Mid-20th Century – Empowering women through fiction and history.

Lending a Helping Hand: The Early FBI

I’m a big classic movie fan. I prefer the earlier classics from between the 1920s and the 1950s rather than the later ones from the 1960s onward. But one film from the 1970s that has always fascinated me is the film Paper Moon. It’s a black comedy set during the Great Depression in the Midwest, where Americans were having the toughest time and would do anything to get by. The film follows a charming and handsome con man named Moze (played by Ryan O’Neal) who gets stuck with an eight-year-old orphan, Addie (played by his real-life daughter, Tatum O’Neal), who becomes a better con artist than he is. Clearly, this is not the kind of film that would go over well today, but in the 1970s, when standards were different and the concept of “political correctness” wasn’t as prevalent, this kind of film embedded a lot of social and political views that many Americans, especially younger ones, shared.

There’s a scene in the film where Moze and Addie succeed in beating a bootlegger at his own game when they find his stash of illegal whiskey, steal some of it, and sell it back to the man. They get caught by the local police but manage to escape. The escape scene is pretty standard 1970s action stuff (you can watch it here). Their goal is to get out of Kansas (their current location) and drive across the state line to Missouri, where the police can’t touch them.

Why was this so crucial? Because up until just after the Great Depression ended, state police had no authority to apprehend criminals who had not committed crimes in their state. So Kansas police couldn’t track Moze and Addie down if they crossed over to Missouri.

Criminals weren’t, however, completely free. In 1908, Theodor Roosevelt approved a new national law enforcement agency that could function in any state and help apprehend criminals who had crossed the state line. At that time, it was named the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, but in 1935, it was renamed to what we know now as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the F.B.I.

Photo Credit: Newspaper story of the ambush (initiated by the U.S. Bureau of Investigation) that killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, 23 May 1934: Bradford Timeline/Flickr/CC BY NC 2.0

This agency helped crack some of the most notorious cases, including:

– The Lindbergh baby case (1932): The infamous case of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son prompted Hoover (head of the Bureau at the time) to send out agents to look for marked bills of the ransom money to try and track down the perpetrator.

– Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (1934): Bureau agents in nine states collaborated to eventually track the killing couple down in Louisiana and create an ambush that led to their deaths.

– Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1950s): This is sort of a forgotten case, but it was huge at the time (and if you’ve read poet Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, you’ll know it). At the height of the Cold War scare, a spy ring was discovered to be transferring secrets from the atomic development center in New Mexico to the Russians. The FBI traced these messages to a scientist named Julius Rosenberg, and he and his wife, along with several others, were arrested in 1951. Both refused to confess and were executed in 1953.

Book 3 of my Grave Sisters Mysteries doesn’t involve Oliver Clarke, the Gyver district attorney, because the sisters focus on helping Daniel Frazer, the Moody County D.A., with his case. But Oliver has his own case, which is helping the Bureau capture criminals who kidnapped a child and left her for dead (yes, the case in the book is inspired by the Lindbergh baby kidnapping).

A Weekend Getaway Murder is available now for preorder, as it comes out this summer, so grab your copy here.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

More than I Love Lucy: Desi Arnaz

This month is Hispanic Heritage Month where we celebrate, among other things, the history and contributions of the Hispanic community. Probably one of the most well-recognized names (and faces) of the Golden Age of Hollywood is that of Lucy’s husband, Desi Arnaz. Only, he was much more than just Lucy’s sidekick in the I Love Lucy show.

Now, I really do love Lucy. Not only did she open doors for women comediennes at a time when men were dominating the comedy genre in film and television, but her I Love Lucy character offered a different glimpse of who women were in the Occupation: Housewife era of the 1950s. It also gave us another image to look up to other than the happy and contented housewife that characters like June Cleaver (though I defend June in this blog post) that many women of the mid-20th century found so oppressive.

