Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [127]
As Tolstoy knew so well, in all times and places there have been happy and unhappy families. In the fifties, the unhappiness was mostly private. Divorce was uncommon and regarded as shameful. I had no friends whose parents were divorced. All kinds of pain were kept secret. Physical and sexual abuse occurred but were not reported. Children and women who lived in abusive families suffered silently. For those whose lives were going badly, there was nowhere to turn. My friend Sue’s father hanged himself in his basement. She missed a week of school, and when she returned we treated her as if nothing had happened. The first time Sue and I spoke of her father’s death was at our twenty-fifth-year class reunion.
There was cruelty. The town drunk was shamed rather than helped. Retarded and handicapped people were teased. The Green River Ordinance, which kept undesirables—meaning strangers—out of town, was enforced.
I was a sheltered child in a sheltered community. Most of the mothers were homemakers who served brownies and milk to their children after school. Many of them may have been miserable and unfulfilled with their lives of service to men, children and community. But, as a child, I didn’t notice.
Most of the fathers owned stores downtown and walked home for lunch. Baby-sitters were a rarity. Everyone went to the same chili feeds and county fairs. Adults were around to keep an eye on things. Once I picked some lilacs from an old lady’s bush. She called my parents before I could make it home with my bouquet.
Teenagers fought less with their parents, mostly because there was less to fight about—designer clothes and R-rated movies didn’t exist. There was consensus about proper behavior. Grown-ups agreed about rules and enforced them. Teenagers weren’t exposed to an alternative value system and they rebelled in milder ways—with ducktails, tight skirts and rock and roll. Adults joked about how much trouble teenagers were, but most parents felt proud of their children. They didn’t have the strained faces and the anxious conversations that parents of teenagers have in the 1990s.
Men had most of the public power. The governor, the state senators, the congressmen, the mayor and city council members were men, and men ran the stores downtown. My mother was the first “lady doctor” in our town and she suffered some because of this. She wasn’t considered quite as feminine and ladylike as the other women, and she wasn’t considered quite as good a doctor as the male doctor in the next town.
In the fifties women were forced to surrender the independence they’d won during World War Two and return home so as not to threaten men. Women’s work was separate and unequal. Many women had no access to money or transportation. Their husbands controlled the bank accounts and cars. Women’s contributions, such as sewing, tending the sick and cooking church dinners, were undervalued. At its centennial, our town published its history of the last hundred years. In the seventy-five-page book, women are not mentioned.
Language was unself-consciously noninclusive—leaders were “he,” hurricanes and secretaries “she,” humanity was mankind. Men made history, wrote books, won wars, conducted symphonies and created eternal works of art. The books we read in school were written by men and about men. They were shared with us by women teachers who didn’t comment on their own exclusion.
Schools and churches enforced male power. Men were principals, superintendents and ministers; women were teachers. We studied the Bible story of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed God’s orders. When my female cousins married, they vowed obedience to their husbands.
Kent, Sam and I were the top students. The teachers praised them for being brilliant and creative, while I was praised for being a hard worker. Kent and Sam were encouraged to go to out-of-state schools to study law or medicine, while I was encouraged to study at the state university to be a teacher.
There was a pervasive, low-key misogyny. Mothers-in-law, women drivers and ugly women