeping a neat house. It was a bit of a scandal that one of my mother's friends usually had a filled-basket ready to be ironed in the living room.
Women in my mother's circle had time to be Brownie or Campfire Girl leaders, play golf except on Wednesday afternoon and Saturdays when the course was left to the men, meet for bridge or whatever they felt like.
Betty Friedan not withstanding, many of the women were happy. Their lives were like they were supposed to be.
My mother was not one of the content. Freed from regular domestic chores by cleaning women and my grandmother, she ventured beyond the ordinary role.
In the early 40s she developed a toy business. She designed cloth dolls, cats and bean bags that were sold by direct mail through magazines like House Beautiful. She marshaled women around town to sew the toys together. My grandfather, a retired engineer, did the silk screening of the toys. When he died, she closed the business.
She sold Peggy Newton cosmetics when we lived in West Virginia. Coming back she ran the country club we belonged to rental program and acted often a wedding and event planner.
When my parents divorced, she started a women clothing business, operated on a party plan. She would go into Boston get samples and soon was doing so well she only had to work six months a year. It left her free to take us to school, be there when we were home, and participate in our activities as well as her own. She would put on fashion shows for organizations, but best of all, I had an incredible wardrobe. She felt I was a walking advertisement and who was I to argue.
She became a journalist by accident. The Boston newspapers were on strike. The Lawrence Eagle-Tribune saw a chance to capture a market, and advertised for a journalist. She wasn't but she applied anyway and got the job.
Waking the next morning she decided, she could never do it. Before she could say call to say she changed her mind, friends telephoned to congratulate her. Her joining the paper had been on the front page. She was a great reporter. Through her I was able to get a job as a cub reporter at 16, something I'd dreamed about since I was about eight. She wrote for several papers right up until her death at 71. It became her passion.
When I was growing up women did not have many choices: teacher, secretary, nurse, hair dresser, store clerk. There was factory work, but that was not an alternative for the range of a middle-class teenage girl. Besides, the goal was to get a husband who would support one and in return, he would receive a well-run house and happy children.
My mother was never trapped by the myth of the happy homemaker. She refused to accept its lies and its limits.
If I had problems with my mother on other levels, it was not for the role model of going for what you want...don't accept the limits--go over them, under them, around them, barrel through them. For a woman born in 1917 this was extraordinary.
Today women have unlimited choice but not without barriers. They also have increased pressures that women of my mother's generation never had.
Is it better? Worse? Perhaps it depends on the person.
My mother's last writing was a cookbook that was never published. It was begun as a newspaper column. I turned it into a blog. I think she would have been pleased.
http://stovestories.blogspot.com/
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment