BE BEST(man):Weird wedding history, advice from parents and from Epicurus and MORE!
Part 3. FOUR more VERY GOOD REASONS Why I Waited 22 Years to Get Married
OPENING DISCLAIMER: Here in Los Angeles, a storm is raging outside that is so big the meteorologists have invented two new terms so far. ATMOSPHERIC RIVER and IVT: INTEGRATED VAPOR TRANSPORT. That means 2 things. 1. It’s good writing weather. And 2. Southern California is NOT on fire for a change! Hooray! That said, I feel I should offer an apology for the amount I’ve been going on and on with this theme of reasons ’Why I Waited 22 Years to Get Married’. But I have really enjoyed excavating the assorted cultural obstacles I found standing in my way. I promise I will get back to my usual assortment of random wack ideas soon. Meanwhile: Here are 4 more reasons that froze me in terror about getting married.
REASON #7: My Parent’s Marriage as Uninspiring Day Job
As a child, my parent’s marriage looked to me like the marriage version of working at an Amazon warehouse. They stayed together, without threat of divorce, for over forty years. No one was being horribly mistreated but no one looked particularly happy or fulfilled either. And the tones of voice they used when talking to each other was a kind of pushed-to-the-edge-last-straw- exasperation. Fortunately for all concerned, there were no incidents involving stolen Easter candy.
The premise of their union appeared to be the accomplishing of a series of thankless chores intended to be performed daily while also coping, in perpetuity , with the ridiculous and disappointing behavior of their two offspring.
Growing up, my parents and their friends seemed like they were creatures from a near-by planet that was similar to earth, but without any of the fun stuff.
My mother always seemed angry so my father tuned her out when she raged. He was, for the most part, calm, meticulous and systematic. He liked gadgets. He had a post dinner ritual where he brought out a gadget which combined a small whisk broom and a small dustpan into one handy little apparatus that he used for sweeping any fallen crumbs from the table. I have recently learned that this device is called “a crumber”. He also had a polished walnut clothes-valet-and-shoe-buffer-stand in his bedroom where he hung up his clothes in an orderly fashion as soon as he took them off. The man was, at all times, breath-takingly wrinkle free. The front creases of his slacks were crisp enough for slicing bread. He was nothing if not meticulous.
And when we, as a family, took the occasional car trip, he packed the trunk of his car like a lunar module. Each item was perfectly nestled within or beside another similarly shaped item, until they all looked like they had been intentionally designed as pieces of a perfect interlocking jig saw puzzle. He should have worked for NASA..
To be fair, my parent’s generation seemed to have been raised with what seems to me like a low bar for happy marriage. I was stunned at the way my mother’s girlfriends gushed so effusively about my Dad’s daily habit of making his own breakfast. Just so you can fully appreciate the miracle that made them wide-eyed with envy, that breakfast consisted of a bowl of ‘TOTAL’ cold cereal with the addition of half a carefully sliced banana, placed beside a small plate containing a piece of buttered toast, cut on the diagonal, and a 4-ounce glass of frozen orange juice. I remember my mother’s friend Doris inhaling with delight when she heard about this, raising her eyes heavenward in awe as she then detailed for my mother the amount of trouble she had to go to every day to make breakfast for her husband Arnold. My Dad and his breakfast skills appeared to her as a light upon the horizon, a wondrous miracle to behold. And, to make it more astonishing, his was a seven day a week gift. On Sunday mornings he would make himself ‘silver dollar pancakes’ so uniformly sized that they could have been used as prototypes at the U.S. Mint. Each was perfectly round, the size of a real silver dollar.
This is not to imply that my father helped with meal prep for any other scheduled meals. His entire culinary empire was limited to his own breakfast. A man’s got to specialize in this world. He’s got to have a niche.
