Three Women
“The heartbreak of all the unlived lives
that ever were…”
Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business
Before there was a “problem with no name” there must have been a problem no one thought of naming: how to be a modern woman.
Three generations of women in my family have grappled with it, each in her own way.
Though my mother didn’t decide to be a career women, she did escape “the problem with no name” described in Betty Friedan’s 1960s Feminine Mystique — the bored, is-that-all-there-is? predicament of the educated women who didn’t have an outlet for their energy outside of expressing their love and commitment through baking Betty Crocker cakes.
In 1952, a year after my father’s death, my mother and I moved in with Grammy. A single parent before the term existed, my mother felt trapped, caught between the needs of her aging parents and the demands of a five year old daughter.
“Cheap living,” my aunt pronounced the arrangement. Since the mortgage on the house had long been paid off, my mother had only heat, electricity, water bills to pay.
No child care expenses; Grammy provided free daycare.
Even so, my mother had to economize since in the 1950s only men were supposed to need a wage high enough to support a family.
I don’t think my mother was ambitious, but she enjoyed the independence earning a salary gave her. She never remarried.
But what about the unrealized possibilities of my grandmother’s life?
Many women of her early 20th century generation must have felt marooned on the empty shores of marriage and motherhood, uncertain that this was the fulfillment they’d expected.
The last time I saw my maternal grandmother in the fall of 1967, she introduced me to one of the nursing home staff.
“This is my cousin, Howard.”
He smiled, shook hands, humoring the senile old lady. At that point, Cousin Howard had been dead of pancreatic cancer for at least three years.
My grandmother died two weeks later.
“Serves her right,” said my aunt. “For putting her husband into that nursing home with the Little Sisters of the Poor.” She must have been waiting ten years to spit out that line.
For my mother, the nursing home had been a difficult decision. But she’d come home from work once too often to find lighted cigarettes falling out of ash trays, pots of potatoes boiling unattended on the stove. Then Grammy started to wander the neighborhood and got lost a couple of times.
Growing up, I had ambivalent feelings toward Grammy. I believed that she was happy to have my mother return home, but was not interested in raising another child. We also competed for my mother’s attention.
Looking back, I don’t think my grandmother even liked children all that much, for she didn’t do more than the minimal duties that it took to keep food on the table and clothes clean. Nor did she take a creative approach to domesticity — she didn’t sew, knit, crochet, quilt, or do china painting. She had no interest in gardening, making jam, or preserving vegetables, nor any of the other things my paternal grandmother did.
When I was in high school and no longer needed a baby sitter, she often said she’d like to go back to work at the American Tobacco Company where she’d had a job before she married. She was sure they’d be happy to have her.
the idea that an old woman who’d been out of the work force for decades could get a job seemed, at the time, ridiculous. Now that I find myself close to the age she was then, I regret laughing at her. Perhaps her desire suggests that she had ambitions beyond the exigencies of family life.
Maybe she wished to re-imagine herself putting on a suit every day instead of a shapeless cotton house dress, high heels instead of old slippers, and taking the subway to an office where she would be valued for the organizational and managerial capabilities she’d never had the chance to develop.
Grammy belonged to that first generation of women who cropped their hair, shortened their skirts, and voted.
“A woman’s hair is her crowning glory,” Grammy would sometimes say, but as soon as fashion changed, she rebelled and cut hers short, to my grandfather’s dismay.
“He didn’t speak to me for weeks.”
Today many women who juggle the demands of work and childcare report that they prefer going off to their jobs where things are calm and orderly, free of the mini-crises that occur daily while taking caring for babies and toddlers.
I remember feeling that way during the first years I had children. I had triplet girls, so home was a place of constant chaos — dirty dishes, scattered toys, unwashed laundry, bickering. In contrast, my college office was clean and quiet; someone else emptied the trash, washed the floors, cleaned the toilets. Students were not always as diligent as I expected, but they didn’t yell at me or burst into tears.
First wave feminists expended so much energy winning the vote — which had been maliciously denied to them for decades — that they were exhausted by the effort, or believed their problems were solved because they confused elections with political power as we see now in celebrations of the passage of the 19th Amendment in the U.S.
Gaining the suffrage didn’t change as much for women as they’d hoped. Undoubtedly many remained disappointed.
In the mid-19th century, Lucy Stone noted that “disappointment is the lot of women.” She wished to “deepen that disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.”
Several years after my grandmother’s death, women’s collective disappointment and dissatisfaction became a catalyst for change.
But for my grandmother, first wave feminism ended too early and second wave feminism began too late.
When I look now at these three generations of women, I see so many ironies. My grandmother lived as women of her day were expected to do; she married young, raised her children. But I think she must have felt something was missing and that embittered her.
My mother longed for the 1950’s ideal of marriage and motherhood: house in the suburbs, two cars in the garage, four children playing in the yard. She regretted missing out on that when my father died, but I wonder if the role of career woman really did suit her more than she’d anticipated or admitted.
I grew up into second wave feminism, embraced it enthusiastically with its rejection of marriage, housework, childcare. My career and my freedom would always take precedence, I believed.
But when, at forty-one, I suddenly had girl triplets, I morphed into a born-again mother, finding joy, not in the housework aspect, but in participating in the growth of three new lives, surprised to discover that I liked children.
As a tenured college teacher, I was lucky that I didn’t have to make the choice between work and motherhood. Day to day routines were demanding, even exhausting, but I did somehow manage to combine both.
Now I can see these three generations of women were all struggling with the same problem: how to be a woman in a society that asks so much of us while valuing our work so little and teaching us to do the same. Only when the care-taking work women do — in homes, hospitals, schools, nursing homes — is seen as the skilled work it really is will feminism accomplish one of its most important goals.
