Rebels in White Gloves (12 page)

The suburban house became for many a postwar homemaker a sort of alter ego, a reflection of her essential self. “My mother’s life was very much focused on appearances—how her house looked, how she looked,” says Ann Landsberg, ’69. “She took on dinner preparation as a demonstration of what she was as a mother and wife. She never let go of that, her entire life. Even when I was grown and had a house of my own, she’d walk through our big, old shambling Victorian with its threadbare rugs and need of a paint job and say to me, ‘If you loved your family, you would do something with this house.’ ”

But if the suburban house was a woman’s sacred creation, it was also, as Sylvia Plath wrote, “a mausoleum,” a place to bury a woman alive, granting her existence only vicariously through the lives of her husband and children and her new best friend, the TV. Woman “the house-jailed and child-chained,” Christina Stead called the mid-century mother in
The Man Who Loved Children
, a 1940 novel that became a best-seller in 1965; kept by “the keycarrier, the childnamer” in a house full of “leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore.”

The suburban house reflected and reinforced the post-war family’s growing appetite for privacy. Over the course of these women’s childhood, sociable front porches and town sidewalks were replaced by fenced backyards and highways, and families increasingly retreated behind rolled-up car windows and locked front doors.
House Beautiful
magazine offered typical praise of that inward turn: In the “privacy of home life are produced men and women strong in themselves, rather than taught to lean on each other as in the more socialistic communities.” What was exposed to the neighbors was in fact carefully controlled, with the consequence that an unhappy woman like Kathy Smith’s mother believed herself to be alone. “The problem that has no name,” Betty Friedan called the affliction. “So ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it,” the suburban mom “matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches
with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts, and was afraid to ask even of herself—Is that all there is?”

Sometimes the secrets were kept even within the home. One class member, still protective enough to ask to be unnamed, describes growing up in an upper-middle-class community “like Ozzie and Harriet’s” neighborhood. “We were, to all appearances, the perfect family. My parents were childhood sweethearts. My father was a successful businessman who had provided his family with a lovely home. My mother was on the school board and active in Junior League.

“When I was growing up, I assumed that everybody, like my mother, had friends over every afternoon for a few drinks. I never realized how deeply unhappy she was. When she left my father after I got married, the very first moment she felt she could, it took me totally by surprise. They had never fought. It was unsettling to realize that so much of what we thought was true, wasn’t. Imagine the shock when we realized the rot beneath the perfect facade.

“There was no reality. If there were any negatives—death, divorce, financial failure—parents felt it best to hide it from their children, to insulate them from harshness. We were supposed to believe that everything was wonderful all the time. I think a lot of our generation has been less able to deal with failure as a consequence, and we all sooner or later meet it in our lives. We never saw our parents cope with the difficulties of real life.”

For children so sheltered in their youth there were, no doubt, advantages: Their generation’s abundant optimism could only have been nourished in such protected ground. But many of these girls of the fifties felt, like Pam Colony, ’69, that they “learned nothing about relationships” from the model of their parents’ marriages. Even in private, discontent went unexpressed; conversation was often formal, superficial, austere. “My mom and dad didn’t interact that I ever saw,” says Pam. “They never fought, they just coexisted. I picked up that pattern of not confronting a problem.” Matilda Williams, ’69, recalls her mother’s overprotectiveness as, “in an odd way, a kind of neglect. On the one hand, you’re so precious that you can’t do anything they don’t approve of. On the other hand, there’s a denial of anything that doesn’t fit the acceptable story. It’s all hush-hush and taboo and not to be talked about, which is not very helpful to actually prevent stuff like sex from happening.
You were expected to be a certain way. If you deviated from that path, you became invisible; no one could see you or hear what you were trying to say.” In a poem published freshman year in Wellesley’s literary magazine, Cheryl Ann Lawson, ’69, wrote of “the gray chill of my father’s house.… The cats and I were soldiers/Who did not hear my mother’s silences.… She set her mouth and washed the blinds.”

Graceful and well behaved, the girls of ’69 were often pressed into service as emissaries of family normalcy; their parents trotted them out like a flattering mirror or their own marvelous invention. Their goodness and achievements were meant to compensate for the disappointments in their parents’ lives. Matilda Williams’s mother had studied painting in Europe after college but gave it up at her husband’s insistence shortly after the wedding. “He put her on a pedestal, which proved to be a stifling kind of love. She resented all along that she had given up her work as an artist to have children, so she programmed us to complete her life.”