But the success of I Love Lucy wasn’t due to Lucille Ball alone. I was recently watching a documentary about Lucy and while it went into details about her life and career, the mention of Desi Arnaz seemed almost like an afterthought. That annoyed me and made me curious about the life and work of this Cuban-American icon. What I found was a man who displayed a technical brilliance and talent of his own, not to mention a resilience that many people immigrating to America (including me) could identify with.

Photo Credit: Desi Arnaz, publicity photo, 1950, General Artists Corporation: Wikimedia Commons/PD US no notice

Desi came from Cuban nobility, which did not sit well with the revolutionaries active in Cuba in the 1930s. In fact, his family had to flee to America when the revolutionaries destroyed their home and possessions in 1933. They came to Miami with nothing and, like many immigrants, had to struggle to survive. They lived in a garage and Desi mentions in several interviews that he had to clean out birdcages among other odd jobs to help the family income.

However, his musical talent led him to form his own orchestra and tour around the country which got him into films. This, of course, is where he met and married Lucille Ball in 1940.

As Lucy’s husband on the show, he was charming and tolerant of her crazy schemes. But Desi’s real talent lay behind the scenes. He was a very savvy businessman and as passionate as Lucy about developing the technical side of television (which, in the early 1950s, was still very new). Desi is always credited for coming up with what is now considered the gold standard of the TV sitcom world: the multiple-camera set up. Up until 1951, most sitcoms were produced in New York and were recorded and broadcast to the rest of the country in a less-than-attractive way in terms of quality. Desi and his cameraman developed a system of multiple cameras filming at the same time on a sound stage with a live audience in the background which allowed for higher-quality images and a realtime feel to the show. Another thing Lucy and Desi are credited for is the invention of the rerun. They insisted on retaining the rights to the I Love Lucy show which allowed them to negotiate contracts with TV stations to broadcast the reruns we still see today.

After Lucy and Desi divorced in 1960, Desi continued to be active in film and television, though not to the degree that Lucille Ball was (who went on to create two more shows in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as star in a multitude of films). He largely retired from the limelight.

Still, his contribution to television is one of the endearing legacies of the medium, not to mention his marriage to Lucille Ball. In the 1950s, multi-racial marriages were much less common than they are today (something that plays a role in my upcoming Adele Gossling Mysteries book Murder Among the Rubble).

If you want to know more about what women enduring in the 1950s, you might enjoy my post-World War II short story collection, Lessons From My Mother’s Life. You can read all about it and find out where to get it here.

Rerelease Day: Lessons 4-Year Publiversary!

Today marks the 4-year anniversary of the publication of my historical women’s fiction short story collection Lessons From My Mother’s Life (hence the “publiversary”).

This book was a huge departure for me when I first published it in 2020. I was writing my Waxwood Series at the time, which was set in the 1890s, and I was also working on my Adele Gossling Mysteries, which is set at the turn of the 20th century. So to write stories set in the post-World War II era was a big change. It was also a book that was more personal to me than anything I had written up until that time.

A word about the title of this collection: I had some arguments with my mentor about changing it. Why? Because she felt the title was misleading. The implication of Lessons From My Mother’s Life is that the book is non-fiction stories about my mother’s life. Or that the book is true stories of other women’s mother’s lives. From a marketing perspective, she thought this would create some problems with the book reaching the right audience.

And truthfully, I did consider changing the title for this rerelease (which I had planned on doing since last year). But I decided to keep the title as it was for several reasons. First, it felt right (and authors can be very stubborn about their titles!) But second, the title originally came from the idea that the lessons the stories convey are lessons that come from my mother’s generation, though they are not lessons she overtly taught me. They are more lessons inferred from her own life, that is, her regrets and what she did that I don’t want to do. These are universal lessons mid-20th century women have to teach us, whether they are our mothers or grandmothers, or even great-grandmothers. In the stories, an older woman teaches a younger one something about life not overtly but covertly, by encouraging her to do what she couldn’t or sending the message “Don’t do what I did.”

Why am I calling this a “rerelease”? Because a few things have changed. The biggest change is the cover. When I first published the book, I created the cover because I was a struggling author whose finances were extremely limited. But over the years, thanks to all my amazing readers (those existing and those to come), I’ve been able to afford to have a professional designer do my covers. So I knew it was time for Lessons to get a makeover.

