When I read the Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, it was a punch in the gut — what Friedan wrote about, was the reason for my mother’s suicide.
Bright, but from a depression-blighted family and a woman, so college was out of the question, my mother scored so high on federal exams that she became the head of the local employment office.
And then the men came back from World War II, she married my father (not so fresh from shell shock) and my mother was relegated to a lonely kitchen, as a baby machine.
Not the best setting for someone whose backstory included a horrific domestic life. My grandfather had been an abusive alcoholic; what sort of abuse is still in question.
“He’d get drunk and lock her and your grandmother in a closet,” is as far as my father will go in describing the abuse. “Was there more to it than that?” I’ve asked. And my father said, while not being able to meet my eye, “I hope not.” Which, translated from my father’s denial defenses, and the 1950s deep quiet about “domestic issues” could even indicate sexual abuse. (If you can’t imagine not being able to discuss your physical or sexual abuse with your own husband, then you weren’t alive in the 1950s.)
After losing her first baby, and blaming herself for it, my mother spiraled down into depression, but she was Catholic so three more children were the least that could be expected from the rhythm method. (There would have been more children, but my Protestant father finally insisted on the sin of birth control, a sin for which my mother would have had to take on the burden of guilt, as a good Catholic, and confess on a regular basis.)
And all the while, my mother danced desperately to keep up the 1950s illusion of normalcy: President of the PTA, of the Rosary Altar Guild, Girl Scout leader, part-time correspondent for the local small town weekly paper.
And periodically checked herself into the local insane asylum.
She also saw a psychiatrist, an extraordinary thing in a lower-middle class family of the day — the psychiatrist’s fee of $25 was 1/4 of my father’s weekly pay.
And the psychiatrist prescribed tranquilizers — that’s right, he treated my mother’s depression with barbituates, the panacea of the day for “bored and lonely” housewives, so much so, pharmaceutical companies advertised it as such! Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of pharmacology should get chills at this point: barbituates depress.
(When I was in college, a friend’s mother confessed that she’d also been one of those “bored and lonely” housewives– in other words, powerless and stranded in a suburban development, with her husband controlling the purse strings. A doctor prescribed tranquilizers, which left her dazed but passive, and twenty years later she was still bitter, “I can’t remember my childrens’ childhood.”)
When I was about ten years old I was witness to a running battle of arguments that were based in a 1950s power struggle over identity: my mother wanted to go back to work outside the house, my father wouldn’t “let” her.
It’s difficult to imagine that scenario today, after Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and 40 years of feminism. That a husband could forbid his wife to leave the house for a job — and that it wouldn’t be considered abusive, but “normal.” That a husband could treat his wife as child, and it would be perfectly acceptable in the mind set of the period.
And adding to that, my father said something that would have devastated the most “normal” housewife of the period: “You can’t handle what you do now.” In other words, my mother was a failure at the only identity allowed in the 1950s, that of a wife and mother — and she been forbidden recourse to any other.
Not long after, my mother committed suicide. She went to New York City and jumped from the roof of the hotel where she and my father had honeymooned.
When I read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique it was a punch in the gut — my mother’s life and death acknowledged and outlined.
And I lived in that half-life: told in high school there were only three careers for a woman: secretary, nurse or teacher. To my horror, pushed at 16 to marry my boyfriend by my stepmother (no, thank God, I didn’t). My father only agree to pay for college, if I trained as a Kindergarten Primary teacher (I switched majors as soon as I could).
Encountering a world in the early 1970s that still relegated a woman to “women’s work”: my first job was on a woman’s magazine — even though I’d never read women’s magazines, those were the only media that hired women as anything other than secretaries or researchers.
I could go on and on: sexually harassed on the job, before the terminology had even been invented, no less laws enacted against; escaping from a relationship that was spiraling toward abuse — at a time when the police offered no protections, and openly sneered at a woman being stalked by an ex-boyfriend.
But I also became a member of NOW in the early 1970s, served on a media committee that protested stereotype ads and films that glorified violence against women, marched in women’s marches, and so on and so forth.
By a hair’s breath in time, I escaped my mother’s life — and death.
So on the day of her funeral I have to say thank you, Betty Friedan, you saved my life.
And we all need to remember the lesson Friedan taught with her own life: the personal is political.