Where the miseries were acute, these gifted girls were sometimes looked to as the most able-bodied person in the room—to contain the damage, or to somehow justify a painful family arrangement by publicly demonstrating its success. Growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, Elizabeth Michel, ’69, was in love with books by age three. Her father was a committed pediatrician, who made house calls at all hours for his working-class patients. Her mother, who had met her husband at age fifteen, was a stay-at-home mom. All in all, says Elizabeth, “the family looked great from the outside.” But Mrs. Michel suffered from severe depression, which jeopardized the wholesome picture. “She was given amphetamines to raise her spirits, then needed barbiturates to sleep, and wound up addicted to both,” says Elizabeth, a small woman with a birdlike face and shaggy bangs veiling her eyes, who is now a physician herself. “Lily May, the cleaning woman, told me years later that she would go the house sometimes when we were at school, and wouldn’t be able to get in, because my mother would be knocked out. That lady had an eighth-grade education, but she knew there was something wrong, with so many pills around.”

Elizabeth understood what she was expected to do. “I became one of those kids who did extremely well in school. I hid behind books, got quiet, and stayed out of trouble. My diligence was rewarded by my
mother, though it also always had the potential for being used. I became her trophy to display.”

Though her experience is not uncommon in the class, Elizabeth Michel is unusual in her willingness to talk openly of her mother’s drug dependency. Most others in the class, after speaking of such matters, would ask that I not use their name. One, the daughter of a salesman, recalls her father going off on road trips for weeks at a time. “He also used to go away on cruises—by himself, he said. My mom would stay home, pacing circles. He would never let her get a job. ‘No wife of mine is going to work,’ he would say. She would have terrible bouts of depression. When he’d go away, she would quit eating and pass out. I knew my father had a drinking problem, though that was one of our many ‘undiscussables.’ I began to wonder whether she might also be hiding a bottle.

“My mom had three nervous breakdowns, as they called them then, dazed spells when she was not all there. When I was six she was hospitalized for three months, and they wouldn’t let me in to see her. I was always afraid for her. I fell off the jungle gym once, and rather than bawl as most kids would, I rushed to my mother to tell her it was all right.

“My mother was taken terrible advantage of by the medical community. Her doctors were incredibly remote; they expected to be treated like gods. And in those days women with ‘nervous ailments’ were medicated out of their misery. My husband’s mother was prescribed Valium by her doctor for twenty years and was then urged by him to have a brandy if she was having trouble sleeping. As for my mother, well you name it, she was given it. She died at age fifty, of what may have been a drug overdose. When she died, I was away at boarding school, and they didn’t even tell me till the next day. It was another of those silences that had been maintained all along. I felt she was robbed of her life. I think she’d been a hopeful girl, but by the time I came along, I knew a very different person, one worn down by life. If my father would say, ‘Jump,’ she’d say, ‘How high, dear?’ She was always controlled, all her life—by her father and then by her husband. What a tragic waste of life.”

Though it is Hillary’s generation that is famous for its drug culture,
her classmates turn out to have been no more prone to substance abuse than were their parents. The fifties were a boom time for cocktail shakers and pharmaceuticals. The introduction of Miltown, Librium and Valium launched the golden age of tranquilizers: The consumption of “mother’s little helpers” reached 462,000 pounds in 1958 and 1.5 million pounds a year later. “The housebound,” wrote Jane Davison, a 1954 Smith College graduate, who wrote a wonderful memoir of her family home, “committed mini-suicide by Fudgsicle or popped Valium or hit the vodka.”

Doctors were quick to pathologize unhappiness and to prescribe a chemical cure: A woman, after all, was first and foremost her biology. Because “woman’s life is entirely dependent upon her reproductive functions,” wrote Dr. Noel Lamare in a widely read book of 1957, “she is in a state of constant physiological unbalance [and] psychical inconstancy. The consciousness of this frailty may give rise to an inferiority complex. So woman appears temperamental, devoid of sense and of the barest faculties of judgment … a vain being, stupid and designed to be dominated. Doubtless man, whose physiological life ensures him an unquestionable stability, must show forbearance, a little charity, towards his companions of the weaker sex.” Dr. Lamare advised “psychotherapy under narcosis, that is after injection of Pentothal, sedative treatment (valerian, phenobarbitone), or electroconvulsive therapy for the extremely hyperemotional or hypermoral and prudish woman.” A guinea pig for such wisdom, Sylvia Plath wrote repeatedly of its effects: In her poem “Lesbos,” amidst the stink of cat and baby crap, mother is “doped and thick” from her last sleeping pill; father hugs his ball and chain but is able to slump out.

