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By Root 1998 0

week, climbing Mount Everest would seem a laughable anticlimax,” writes Shirley Jackson (McCall’s, April, 1956). When Shirley Jackson, who all her adult life has been an extremely capable writer, pursuing a craft far more demanding than bedmaking, and Jean Kerr, who is a playwright, and Phyllis McGinley, who is a poet, picture themselves as housewives, they may or may not overlook the housekeeper or maid who really makes the beds. But they implicitly deny the vision, and the satisfying hard work involved in their stories, poems, and plays. They deny the lives they lead, not as housewives, but as individuals.

They are good craftsmen, the best of these Housewife Writers. And some of their work is funny. The things that happen with children, a twelve-year-old boy’s first cigarette, the Little League and the kindergarten rhythm band are often funny; they happen in real life to women who are writers as well as women who are just housewives. But there is something about Housewife Writers that isn’t funny—like Uncle Tom, or Amos and Andy. “Laugh,” the Housewife Writers tell the real housewife, “if you are feeling desperate, empty, bored, trapped in the bedmaking, chauffeuring and dishwashing details. Isn’t it funny? We’re all in the same trap.” Do real housewives then dissipate in laughter their dreams and their sense of desperation? Do they think their frustrated abilities and their limited lives are a joke? Shirley Jackson makes the beds, loves and laughs at her son—and writes another book. Jean Kerr’s plays are produced on Broadway. The joke is not on them.

Some of the new Housewife Writers live the image; Redbook tells us that the author of an article on “Breast-Feeding,” a woman named Betty Ann Countrywoman, “had planned to be a doctor. But just before her graduation from Radcliffe cum laude, she shrank from the thought that such a dedication might shut her off from what she really wanted, which was to marry and have a large family. She enrolled in the Yale University School of Nursing and then became engaged to a young psychiatrist on their first date. Now they have six children, ranging in age from 2 to 13, and Mrs. Countrywoman is instructor in breast-feeding at the Maternity League of Indianapolis” (Redbook, June, 1960). She says:

For the mother, breast-feeding becomes a complement to the act of creation. It gives her a heightened sense of fulfillment and allows her to participate in a relationship as close to perfection as any that a woman can hope to achieve…. The simple fact of giving birth, however, does not of itself fulfill this need and longing…. Motherliness is a way of life. It enables a woman to express her total self with the tender feelings, the protective attitudes, the encompassing love of the motherly woman.

When motherhood, a fulfillment held sacred down the ages, is defined as a total way of life, must women themselves deny the world and the future open to them? Or does the denial of that world force them to make motherhood a total way of life? The line between mystique and reality dissolves; real women embody the split in the image. In the spectacular Christmas 1956 issue of Life, devoted in full to the “new” American woman, we see, not as women’s-magazine villain, but as documentary fact, the typical “career woman—that fatal error that feminism propagated”—seeking “help” from a pyschiatrist. She is bright, well-educated, ambitious, attractive; she makes about the same money as her husband; but she is pictured here as “frustrated,” so “masculinized” by her career that her castrated, impotent, passive husband is indifferent to her sexually. He refuses to take responsibility and drowns his destroyed masculinity in alcoholism.

Then there is the discontented suburban wife who raises hell at the PTA; morbidly depressed, she destroys her children and dominates her husband whom she envies for going out into the business world. “The wife, having worked before marriage, or at least having been educated for some kind of intellectual work, finds herself in the lamentable position of being ‘just a housewife.