I also took the opportunity to give the book a new cover to give the stories another proofread. I’ve done this multiple times (don’t ask how many) as a way to refresh the stories and make sure they still read well. So there are some minor tweaks to most of the stories. Even if you’ve already read the book, I encourage you to pick it up again because the stories will read a bit differently than they did in the original version.

I hope you enjoy the book and have a discussion with your mother or grandmother about what her life was like so you can learn the valuable lessons her life has to teach you.

Title: Lessons From My Mother’s Life

Author: Tam May

Genres: Historical Women’s Fiction/Short Fiction

Original release date: March 29, 2020

Rerelease Date: March 29, 2024

How happy was the 1950s happy housewife?

Women in post-war America were supposed to have it all: generous husbands with great jobs, comfortable suburban homes with nice yards and two-car garages, and all the latest gadgets to make their housework easier.

The pain and horror of World War II were over. The economy was booming and America was becoming a world leader. American women were to play a role in America’s prosperity, the role they were always meant to play: supporting mothers, wives, and daughters. Theirs was a life of ease. They were the fairytale princesses with the happy ending.

The women’s magazines told them so. The advertisements for laundry detergent and TV dinners told them so. The doctors who treated their children’s colds told them so.

Women in 1950s America were sold a bill of goods about their purpose in life and their futures. Some bought it and some didn’t.

This book is about the women who didn’t.

These are not nostalgic stories about my mother’s life or your mother’s life. They dig deep into the lives of five fictional characters who knew in the back of their minds that their lives weren’t happy and they wanted something more.

Five stories. Five women. Five roads that will lead to self-identity and fulfillment.

About the Author

Writing has been Tam May’s voice since the age of fourteen. She writes stories set in the past that feature sassy and sensitive women characters. Tam is the author of the Adele Gossling Mysteries which takes place in the early 20th century and features suffragist and epistolary expert Adele Gossling whose talent for solving crimes doesn’t sit well with her town’s conventional ideas about women’s place. Tam is also working on a new series, the Grave Sisters Mysteries about three sisters who own a funeral home and help the county D.A. solve crimes in a 1920s small California town, set to release in 2025. She has also written historical fiction about women breaking loose from the social and psychological expectations of their era. Although Tam left her heart in San Francisco, she lives in the Midwest because it’s cheaper. When she’s not writing, she’s devouring everything classic (books, films, art, music), concocting yummy plant-based dishes, and exploring her new riverside town.

Social Media Links

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tammayauthor/

Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/tammayauthor/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/tammayauthor/

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Tam-May/e/B01N7BQZ9Y/

BookBub Author Page: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/tam-may

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16111197.Tam_May

Are you into fun and engaging mysteries set in the past? Love sassy but sensitive women characters defying the social conventions of their time? Then you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, enlightening anecdotes about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

The Feminine Mystique: Our Mothers’ and Our Grandmothers’ Lessons

In 2020, I released what is probably to date the most personal book I’ve ever written. It’s not an autobiographical novel or even a partially autobiographical novel. It’s a collection of short stories set in the post-WWII era of America. The book, Lessons From My Mother’s Life became much more of a personal project than I anticipated (or even intended) it to be for several reasons.

First, it was intended to be a historical rewrite of the first book I ever published back in 2017. Those stories were set in contemporary times and were quite literary in tone and style. Reviewers liked the book overall but many complained the stories were too short and the endings seemed chopped off. I agreed with this (and did a lot of journaling as to why that was because I knew there were deeper reasons than the fact that it was my first book and I was still learning the writing craft). I firmly believe in giving readers the best I have as a writer and revising books when I know my writing has become stronger and my writing purpose clearer (I’ve done this with several books). So I had no qualms about releasing a second edition of that first book.

Except it didn’t turn out to be a second edition. It turned out to be an entirely new book. I set the stories in a historical timeframe rather than a contemporary timeframe. Most of the stories in Lessons differ from those in the original first book (which is still available in online bookstores). I took some stories out that didn’t fit with the historical background and themes I was aiming for and replaced them with other stories.