But interestingly, this same astonishing morning shift-only chef did not have any meal points distracted from his weekly totals when, during the elaborate dinner my mother cooked most nights of the week, he would always manage to find certain particles of the food in his mouth, (which, I must point out, he had inserted there with his own fork) un-chewable. Somehow, without a change in facial expression, he would transform small amounts of extremely chewed food into perfectly round tiny little balls and then lean his head down near the edge of his plate and noiselessly expel them. And when I say expel, I mean ‘spit.’ The result being that every night by the end of dinner, he had accumulated a tidy row of between two and four little BB-sized balls of chewed food on the rim of his plate. Kind of grotesque, yes… but also kind of fascinating. My Dad was in most ways such a nice guy that it almost made sense that he had to rid his person of those imperfectly cooked food fragments lest they despoil his tidy personal hygiene system.
Speaking as someone who has never even once spit out food during any meal, I know if I saw my dog spitting out food on a daily basis, I would take him to the vet. I also know that if I had been the one doing it, my mother would have stopped speaking to me for months.
It may be worth noting, at this point, that the friend of my mother’s who was so awestruck by my father’s breakfast skills and vocal about her own husband’s burdensome breakfast demands, ended up putting a dry-cleaning bag over her head one bright sunny afternoon. That is how she took her own life.
The year I graduated college, I asked my mother’s best friend from high school, on the occasion of her 30th wedding anniversary, to share with me “the secret of her long successful marriage.” This best friend of my mother’s was a sophisticated, college educated, fashionably dressed resident of a high-rise apartment building on the upper East Side of Manhattan. She attended art exhibits and Broadway plays. She enjoyed museums and read a lot. She had a great relationship with her three grown kids.
And her response to my question was “Sweet-hawt, it’s all about learning to cope. Not a day went by when he didn’t make me cry.” My eyebrows shot up. My jaw dropped. “Seriously?” I responded, “Every day? So technically you can’t really call that a HAPPY marriage, can you?” To which she replied, ““Well, darling, who really knows what happiness is? You take the good with the bad.”
I nodded, in an attempt to show her that I appreciated what she had just told me. But silently I was thinking to myself “ So the trick is to exchange the definition of HAPPINESS with the definition of MISERY And BINGO. Everything makes sense!”
After my mother passed, in my father’s last days on planet earth, I asked him about his proudest accomplishments in life. Immediately he pointed to his marriage. Clearly, they were a happily married couple. So this was obviously what a happy and successful marriage looked like!
And that scared the shit out of me.
REASON #8: The Incomprehensibility of LOVE
When you get down to it, the human understanding of love as it relates to marriage is one of our species most complicated, and also incongruous theories. It seems like a big part of the problem lies in the fact that, like so many of the big human concepts, love is so difficult to define. It is a romantic, elusive and shape-shifting creation all at the same time, formed from a complex mythology that means one thing in its early stages and another thing entirely in its middle.
This is not to say that all creatures big and small do not feel love. They definitely do. But they are not burdened by the big over-arching human doctrine of love that leads otherwise mentally functional people to announce that they have found their soulmate after only knowing a person a couple of days.
The ancient Greek philosopher and sage Epicurus had an interesting take on all this: “Love is nothing more than a mental disturbance, overwhelming and excruciatingly painful.’ he wrote in the third century. His recommendation for a sensible alternative was “a tranquil and friendly marriage with a good but homely woman, beauty being a disquieting prompt to excessive desire.” He makes an interesting point but he could not have been popular with the ladies. I feel certain that the ‘tranquil and friendly’ women he recommends so highly would have preferred, since he knew he was being quoted for posterity, that he take a couple of extra moments to select a different descriptive adjective for her besides HOMELY.
Sadly, there is no counter argument from the Greek ladies to Epicurus’ manly musings because, like the Romans, the Greeks decided that no writings by women on any topic were worth passing on to succeeding generations. Shut up, you noisy women with all your so-called “things to say”. Do not waste our time!
Not until the mid 1600’s, did any of the good but homely women who were so worthy of marrying get a chance to add any of their reactions to the historical record. And by then, It’s possible that they were so angry about being called homely that they were rendered speechless.
Over the centuries, male and female scientists, poets, authors and songwriters on every continent have tried to pin down a definition. So starved are we for a concrete foundation on which to build a pyramid of facts that when, in 1943, a song was recorded called ‘Love is a Dimpling Doodle Bug’, it was an international cause for celebration because finally everyone, in every country and on every continent, had at least one thing on which they could agree: Love is definitely NOT a Dimpling Doodle Bug. That is one of the only basic facts about love of which there is uniform agreement.
