The Women of Mid-Twentieth Century America: A Search Inside their Literature and their Confines

Leah Sewell

With thanks to the WU-CSI Grant Committeeand my advisor, Amy Fleury

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My grandmother is strolling down 8th Street in San Diego, her eyes fixed on

something ahead in the distance. It is the fifties. A loose-fitting plaid maternity dress

billows out behind her. She walks alone, unsmiling, serious, preoccupied. I stumble

occasionally upon a black and white photo like this, when my grandmother Muriel was

about my age, her twenties. In most of these she is pregnant or surrounded by young

children. She gave birth to six, my father included, and she made a profound impact on

her children. At family reunions my aunts speak of her in hushed tones of reverence. My

father told our family teary-eyed stories of her compassion and tenderness while we

gathered around the kitchen table. All testify that she was a wonderful wife and mother.

I speak of my grandmother because I think of her more often since I began

to examine the lifestyles and dreams of the women of her very same generation. And I've

realized how drastically my life is different from Muriel's just two generations later. I am

a young woman, a college student, a writer/poet, and I am single. The majority of my

knowledge of motherhood I gleaned from my relationship with my own mother or from

my readings of other women's feelings on motherhood.

I also consider myself a feminist, a term that has many meanings. As defined by

the Oxford English Dictionary, a feminist is someone who "advocates women's equality

and rights." Rebecca West, a British Suffragette and writer, commented less rigidly on

the word's meaning in 1913, saying, "I myself have never been able to find out precisely

what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express

sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat." I read and re-read Betty Friedan's The

Feminine Mystique (1963), a book that, in numerous ways, essentially points out that

suburban 50's housewives were doormats. I cannot help but wonder about Muriel's

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position. As mother of six children and stay-at-home wife to a working husband, did she

ever feel like a doormat? And if so, did she ever express sentiments opposing that sort of

existence? I cannot identify with the feelings of depression and worthlessness revealed

by women quoted in Friedan's book, yet I readily call myself a feminist. My own

definition is historically informed. I genuinely mourn the historical lack of equality with

men, a fact that kept countless women from pursuing dreams or from dreaming at all to

begin with. I feel greatly indebted to those women who pioneered the Women's Rights

Movement in the nineteenth century, and to those who picked it up again after feminism

stagnated in the 1950's. The freedoms I enjoy today are a direct result of their difficult

battles. My grandmother might have easily been able to identify with those other

housewives in Friedan's writings, whose dreams were never fully realized or never

articulated for one reason or another. But I can safely say that my grandmother would

not have labeled herself a feminist. In her day the label had a derogatory connotation for

many American men and women.

Muriel belonged to the same generation as Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Tillie

Olsen, and Anne Sexton. These writers were also wives and mothers who expressed their

artistic abilities and gained notoriety in a historically male-dominated literary

community. Whatever their final contribution to American literature, they were a

minority, and had to daily face the fact of being a woman, an "other," with all the social

and cultural pre-and proscriptions attached. This blunt fact, made more intense by the

power of mid-century America's expectations to conform, had a great impact on their

work while at the same time hindering them from their work. Tillie Olsen, writing in her

book Silences in 1972, revealed that there is "one woman writer for every twelve men (8

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percent women, 92 percent men)(her emphasis)"( Silences 24). She wrote these words

about twenty years after Muriel became pregnant with her fifth child, my father, and only

about ten years before my own birth. It is a near impossibility, Olsen implies, that I have

a literary tradition to draw upon for my own confidence as a woman writer, that visible

tradition left by poets like Rich, Sexton, and Plath, who were writing during a time when

the words "women's rights" were considered absurd. But, my grandmother, it seems,

could not, without great strain, determination, and the luck of finding herself in a

situation encouraging her confidence, have been anything but a housewife and mother

given the overwhelming attitude of the American public during the years most crucial to

developing her life goals. Discussing an unconventional pursuit for women, Olsen

named some obstacles:

How much it takes to become a writer. Bent (far more common than we

assume), circumstances, time, development of craft -- but beyond that:

how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one's

right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to

be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one's own life

comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds

such confidence. Almost impossible for a girl, a woman (Silences 27).

