Mom's Feminist Marriage

Frances Smoot ca. 1970

When Dad retired, he complained that just going to the bank, the store, and the post office had taken him all morning. Mom quipped, "Try it with three small children in the car." Thus Mom described her life as a wife and mother in the 1960s.

So Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique (1963) spoke to her. Friedan begins her book with a survey of the best selling women's magazines. In 1960, a year of startling changes in politics, culture, and technology, McCall's and Woman's Day contained no mention of the world beyond the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Women, now largely college-educated, were dependent on their men and spending their days on trivial chores.

But household chores are sacred, women were told, not trivial. The "feminine mystique" was the party line that women, with their mysterious child-bearing powers, were "closer to nature" than men, to be cherished and protected from the harsh realities of the working-day world. (The hit TV sitcom Bewitched embodied the myth of the mystique, as a super-powered wife stays home doing chores while her husband goes to work, so that he can have what he calls a "normal family." Made explicit, the feminine mystique was ridiculous.)

Years later, Mom remembered how she drove with Friedan's book to a signing in downtown Pittsburgh. "But when I got to the front of the line, I saw how ugly she was and thought, no wonder her husband left her!" Mom dropped out of line.

Still, within a couple of years, Mom was changing her life. When my big sister was in elementary school, Mom became President of the PTA. She was also elected chairwoman of the local chapter of the Republican party [I remember being fascinated by the gavel that she brought home.]

So she was a community leader when Dad told her he'd taken a new job in Chicago and we'd be moving. "And you didn't even ask me?" she said. Decades later, Dad was still abashed about that. "She went along with it that time," he said, "but I never made that mistake again."

In that same conversation with my parents, they were astounded that I didn't remember Mom's Day Off. Saturdays, Dad fed us breakfast, supervised cartoon-watching, and took us on excursions to the garden center and hardware store, while she dressed up and drove away to no-one-knows where. Mom told me that her Saturdays probably saved their marriage.

In the 1970s, Mom went back to work as a teacher at Holy Innocents Episcopal School. (She'd taught sixth grade one semester before her first child started to show.) Dad encouraged her to get her Master's in Education. Laughing, they told me that he even wrote some of her papers. She became the team leader for 3rd grade and created the school's summer program, which she directed for two decades. Mom also became an entrepreneur. With friends, she purchased properties to rent or resell. She managed a pool of writing tutors that she called “The Write Connection.” When she was called forward at an all-school faculty meeting to be honored at her retirement for her 33 years of service, she astonished the crowd by doing a handspring.

Super-powered indeed.

[See my page Family Corner for much more about Mom, Dad, and their families. See my Dementia Diary about the downs and occasional ups in Mom's life since she moved alone to a retirement home near me. See also Bewitched Craft for more ways that the sitcom reflected its time.]