But for a thing that can’t be clearly identified, we are all very pre-occupied with finding it, keeping it, maintaining it, reviving it, getting rid of it and then repeating the process over again, sometimes with the same person numerous times. It is similar to a dog’s relationship to a car. He can’t wait to get into the car but once inside he can’t wait to get out. Then, having been released from his infuriating confinement, he again stares longingly at the car and waits to be let back inside.
There was an interesting turn of events in the understanding of marital love in the 1700’s when certain doctors began pointing out that it was bad for a man’s health to be married to a wife who hated him. “WHAT! “ came the outcry, throughout the land, “Do you mean to tell me that there is something BAD about your wife hating you? I suppose next you’re going to tell us that we also shouldn’t just snatch her off the street or out of her locked bedroom at night!” They were stunned, to say the least, when male doctors ( i.e.: all doctors) began promoting the idea that a man should try having a positive relationship with his wife in order to collect these important health benefits! Men, suddenly presented with a concrete motive for being nicer to the women they married, were rattled to their core.
Finally it began occurring to men that rape might generate and even inflame hostility in the rape victim! And now that it was proven that the resulting hostility might actually have a negative impact on the health of the rapist himself….well, rape began falling out of favor! Men realized that they had to think twice about acting out their raping and assaulting plans if they wanted to stay healthy.
Kidding. That definitely did not happen.
Nevertheless, by the mid 1800’s in Western Europe and North America, popular opinion again shifted. The Victorian era presented a new-fangled idea that a marriage based on love where the wife stayed home and was supported by her husband now became popular. This worked perfectly until all the social isolation of having to stay at home and toil endlessly on tedious household chores with no hope of assistance or relief began to take its toll on members of the Victorian wives. As it became less like utopia and more like solitary confinement, some of the wealthiest ladies began to get itchy.
This resulted in some surprising reactions from the husbands of these restless exhausted women. Because their husbands knew a good bandwagon when they saw one, they joined with their (male) doctors in a resurgence of discussion about all the new cases of an old favorite, ‘female hysteria’. Naturally doctors began looking for ways to help these poor demented women make ‘personality adjustments,’ and this ushered in a set of Victorian era laws that permitted any and all male family members (fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, grandfathers, cousins ) to authorize their female family members who seemed to be succumbing to undesirable personality traits be committed to a mental institution.
As you might have guessed, the list of undesirable personality traits used to diagnose ‘hysteria’ was painstakingly thorough. It wasn’t quite as imaginative or extensive as those used to diagnose witchcraft, but it did bother to include, among the behaviors that could get a woman institutionalized, her desire to learn to read. For this alone, she could be removed from her home, placed in a sanitarium and put on unlimited bed rest.
(Author’s note; I can hear some of you saying you wish you could have unlimited bed rest. Stop it. Just stop it. There was no internet or cell phones or ipads or ever leaving the bed. No friends to text with, no infinite amount of shows to binge watch. And definitely no reading. Remember, reading is what got you here in the first place. And imagine what the beds were like in a dormitory in a sanitarium a few centuries ago. Or who your roommates might turn out to be. And we haven’t even gotten started yet on the medical treatments for hysteria. Or the sanitarium food. )
On the other hand, these laws were so well received by men of the period that beloved and best-selling-author-of-all-time, the legendary Charles Dickens, tried to have his wife/ the mother of his ten children committed to a mental institution so he could pursue, unobstructed, his love for a much younger woman.
I believe this is the spot in the narrative where Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might have thrown in another “and so it goes.
REASON #9: Be Best (Man)
The origin stories of the dramatis personae in the traditional wedding ritual are very interesting.
When you play act in this drama, here is what is actually going on if you are the woman in the scenario: THE BEST MAN was the title given the best friend of groom, who was to be standing on the groom’s left side. He was given the honor of this title because it was his job to grab the bride if she decided to make a run for it and attempt an escape at the last minute. This was not uncommon at various points in history because it was not uncommon for marriages to begin with the kidnapping of the bride right off the street or out of her bedroom at night. So you can see why having an extra set of hands from a loyal best friend was just what the doctor ordered. And by doctor, I of course mean prison warden
.Perhaps now you are saying to yourself, “Oh come on, Merrill. That sounds a little far-fetched.” But your skepticism is leaving me no choice but to inform you that bride kidnapping, along with its evil twin bride sexual assault, is still popular in countries like Armenia, Ethiopia, South Africa and Kazakhstan where they’re enshrined inside a custom called “ala kachuu,” a fun slang expression that means “to take and run away’. Haha. Who doesn’t love a fun slang expression!