Second, the historical era I chose turned out to be a big surprise even to me. As many of my readers know, I am a huge fan of the 19th and early 20th centuries. My preferred timeframe for my books is the Gilded Age (roughly, the last quarter of the 19th century) and the Progressive Era (roughly, the first few decades of the 20th century, up until the end of WWI), though I’m experimenting now with a new upcoming series that is set in the 1920s.

Photo Credit: Betty Friedan as photographed in her home, 1978, photo taken by Lynn Gilbert and uploaded 6 August 2009: LynnGilbert5/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

So why did I choose to set the stories in Lessons in the 1950s and early 1960s? Because, at the time, I had rediscovered a book I read in grad school: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan’s book introduced the paradox of women’s lives during the post-WWII era to the American public. The book came out of Friedan’s experiences talking with women in the 1950s, especially housewives, while working as a journalist for women’s magazines. She takes a very comprehensive look at what she calls “the feminine mystique” and the institutions that allowed this image to emerge.

The “feminine mystique” has been defined in many ways over the years, but for me, it’s the idea that a woman’s biological, psychological, social, and spiritual destiny boils down to one thing: her identity in relation to others. In post-WWII America, this was pretty much all that was expected of women. As Friedan puts it, “[For] the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife” (p. 59).In other words, her identity and her role in life are defined as wife, mother, daughter, granddaughter, caretaker, lover, etc.

For Friedan, the problem wasn’t with these roles but with the isolation and restriction the outside world forced upon them. It wasn’t that it was bad to be a mother or a daughter or a wife or that women who wanted these things were wrong. It was that the expectation that this is all a woman was capable of being and should want to be was limiting and unfulfilling to many women.

Now, this idea of restricted identities for women is not new. It’s an inherent part of the separate spheres, which began in the 18th century but really saw its heyday in the 19th century. But what was different about the post-WWII era was that women were starting to feel the damaging effects of it on their psyches. They were getting subtle messages from their mothers and grandmothers who had grown up with the separate spheres that this was not enough and shouldn’t be enough for many women. The epigraph for Lessons states:

“A mother might tell her daughter, spell it out, “Don’t be just a housewife like me.” But that daughter, sensing that her mother was too frustrated to savor the love of her husband and children, might feel: ‘I will succeed where my mother failed, I will fulfill myself as a woman,’ and never read the lesson of her mother’s life.” (p. 71)

Lessons From My Mother’s Life is exactly about the lessons mothers and grandmothers have to teach the younger generation. The stories are set in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the second-wave feminist movement. In each story, the main character sees the writing on the wall in terms of where her life has been or where it’s going and someone outside of her is trying to teach her the lessons of the feminine mystique. For example, in my story “Fumbling Toward Freedom,” Susan is a nineteen-year-old college student about to marry an upright young man still in medical school. When she attends an exhibition of Circe sculptures by an older woman artist, the artist’s work demonstrates the consequences of letting a marital relationship define who a woman is. The story ends with Susan taking a step back to examine what it is she really wants in life.

Is Friedan’s book and the idea of the feminine mystique still relevant to the younger “I don’t need feminism” generation today? I explore that in this blog post.

Lessons is getting a makeover with a new cover and a few revisions and will be out in its new form on March 29th.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy my novella The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to my newsletter subscribers and you can get it here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

Works Cited

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition). W. W. Norton & Company, 2013 (original publication date: 196). Kindle digital file.

Generation Bonding: “Two Sides of Life”

I’m a Generation Xer. I say it loud and I say it proud. Yep, I’m from the generation that started the technology revolution and brought you big hair, hip hop, and MTV. We’re known to be independent, educated (sometimes too much), and family-oriented.

And I won’t lie. Sometimes, I have a hard time bonding with Generation Z or, as I like to call their kids, Generation Z Squared. Each generation has its own set of values and behaviors and even trying to explain one to the other can be a challenge. A fellow Generation Xer posted on Facebook recently that she tried to explain the stick shift car to her children and they didn’t get it.

