Boys Fighting on the Streets and Moms Fighting at the Afternoon Bridge Party

Since my late teens, I’ve pretty much turned away from my early life, seeing as bleak and sterile those years in my suburban neighborhoods and shopping districts, in the schools overflowing with baby boom kids, and within my at times twisted nuclear family. As I have been reading the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, I’m coming to another point of view, a view on how my parents might have seen things in the 1950s, that makes me accept that my little neighborhoods were the fulfillment of an American dream. My parents, married during World War II, with a first son born while my father was in the service, came from homes that suffered from extreme poverty during the depression. Both also came from homes where much brutality and suffering took place—brutality from the father against a suffering mother. So their new life in a new home in a new Dallas suburb must have been a great adventure, going forward but perhaps more significantly getting away from a past that had been traumatic.



From The Feminine Mystique—The Problem That Has No Name: “The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American woman and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.” p. 13

Our memories of childhood are selective and some of my most pointed memories are times when my mother lost her temper with me and/or my brother. She generally was a kind, nurturing and generous, though tight lipped and high strung, woman. So this is a memory of how the bridge party Mrs. Betty Williams invited my mother to led to one of those infrequent losses of temper. My father complained to me once that he couldn’t understand why she sometimes was so unhappy; he would find her crying and she could give no explanation for what was wrong.

To Be Continued