In Kyrgystan, this time-honored tradition is now illegal, but apparently still common. The way it works is that a “groom” forcibly grabs the young woman or girl he fancies right off the street and then takes her back to his home where he commands her to write a letter of consent. (Among other things, this is certainly an interesting re-interpretation of the word consent.) Once she is finished, she has to wear a “marriage scarf” over her head. The men of Krygystan who still prefer finding brides using the old “ala kachuu” (as they explained in this article in the New York Times) go on to say that kidnapping women off the street is just easier than courtship. And come on: Who among us wants to make courtship more difficult? It’s also cheaper for them than paying the standard "bride price," which can be as much as $800 plus a cow. (And that doesn’t even include what it costs to buy dinner for the cow.)
“Ala Kachuu” is the reason that the most time honored and sacred piece of Krygystani marital advice, passed down thru the ages from parent to child, ended up being "Every good marriage begins in tears." Perfect for embroidering on tea towels!
So, as it turns out, my mother’s best friend wasn’t crazy after all when I asked her secrets for a long happy marriage. Sadly, it never occurred to me to ask her if she’d been kidnapped off the street. May the circle be unbroken.
Sadly, there is no BEST WOMAN in the marriage ceremony. I guess if there were, she would have to be armed and an expert in the martial arts. Instead, there is this elaborate story of how the tradition of the bridesmaids began. Apparently the reason the bride is surrounded by an ensemble of women dressed in stylistically similar yet complimentary gowns is that the women are there to provide camouflage meant to distract any near-by demons who are plotting to grab the bride and drag her into hell before she ever gets done with the ceremony! This way, because the afore-mentioned disruptive demon encounters so many bride-like women in the same place, he grows confused about who to grab. This gives the actual bride some time to wrap up the wife-becoming stuff and get out of there before the demon can grab her. In other words, her bridesmaids are there to act as human shields. Aww. Sentimental.
Of course let’s not forget that the reason it is customary for a father to “give away” the bride is that for centuries, the father flat-out ‘owned’ his daughters legally. Hopefully the wedding details were worked out so the fathers on both sides were able to profit through an exchange of land, grains, farm animals and, if they were unfortunate enough to have them, female children.
Seems like human civilizations have long been in a competition for the title of most macabre marital ceremony symbolism. But I think the prize goes to Ancient Rome where, at the close of a lavish wedding, all of the principals participated in a little psycho-drama in which the groom would pretend to tear the bride from the arms of her weeping mother while he and his friends sang dirty songs and made obscene jokes. Take that Mommy! And what better way to kick off a brand-new relationship with your soon-to-be mother-in-law than with a barely disguised symbolic kidnapping and sexual assault of her daughter. HA!…the fun they used to have in the olden times! You know what they all used to say to each other and probably had embroidered on tea towels: “You’re not losing a daughter. You’re gaining a rapist.”
But the festivities didn’t stop there. After that, the male members of the wedding party would lead the new bride in a public procession to her new husband’s home, where they would all stand outside the bedroom while the marriage was being consummated, singing a specially written obscene poem for the marital chamber called an ‘epithalamium’, because it was better to name them something Latin and unpronounceabe than to call them filthy limericks.
Was there ever a new bride, (who, by the way, had to swear to her virginity status in order to even be eligible for wife-hood,) who didn’t long to be drenched in cartoonish sarcasm and crass commentary during the delicate moment of deflowering? I think not!
It begs the question “What would YOU (meaning ME) have done under these circumstances?” and the only thing I could think of, besides making cutting remarks that would cause me to be burned as a witch, was to run out naked, mid-act, with a scabbard between my teeth, making growling guttural noises so disturbing they’d be re-enacted at campfires as ghost stories for the rest of man’s existence on planet earth.
