Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Forward with Betty, but which Betty?

A dear friend of mine is in the process of divorce after nearly 40 years of marriage. The divorce rate for our generation, aka Baby Boomers, is 39%. Divorce rates are now on the decline and have been for several years. My friend of fifty-plus years and I both married in 1971 when we were 20 years old. That was not that unusual back in the 70's. Today the age of a first marriage is on the rise: 25 for women, 27 for men.

My mother made it clear to me and to my three younger sisters that she wanted us all to go to college and have careers. She told us not to marry young. Her message was clear: you had to be able to fend for yourself. Her underlying message may have been that had she had a career, she would not have chosen to remain in her bad marriage. My mom worked many hours a week as a cleaning woman, then came home to all the work of maintaining a household of 4 children, my grandmother, and my father. It appeared to me as a child that she never seemed to sit down. She hoped her daughters would realize their dreams, since her dream of becoming a nurse never came true.

The aristocratic women of Downton Abbey, Masterpiece Theatre's wonderful new series on Sunday nights, have a life of comfort and ease. They are economically powerless,however, unable to support themselves or inherit their family estate because of their gender. The father, who was bailed out financially by his American wife's fortune, is forced by English law to groom a distant male cousin to inherit Downton Abbey. The sisters are left to find rich husbands, and fast, before their "bloom is off the rose."

One of the young, single servant girls at Downton, near the bottom rung of the staff hierarchy ladder, dreams of bettering herself by becoming a secretary. The mother of the young man in line to become the heir of Downton shows spunk by involving herself in the town hospital. She was trained as a nurse during the Boer War, and the knowledge she gained from her dead husband, a doctor, saves the life of a tenant farmer hospitalized for a failing heart. The aristocratic dowager grandmother, played by Maggie Smith, finds this practical woman's behavior reprehensible, but she herself is engaged in fighting, with all the shrewd, cunning, manipulative behavior she can muster, a losing battle against the traditional roles which will result in her granddaughter's loss of the family estate. The world for women is slowly beginning to change.

Marriage and motherhood or prostitution were typically the only paths for women throughout history. If a woman remained single, she was a burden to her family: Jane Austen and Emily Dickenson both bore that status even though their families had money. Poorer single women had few career choices: governess, schoolmarm, nun, servant. With the advent of the typewriter early in the 20th century, secretary was added to the small list of professions a girl could aspire to. Nursing, the other predominately female profession, began with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. In WWII, and even WWI, many women worked in factories to support the war effort, but many went home after the war to become the Betty Crockers of the 1950's. Some women found that role fulfilling, others, like my mother, did not. There were, of course, women throughout history who found ways to escape their societies' strict roles.

American women of my Baby-Boomer generation were encouraged to have careers and families. We wanted to believe Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, who told us we could and should have it all. Those of us who tried it found it was darn hard to do so. The new liberation philosophy was liberating in every sense of the word but we were swimming in deep, uncharted waters. Many a working wife found that her mate had had no idea of what running a household with children entailed. Many men had a 40+ hour work week but their working wives and mothers found that when they got home from work, their second full time job began.

Every generation has to let go of something in order to move forward. Some of us boomers had to let go of the idea of "till death do us part," (and many were only too happy to do so). The Downton Abbey girls were living on borrowed time. Their rich and pampered way of life began to crumble after World War II. My mother, daughter of an immigrant mother who worked in a dirty foundry, wanted her four girls to have college educations and careers, and that happened. She was shocked and dismayed, however, when her two eldest daughters divorced. In her generation, you got married and stayed married, happy or not. (Harry says his mother vigorously verbalized exactly that when he announced his divorce.) My mother stayed home raising children the first years of her marriage; her Baby-Boom daughters married, had children, went to college, worked, all at the same time.

The tiny seeds of change that began to impact the women of Downton Abbey were fertilized and began to grow quickly during the Baby-Boom era. Some of us boomers were impacted more than others, and a high percentage of us experienced divorce. It is to be hoped that the trend to wait to marry until you are older is a good thing. Knowing you can survive on your own is definitely a good thing: life after all is unpredictable. Bringing some maturity and economic independence to marriage may be another good thing. Today's married generation seems to understand better that parenting and running a household are better accomplished by a team. You can thank us boomers for working out that one! It wasn't easy.






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