Guideposts

continued

The function of the 1950s housewife, I told them, was to buy. It was a new consumer culture of toaster covers and laundry whiter! brighter! than your neighbor's. One popular ad showed women discussing in shocked whispers a wife whose husband's shirts on the backyard clothesline revealed "tattletale gray." We were to keep a sharp eye on each other for all such evidence of imperfect housekeeping and nonconformity.

Because that young editor was nursing her baby during my outburst in Oregon, I used this issue as an illustration. Breast-feeding, when my children were born, was condemned as a holdover from an unsanitary past. Bottles and formulas were the modern way. "And don't forget," my pediatrician would caution, "to weigh him on the infant scales before and after each feeding." Infant scales sold for $39.95 -- the equivalent of hundreds today.

"I tried anyway to nurse all three children," I told the Oregon gathering. "And I failed three times." If the baby was fretful, or if I had so much as a sniffle, the doctor would warn that my primitive insistence on breast-feeding was endangering my child's welfare. I was ignorant of everything about mothering, only holding onto some half-formulated notion of "naturalness." And the natural was to have no place in the dawning plastic age, when products were to meet all needs.

Today I understand better the reasons for all this. America had just fought a global war at immense cost in lives and resources. With husbands and sons home from foreign battlefields, every instinct drew us to our own needs. And the huge industrial capacity of the United States, built up to wage the war, had to find an outlet in consumer goods.

Massive output requires a mass market, standard products for standard customers. Today too I know that in the '50s there were many, many women like me, isolated in our look-alike houses, each guiltily believing herself the only one failing to feel the fulfillment the media assured us was ours.

"Listening to you discuss the problems facing women today," I told the group in Oregon, "I kept thinking, Praise God, they're talking about these things!" In the 1950s women were not allowed to have problems that could not be solved with the right purchase.

My unhappiness in the '50s, of course, had personal causes as well. The landscape of our individual journey is always a mix of public features and private ones. In my case, the contrast between the wide world of travel writing and the confinement of housekeeping was too sudden, even if I hadn't been lugging baggage from childhood.

Dr. Kazan, the psychiatrist I'd begun seeing in 1951, helped me to see that the role of housewife held special menace for me. My mother too, I began to understand, had needed a barrier between herself and other people. Mine was that mythical door, hers was housework. Whenever, as a child, I'd tried to talk to her, she'd remember ironing she hadn't done or a room that needed vacuuming.

Since Mother had household help, I think I knew even then that housework was her way of hiding. I of all people should have empathized! Instead I blamed the cooking and the mending and the silver polishing for her unavailability. I would never give importance to such things.

In fact, I kept writing all through the '50s. But at a price! Scotty was five months old when I found an editing job I could do at home. Every few weeks the Updegraff Press would mail a book manuscript for me to work on. The mail slots in the apartment lobby, however, were letter-sized; the bulky manuscript envelopes would lie on the floor in sight of inquisitive neighbors. Soon it was rumored that the inhabitant of 15A was "different" -- a fatal word in those days -- and the friendly greetings in the hallway ceased.

The harm of 1950s stereotypes, though, was mostly self-inflicted. It wasn't so much that others condemned me, as that I condemned myself. Except for those few months before and after Scott was born, I have always worked -- and until our youngest entered high school in 1971, I did it under a cloud of self-reproach. Combining career and family was a juggling act indeed, as the women in Oregon said, but for those of us who attempted it in the 1950s, it was a problem each one wrestled with alone.