Eventually it would become the only thing on my Wikipedia page. It would even replace Stupid Pet Tricks.
Reason #10: WHAT BETTY SAW
Betty Friedan published her famous best selling book, ‘The Feminine Mystique’ in 1963. I finally read it this year.
I was in middle school when it was published and too busy reading Mad magazine to pay any attention. I did, however, hear it referenced constantly and used as a punchline on television, in comedy monologues and on talk shows. It never occurred to me that the book might actually be a portrait of my always angry mother.
To recap 1963 briefly, it was still a time when a woman couldn’t get a credit card unless her husband was a co-signer. ‘Help Wanted’ ads were still allowed to be gender specific and therefore exclude women from applying. Newspapers had a special ‘Women’s Section’ that was almost exclusively comprised of advice about home-making. And everybody’s favorite, ‘The Law of Coverture,’ was still in effect in some states.
‘The Law of Coverture,’ said that when a woman married a man, she became a “femme couverte”…meaning that her identity was “covered” by his identity. She literally lost her independent rights to pretty much everything. Fun! Of course, why did a femme couverte even need independent rights? What a waste of rights! Amazingly, The Law of Coverture wasn’t officially repealed by The Supreme Court until the late nineteen sixties. If you listen carefully right now, you can you hear me screaming “The LATE NINETEEN SIXTIES!” until I fall to the ground in exhaustion and require oxygen.
Yes, yes, I know other things happened in 1963. But, to recap, the reason I’ve brought you all here today is to explain why I spent most of my adult life afraid to get married. The Kennedy assassination and Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech took place in 1963 but they can not be held responsible for my marital terrors.
The early sixties were also the years where it seemed like every article I read in the teen magazines to which I subscribed advised me that I needed to learn how to feign helplessness around boys if I wanted to be loved. Underwriting a win for him in all areas was the way to his heart. So if a girl found herself playing a game opposite a boy that she ‘liked’ , etiquette books unironically cautioned her to intentionally engineer her own loss. This involved creating an interesting set of subtle, sneaky, manipulative, ineptitude skills since it’s not easy to intentionally lose at checkers.
In ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ Betty Friedan identified something she called ‘Housewife’s syndrome.” She was referring to the bill of goods American culture was selling to women about their place in the world, post WWII. Mystique is a long book because Betty uncovered a lot of proof that the rules around being a housewife, which were being described as nature’s throne of privilege for women, were making the women who played along feel exhausted, crazy and suicidal.
In a related story, these were the days when housewives on popular television sit-coms were shown with their hair professionally done, wearing cinch-waisted-dresses, sensible high heels and a pearl necklace while they vacuumed the living room. It was just presented as the feminine part of what was usually referred to as ‘the American dream’. I didn’t know much about class or gender but I definitely knew that I never wanted to become one of these women.
Betty wrote “The Feminine Mystique” after noticing that she was meeting a lot of adult women in supposedly enviable circumstances who were experiencing an all-encompassing emptiness. ”I feel like crying all the time,” they were telling Betty frequently enough for her to want to look in to the root cause. (Of course, current protocols dictate that I have to now point out that many in the group Betty consulted were what are currently known as middle-class women of privilege. No question there were women in other classes, categories and life stations who Betty never talked to who were subject to more catastrophic circumstances and far worse problems causing more suffering for less fixable reasons. But that’s a whole different topic. )
What Betty decided she was seeing was “the earmarks of a cultural identity crisis”. Many people took issue with her labeling of this theory because the whole idea of having ‘an identity crisis’ was considered,at this point, exclusively masculine. Identity was a thing only men needed to bother with. In fact, since ‘The Law of Coverture’ wasn’t fully repealed yet, these empty, weepy women weren’t even legally ‘a person.’ So the last thing they needed was to be lugging around some pointles identity!
NEVERTHELESS Betty was determined to find out why these women in the 1950’s were seeking out medical professionals for help with this exclusively female slate of brand-new neuroses, personality disorders and sexual dysfunctions. And why those doctors were now reporting an increased incidence of emotional breakdowns and suicide attempts by women in their twenties and thirties. “You wake up in the morning and feel there is no point going on another day like this.” Betty heard too many women saying. She began to refer to this as “The Problem That Has No Name.”
