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

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.

Photo Credit: Silhouette of woman’s face in a question mark, uploaded 9 February 2019 by Mohamad Hassan: mohammad hassan/Pxhere/CC0 1.0

This month, I’ve been talking a lot about Betty Friedan and her book, The Feminine Mystique, because the ideas in that book were an inspiration for the stories in the new edition of my first book Gnarled Bones and Other Stories. How that came to be, I go into in the Forward of that book.

I was first exposed to Friedan and her ideas in graduate school. I took several courses in feminist theory and feminist literature, and one of our textbooks gave a snippet from Friedan’s book. The passage was one that appears in a lot of college materials on feminist theory: The Problem That Has No Name.

This might seem like a convoluted and abstract idea but, in fact, Fridan breaks it down into an entire chapter in her book. Writing articles for women’s magazines in the 1950s, Friedan had an opportunity to visit with many suburban housewives, and her talks with them revealed how these women, who were supposed to be living the American Woman’s Dream had, in fact, a problem — a big problem. Their lives weren’t such a dream. In fact, each woman felt “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that … [she] struggled with … alone” (Friedan, p. 1). In other words, many of the suburban housewives Friedan met expressed the same uncertain feeling that something wasn’t quite right with their lives, that, though they were living in comfort and ease, something was missing, and that missing something caused them to be unhappy, dissatisfied, and unfulfilled.

That snippet during my graduate studies made an impression on me, and I have since read Friedan’s book. I’ve been impressed by how comprehensively she looks at the way in which so many American institutions (including magazines, schools, advertisers, and the medical establishment) had created such a powerful ideology about what women should be and their road to happiness in mid-20th century America.

The key to Friedan’s feminine mystique was that it wasn’t just about the stereotype of the 1950’s happy housewife embodied in 1950’s television shows such as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. It wasn’t just about an ideal of what all women, young and old, should strive for. It was about the mind play, the idea that a woman’s destiny to serve others (husband, children, community) should be her purpose in life, and if she did achieve this goal, she would find contentment.

But as Friedan discovered, many of these women who, for intents and purposes, should have been happy, weren’t. And they felt guilty about it. They felt they let their families down, and they felt there was something wrong with them. They tried to blot out the problem by immersing themselves in more housework or more committees or by taking sedatives. They shifted the blame sometimes to their husbands or their children or some other outside source. Worst of all, many tried to ignore it. In short, they did everything but deal with it.

This is, in fact, a part of how the second wave feminist movement began. It started with the feminist “consciousness raising” groups. The idea was to encourage women to discuss problems and issues related to women by connecting them to their own lives, so that they felt not only that they weren’t alone, but that they could also seek guidance together. There is a great consciousness-raising scene in the 1975 film version of The Stepford Wives, a dark comedy about the suburban housewife. Despite its tongue-in-cheek reference to this idea of women getting together to discuss their problems, the scene contains a lot of truth, especially in the way it depicts the suburban housewife’s narrow world. I talk a lot about this in my blog post about the 1950s housewife as well.

The women in Lessons From My Mother’s Life live in the 1950s and early 1960s and are subject to this same kind of snow job about how their lives should make them happy and fulfilled. But they each come to realize they suffer from The Problem That Has No Name. They come to see their lives, for all the glossy veneer, isn’t what the women’s magazines, advertisers, doctors, and psychiatrists tell them it ought to be. They don’t wait for the women’s movement to raise their awareness and give them options. They examine their own psychological reality and make their own options.

If you’d like to know more about Lessons From My Mother’s Life, coming out in March 2020, then you can click on this link.

Works Cited

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

Tag: mid-20th Century

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

The Problem That Has No Name