But different generations can teach each other new things. One of my ESL students told me recently her company always puts older and younger employees on teams so the older ones teach the younger ones the value of their expertise and experience and the younger ones teach the older ones a new perspective and new technology.

Several of the stories in my post-World War II short story collection, Lessons From My Mother’s Life, are about the lessons the older generation has to teach the younger. The 1950s and early 1960s were vital for women’s place in America because the dissatisfaction and inertia many women felt at that time led to the second-wave feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I talk more about how women felt in these post-war years in my blog post about the “Occupation: Housewife” Era.

But there are stories in the collection that work the other way around too. It’s the younger generation that teaches the older one something new. One of these is the last story in the collection titled “Two Sides of Life”.

It was one of those writerly moments where an interesting anecdote my mother related to me became the germ of the story. When she was in her 50s (the age range I am now), my father took her to a nice restaurant for her birthday, as usual. They had a great time and when the check arrived, the server informed them the bill had already been paid. It turned out my father, who was working as a quality control consultant at the time, befriended one of his younger assistants who recommended the restaurant. The young man surprised my parents by paying the restaurant bill in advance.

I wrote the story as a contemporary work of fiction and posted it for a while as a freebie on my website. When I made the shift from contemporary to historical fiction, I took the story down, meaning to revise it. Toward the end of 2019, when I rewrote my first book, Gnarled Bones and Other Stories, to what became Lessons, I removed the title story (as it didn’t fit with the themes I had planned for Lessons) and went searching for another story to take its place. I realized the story I had written about my mother’s birthday dinner (then titled “A Birthday Gift”) would fit nicely with the new collection.

I retitled the story “Two Sides of Life” and kept the incident of the birthday dinner but moved it (reworked in mood, theme, and emotion to fit the collection) to the background. “Two Sides” became more about the dysfunctional relationship between the protagonist Leanne and her husband of twenty years, Calvin, and the lessons the young wife of Calvin’s assistant, Arlene has to teach her about life and women’s place in society.

Leanne, like many suburban housewives of the mid-20th century, had been indoctrinated into the feminine mystique and, like many of these women, had become frustrated by what Friedan called “The Problem That Has No Name”. The story opens on the day of her forty-second birthday. Her husband Calvin (an intelligent but emotionally distant professor) “suggests” she head over to one of their neighbors (Paul, Calvin’s lab assistant) and offer to help with his six-year-old son’s birthday party. Leanne agrees, though reluctantly. The party proves to be a turning point in her life, as she bonds unexpectedly with Paul’s wife, Arlene. Arlene represents the familiar sort of young woman we imagine started the second-wave feminist movement: The “do it all” woman juggling a career and family, determined to make use of her full potential in the home and out of it. Leanne, like many older women of her generation, judges Arlene pretty harshly at first but comes to realize her judgment is misplaced:

“Arlene says women today can have a career and a family too, if they just make sacrifices and balance everything correctly,” he said. “It’s what she’s trying to do, and so are most of the girls who graduated with her at Mills College.” He looked at her again. “Do you think a woman who has a job can’t be a good wife and mother too?”
She felt the breeze around her turn into waves, returning the strange chill she had felt that morning. The noise of happy children dimmed, replaced by the loud caw of birds. She realized they were standing under a nest where baby birds chirped out their starvation. She saw the head of the mother, its grim beak set and its gorging eyes searching the ground. She recognized the basic instinct of a mother on her children.
“I think any woman could do anything, if she sets her mind to it,” she said softly. “And I can see Arlene has her mind set on it. I’ve no right to judge her, and I’m sorry I did.”

Later, Leanne sees how she and Arlene are trapped in the same cage of feminine expectations, though their lives are very different. Their unexpected bond leads to some unexpected twists to the original story my mother told me.

You can read “Two Sides of Life” as well as the other four stories in the collection which speak to the idea of bonding generations of women when Lessons From My Mother’s Life is re-released on March 29 with a completely new cover!