So she decided to focus her research on the content of the women’s magazines that were published for her generation, in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. And what she found surprised her. The women at the center of the stories in those earlier versions of existing magazines didn’t seem damaged. They described themselves as spirited career women who held jobs as nurses, teachers, artists, copywriters, and saleswomen. They spoke about their goals and visions for themselves beyond simple housekeeping. Why it was almost as though these women thought they were part of the human race! And yet…for some mysterious reason by the early fifties, a third of the stories being published were suddenly about unhappy working women who decided to renounce their careers.
In the beginning of the 1950’s, a whole different dialectic about a woman’s role in American culture began to emerge in the universe of the most popular women’s magazines. The world beyond the home was now being systematically eliminated from the content of the articles being featured. Instead, now there was an influx of titles like “How to Keep Your Husband Happy” and “Femininity Begins at Home” and “Do Women Have to Talk So Much?” (Because those darn gals, with their crazy need to communicate!)
At the time, Betty was a young journalist seeking employment by trying to pitch stories to these magazines. And she was surprised, to say the least, when she was told by one male editor, right to her face, that “Our readers are full time housewives and not interested in public issues or national/international affairs or politics. They are only interested in the family and home. Humor has to be gentle. No satire. Travel? We’ve dropped it.”
So Betty started investigating the reasons behind the shift in content and the marketing to women and she noticed something interesting: In the late 1940’s, when the men of the armed forces returned home after WWII and re-entered the job market, the editorial positions at women’s magazines, which had previously been held by women, were suddenly occupied almost entirely by men. Could it be a mere coincidence that the content of these magazines suddenly shifted to a barrage of helpful housekeeping hints, an endorsement of early marriages for women and the need to start larger families, and tips about looking good for your husband?
You will gasp when I tell you that no. It turned out not to be a coincidence.
After these magazines were taken over by men. a whole new ideology was put into place to convince the female readership that having a career was keeping them from what they knew deep down was their true calling: being a housewife. By 1958, A HUNDRED PERCENT of the women being written about in women’s magazines rejected the idea of an outside career altogether. No longer did any of these women have any vision of the future except babies and beauty maintenance.
Cut to Betty, who kept on talking to women about their lives in the fifties. And this is what she was hearing: “I love the kids. I love my husband. But I feel desperate. I’m a server of food and a maker of beds but who am I? I just don’t feel alive.” She was also hearing this as the remedy: “So you take tranquilizers because it makes you not care so much that it all feels pointless.”
In a related story, the large numbers of women falling prey to this malaise went on to become the inspiration and the muses for Arthur Sackler and his band of merry men. In case his name isn’t ringing a bell, Arthur Sackler (and the corporate pill business created by his extended family, Perdue Pharma) are now most famous as the people responsible for oxycontin and the rest of the omni-present opiate addiction problem.
But back in 1963, Arthur was just getting his first big break helping an earlier version of pill addictions gain a popular following with the ladies by manufacturing, distributing and marketing valium for doctors to prescribe to their unhinged female patients as a solution to “The Problem That Has No Name.” As he would later say of oxycontin, ‘these pills were not addictive. Not at all.’ Except they were. Valium is basically Xanax. By 1966, the consumption of valium by women was so ingrained in the middle-class culture that it inspired The Rolling Stones to write their hit song “Mother’s Little Helper.” And there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know what those lyrics were about. My angry mother never went anywhere without a valium or two. She was equally fond of Librium, a valium sibling.
“We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says “I want something more than my husband, my children and my home.” is what Betty concluded in her book, observing that the human life cycle makes room for ideological re-adjustments at different phases of development for men, because it is necessary to help them grow and function properly. But, she pointed out, because society seemed to have lost the memo that human women were part of the human life cycle, the wisdom of pop culture was pushing the idea that it was ‘natural’ for a woman to stop looking for any more answers after she got married! Now all her needs could be met by pleasing the men and children in her life. One stop shopping!