Somewhere along the line my grandmother would have had to have stumbled upon some

such conviction in order to become anything besides "occupation: housewife"; or perhaps

she did later, but the demands she answered to as a wife and mother prevented her from

action. I can only speculate, since she died before I could ask her these sorts of

questions. It seems that the pervasive American voice of the culture of the fifties kept

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millions of women like her from dreaming outside the walls of their kitchens. Betty

Friedan, writing in The Feminine Mystique, put it:

Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest

ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get

and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine

problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the

major decisions (14).

This narrow-minded view of their own roles in the world, according to Friedan, was

placed in these women by childcare books, women's magazines, and television.

Academic environments were becoming more supportive of the notion of women's

supposed true domestic role by adding home economics classes, childcare classes, and

courses discussing ways of making a successful marriage. Given all of these persistent

suggestions, it is no wonder that millions of young women like my grandmother Muriel

rushed to fulfill the roles of wife and mother, sold at every turn as the highest fulfillment

for American women.

Of the women I examine here that were producing literature in the fifties and

early sixties, most were mothers and wives. Young women such as Sylvia Plath and

Anne Sexton, who were entrenched in the repercussions of their decisions to marry and

bear children at a young age, contemplated the larger societal forces that held sway over

their decisions. In the case of the talented young poet Sylvia Plath, her writings

sometimes reflected an opposition to cultural norms, such as the pressure upon young

women (and men) to join the institution of marriage.

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The poet Robert Lowell wrote of Plath, in a biting foreword to her posthumously

published collection of poetry Ariel, "This poetry and life are not a career; they tell that

life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it" (Lowell viii-ix). Sylvia Plath's life

and work are, unfortunately, too often overshadowed by the fact of her suicide. Plath

excelled in writing at a young age, publishing her first poem and short story at seventeen.

She graduated from Smith in 1955, and achieved a master's degree from Cambridge in

1957. She published a book of poems, The Colossus (1960), and the autobiographical

novel The Bell Jar (1963) during her lifetime. She married the poet Ted Hughes in 1956

and had two children. They separated in 1962. She committed suicide in 1963. The

motive behind her suicide is still a subject of dispute among scholars.

Plath participated in a poetic movement that included such poets as Robert Lowell

and Anne Sexton, labeled "Confessional Poetry," a term that has recently been disputed

by some critics. However "confessional" or personal her poetry may be construed, Plath's

verses occasionally contain discussion of wider social topics like marriage. Poet and

critic Carol Muske has said of Plath that she "captured the collective imagination with her

challenge to an unjust past" (7). Take, for instance, the poem from her book Ariel

(published in 1965) entitled "The Applicant." This poem is a satirical exploration of the

institution of marriage through the voice of an insistent speaker, who continually offers

objectified women for marriage to the target of the speaker's sales pitch: the male

"applicant." Plath's choice of title for this poem indicates a willingness of the man to join

in on whatever the speaker is selling. But the conversation that is the poem itself is one-

sided. As readers, we get a sense of the applicant's responses through the speaker's

words, as evident in the first and second stanzas:

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First, are you our sort of person?

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,

Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then

How can we give you a thing?

Stop crying.

Open your hand.

Empty? Empty. Here is a hand (1-10).

Also, from these stanzas, we can glean that the applicant must meet requirements in order

to be given "a thing." If he is disfigured in some way, or if something is obviously

"missing," then he cannot "apply." The use of the word "our" in "are you our sort of

person" implies that the person executing the sales pitch belongs to a group, perhaps even

a wider society. Plath, in her comment upon marriage, may have taken up the communal

voice of American society. Further reading of "The Applicant" supports this. A hand is

offered up to the applicant, one that is "willing / To bring teacups and roll away

headaches / And do whatever you tell it. / Will you marry it?" (11-14). The pitch

involves selling the concept of the institution of marriage, based on the woman (the hand

or the "it" of the poem) taking care of the man (the "applicant"). Plath presents this

institution as impersonal, a sales pitch thrust upon the unsuspecting applicant, a man who

simply wishes to belong. Love is not mentioned, nor friendship.