A startling number of women of Wellesley ’69 remember mothers (and fathers) courting oblivion with drugs and alcohol. It is perhaps not unrelated that one in ten also reports having been physically or sexually abused as a child. “When I was four,” says Elizabeth Michel, “my mother beat me really badly and I became totally submissive. My sister and brother were always fighting with each other, but I learned to be a very good girl. It didn’t protect me. She abused us in all ways—physically, emotionally, and sexually. My father wasn’t home much—he worked most days, and evenings as well—and says now that he wasn’t really aware of what was going on. None of her friends knew of her addiction
and abuse. People just didn’t talk about it then. I remember sophomore year at Wellesley a friend telling me that her mother had once hit her. I became very, very ashamed, and didn’t say a word.”

Elizabeth would later speak of the sorrows in her family. Her mother never would, sealed away to the end by concern for appearances. Such isolation had tragic consequences. Shortly after Elizabeth’s younger sister joined her at Wellesley in 1967, their mother made her first suicide attempt. She soon made several more, and was briefly hospitalized, which left Elizabeth’s father feeling “terribly ashamed.” During Elizabeth’s junior year at Wellesley, her mother went into a brief drug-induced coma. In 1973 she walked out of the house and disappeared for good.

Looking back, Elizabeth wonders whether all the stellar grades and awards she brought home were entirely welcomed by her mother. While they offered a kind of Potemkin facade, helping Mrs. Michel win and keep the admiration of her neighbors, Elizabeth’s achievements were perhaps a complicated blessing. In medical school, Elizabeth discovered that she struggled to speak up in front of other people, to look smart in public. “I feared people would abandon me. And I realized then that my success had been threatening to my mother. It meant separating from her, ceasing to identify, being disloyal. It was a crazy-making bind.”

Even now, Dr. Elizabeth Michel doesn’t fully understand her family’s still-unfinished story. It had been difficult, she says, for her mother to grow up Jewish in New Haven in the thirties. She had both suffered and absorbed the prevalent anti-Semitism: Jews were vulgar, she told her daughters, then insisted that they date only Jewish boys. Denied her own chance to go to college—though her grandfather was wealthy, he saw no reason for a girl to go to school—she grew jealous when her daughters went off to Wellesley. When they came home from college, she taunted them relentlessly, accusing them of thinking themselves too good for the likes of her. Such maternal jealousy can cripple a young girl, Elizabeth learned. In the daughter’s joy is implied her mother’s deprivation.

In the end, most of the mothers and fathers of the women of ’69 hoped that their daughters would be, not exceptional, but average, unambitious—
normal
. For a girl to be smart or to remain single was to be “thrown out of all the better-worn social grooves,” wrote Anne Parsons, the unmarried daughter of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, the
most famous 1950s advocate of the nuclear family. “Being in that category is like being a Negro or Jew.”

“My mother simply did not want me to be the person I was,” says Kathy Smith Ruckman. “She kept telling me not to stick out, because people wouldn’t like me. ‘Be as average as you can be.’ She never wanted to seem as if we were trying to be better than anyone else. When I asked for music lessons, she told me they were a wealthy person’s luxury. So I bought five-cent plastic flutes and built piano keyboards out of paper to try to teach myself. When I signed up for a second language at school, she was furious. My dad didn’t understand my desires, and thought my mom was always right and never intervened on my behalf. My mom was determined not to ripple the water. She needed to be liked, and hung with people she knew she could fit with, who posed no competition—uneducated people who she never had to worry would be smarter or richer than she. She was anti-intellectual, and so was her milieu. Intellectuals were people with pretensions and no common sense. ‘You’re supposed to be so smart, and look at the stupid thing you did.’ I heard that all the time. She didn’t like the fact that my friends were mostly Jewish. She told me I should find friends of my own kind. By the time I was in college, my mother and I had given up talking about anything of real meaning to me. I felt as if she didn’t remotely understand who I was. I still feel that way about the rest of my family. I got away from Wilmington and lived a very different life, and that seemed to make my family uncomfortable. Maybe they feel threatened by what I did. What was good enough for them should have been good enough for me.”