Betty also noticed that the only career that was even mentioned in passing, within the pages of the revamped and now male staffed editorial leadership of women’s magazines, was ‘actress.’ And even the most serious of actresses were being packaged as baby-faced sex objects who had nothing but regrets about the time that acting took away from their first priority; being a housewife. Case in point: this amazing excerpt from a 1957 article that appeared in the popular women’s magazine REDBOOK about Judy Holiday.
“She must find fulfillment in her career because she is divorced from her husband’ the profile they wrote explains, “By continuing to pursue her career to the exclusion of a traditional family life, Ms. Holiday WAS FORCED TO LIVE WITH STRONG FEELINGS OF INADEQUACY AS A WOMAN. It is a frustrating irony of Judy’s life that as an actress she has succeeded almost without trying. But as a woman she has failed.”
I know. Time for a scream break.
Aaaaagggggggghhhhhh.
Refreshing. We continue:
By 1960, a journalist like Betty who was trying to sell a story to a woman’s magazine featuring the woman as the hero was told that this idea was off the table entirely. “If we get an article about a woman who does anything adventurous by herself, we figure she must be terribly neurotic” explained the male magazine editor of Ladies Home Journal to Betty.
The all-male editorial boards also just went ahead and decided that it wasn’t in the female nature to care about civil rights or the economy. Women’s interests were limited to romance, home furnishings, clothes, pregnancy and nursing. They simply didn’t have room in their pretty little heads for...well, as it turned out…anything.“Women need to stop envying men and trying to be like them,’ they were being told, because ‘A woman’s greatest fulfillment was through her husband.” And all these so-called modern-day female miseries came straight from a woman’s denial of her ‘true nature.’
And what was that true nature? Well, conveniently enough it yearned only for “sexual passivity, male domination and maternal love.” Betty called this craziness “The Feminine Mystique.”
I was coming of age during this period and only heard this stuff as background noise. I never took it seriously. Mad magazine was my Bible and the (all male) writing staff of Mad regularly made fun of women’s magazine content and the housewives themselves. But I also remember trying to write an adventure story with a heroic female lead at its center, for a fifth grade class assignment, and finding it impossible to visualize.
My mother, a thwarted journalist, seemed to be taking this housewife culture seriously in spite of herself. Because there she was, trying to sew her own dresses, decorate cakes and make multi-course dinners yet constantly angry and popping Valium and Librium to help with her mood. In a related story, by the time 1963 rolled around, she had been hospitalized numerous times for serious gastro-intestinal disorders.
It was during this period that I received my first diary as a Chanukah present .And one of the first things I wrote was “I’m never getting married. I’m never having kids.”
.
I’ll be 65 on Friday, and I read The Feminine Mystique at camp. Needless to say, I was not one of the cool kids. I was genuinely puzzled for years by my mother. She and dad both held masters degrees. In fact, they met in class. Unfortunately, her parents forced her to major in a practical degree. Now I’m not saying her parents were wrong. Because her father was a farmer and he said none of his kids were ever going to be a farmer. She ended up becoming a bacteriologist. She described long days bent over microscope in the stifling heat of Florida in the 50s. She actually quit her job to try to conceive a baby at the advice of her doctor. I did not think that was anything but an urban legend.
Anyway, it didn’t work so they adopted me as a newborn. She was forbidden to work for three years by the state of Florida after adoption. My sister was adopted in 62 so there went three more years. She didn’t go back to work until we were teenagers
However, my mother was a person of incredible drive and creativity unlike anyone I have ever known. She filled her days by learning how to sew to a professional tailor level. Cooking like a gourmet chef. I still have a leather suede jacket she made for me when I was 14. She also knitted me a coat when I was six that I use as a sweater.
She had a huge garden and we went off them pick vegetables for a salad. She decapod anything she could find that would lie down long enough for her to slap mod podge on it. She made all of her clothes and our clothes. She took courses and interior design and flipped five houses by the time I was 11. My dad kept getting new jobs in the field of public health, which was new and really hot back then.
Also, she seemed really enjoy having us around full-time. I am the mother of two adoptive daughters myself and I really don’t see how she did it. Especially before disposable diapers.
I was actually terrified of getting married because I did not think I could find a marriage as happy as my parents and so I didn’t until I was 33.
This was fucking fantastic