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Plath's speaker then goes on to discuss marriage as an investment, like a new suit:

"I notice you are stark naked. / How about this suit — // Black and stiff but not a bad fit. /

Will you marry it? / It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof / Against fire and bombs... /

Believe me, they'll bury you in it" (19-24). If the suit is emblematic of marriage (one is

reminded of a wedding suit or tuxedo), then it is being sold by the speaker as a lifelong

commitment ("they will bury you in it"), but also as protection. Here I am reminded of

the first lines in which the speaker asks the applicant if there is something missing.

Deformity or unnatural status exempted Americans from the expectation to marry, but as

Ruth Rosen has noted of mid-twentieth century attitudes:

A majority of Americans judged men or women who did not marry as

'sick,' thinking them either immoral, selfish, or neurotic. As 'difference'

became synonymous with 'deviant,' people began to regard such men or

women with suspicion, their refusal to mate hinting at some 'antisocial'

secret (13).

With this put into consideration, perhaps the suit that Plath's speaker so insists the

applicant marry is "proof / Against fire and bombs" because healthy unmarried American

adults were, in essence, barraged by suspicion or disapproval.

Perhaps it is due to this insistence that Plath herself married young, or for that

matter, that my grandmother Muriel would marry young and devote herself to the lifelong

commitment that American society, the speaker of Plath's poem, sold. But, in "The

Applicant," Sylvia Plath presents a different perspective from that of Betty Friedan and

her social commentary, for instance. Where Friedan speaks of the pressures on women to

reach their full potential by embracing "femininity," Plath speaks from the voice of that

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intangible collective attitude, that thing which does the pressuring on both men and

women. Nonetheless, her poem does convey contempt for the role imposed upon the

wife in the lines, "A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook" (33-34).

The neuter pronoun "it," is used to portray the potential wife as an object: a doll, or a type

of appliance that performs specific functions (sewing, cooking). One can sense, in Plath's

sardonic tone, a disapproval of this interpretation of the role of the wife. It was a role

which she, among millions of other American women, adopted to her later

disillusionment and discontent.

Poet Anne Sexton also expressed contempt for the types of roles imposed upon

married women in mid-twentieth century America. Like Plath, Sexton married young, at

age nineteen, taking part in what Betty Friedan explained was a general "rise in teenage

marriages and pregnancies" (175). In 1953 she gave birth to her first child. Sexton

experienced numerous psychological "episodes" throughout her adult life, and was

frequently hospitalized. One of her psychiatrists recognized her intelligence and

recommended that she take up writing poetry, a talent she had pursued in high school

before marrying and having children. She enrolled in a poetry writing workshop and

began to publish her poetry. Friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin wrote that Sexton's

poetry "broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the

way because of the flamboyance of her subject matter" (Kumin xxxiv). Sexton continued

to write bold and controversial poetry throughout the remainder of her marriage and up

until her death by suicide in 1974.

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In her collection of poems, All My Pretty Ones (1962), a poem entitled

"Housewife" stands out as particularly frank in discussing the roles imposed upon

married women in mid-twentieth century America:

Some women marry houses.

It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,

a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

The walls are permanent and pink.

See how she sits on her knees all day,

faithfully washing herself down.

Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah

into their fleshy mothers.

A woman is her mother.

That's the main thing (1-10).

Sexton uses the term "Housewife" at first to mean something entirely different

from the common definition of that word. The type of marriage she discusses between

"some women" and "houses" is not a fanciful version of the typical matrimonial

agreement between men and women, but rather, its use in this context is to simply imply

a basic union. Sexton draws a parallel between those two elements brought together in

the union: the woman and the house. There are several details that convey a parallel

between the house and the woman subject of the poem. The house has "a heart, / a

mouth, a liver and bowel movements" (2-3). The organs of the body are compared to the

rooms of a house. That the inner walls of the house are "permanent and pink" also

implies internal parts of the body. The difference between the home structure and the

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physical structure of a woman are blurred. The line, "See how she sits on her knees all

day"(5) evokes an image of the woman cleaning the floors of the house, as women of her

day often did by physically bending or kneeling down. Then, in the following line, the

woman is "faithfully washing herself down" (6). Like the house, the woman also must be

cleansed. She is faithful, in a sense, to the definition of herself ("housewife") that she has

come to embody. Sexton leads the reader, throughout the poem, into the belief that, by

marrying the house, the woman has become the house. Sexton's wordplay packs in

meaning. Already, the readers have seen two connotations for the word "Housewife,"

meaning both a woman in union with a house and a woman who is like a house.

Sexton goes on to explain, "Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah / into

their fleshy mothers" (6-7). Again, the house and the woman are alike, but now Sexton

has added a further dimension: wives as replacement mothers to the men. The men are

"drawn back" as if to childhood, or to the comfort of the womb - their "fleshy mothers."

The men in this poem are "drawn back" both to the security of childhood, symbolized by

the house, and to the comfort of mothers, symbolized by the "housewife." Betty Friedan

touched upon this need, post-World War II, for men to return to the kind of comfort they

experienced as children: "The young GI, made older than his years by the war, could

meet his lonely need for love and mother by re-creating his childhood home" (174).

The woman in this poem is many things: wife, mother to men, and the house

itself. But Sexton leaves the reader, at her final lines, with a lasting perception: "A

woman is her mother. / That's the main thing" (9-10). Finally, the woman is reduced to a

simple definition: a physical perpetuation of her own mother's life, with all the domestic

roles attached.

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Sexton touches upon the idea of a woman becoming her mother once again in her

poem entitled "Self in 1958," from her 1966 book of poetry Live or Die. Sexton dated

the poem. She began writing it in June of 1958. The speaker of the poem is a doll who

lives in a dollhouse. Sexton wrote in the voice of the doll, "Someone plays with me, /

plants me in the all-electric kitchen" (21-22). Here again other forces dictate the woman.

In "Housewife," the woman's actions are informed by her "marriage" to the house. In

"Self in 1958," the doll-woman is made to act according to the wishes of whoever

controls her. The doll-speaker asks, "What is reality / to this synthetic doll / who should

smile... / and have no evidence of ruin or fears?" (31-32, 33, 35). The speaker "should"

and should not do certain things, and so lives in a false reality. Sexton returns to the

concept of a woman becoming her mother when the speaker recognizes that she finds

herself "rooted into the wall that / was once my mother" (37-38). The use of the word

"rooted" is very telling. The subjects of these two poems are fixed in the roles that their

own mothers also played out. But one can sense both the poet's lament and her protest.

The type of marriage that Plath and Sexton portray in their poetry is grim,

especially for the women who participate in that institution. The objectified woman in

"The Applicant" and the tradition-entrenched women of "Housewife" and "Self in 1958"

are different from Plath and Sexton themselves, the women who created these dismal

representations of married women. This is because they were able to break free from the

cultural dictate that women focus their energies on house, husband, and children to

participate in the male-dominated literature world. Sheila Ruth, author of Issues in

Feminism, took up the voice of the culture in articulating the attitude that

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Women...haven't the minds or spirit for highly creative activities, such as

art...Besides, we haven't the time for it, if we are doing our primary tasks

properly. Women were designed to reproduce and care for our

children...which takes a great deal of time, and thus we are meant to stay

at home, where we can do what we were designed to do" (182).

In a country where a majority of its citizens held onto these types of beliefs about

women, it is surprising that Plath and Sexton were able to produce poetry at all. Despite

obstacles, they used the medium as a means to convey the situation they and other

women (perhaps even my own grandmother) encountered.

With so many elements working against the women aspiring to become

recognized writers in the 1950's, it would seem that a college education would aid in

drowning out the voice of American culture that called this dream deviant. However,

women college students of literature were not exposed to female models in their field.

Poet Adrienne Rich, a 1951 graduate of Radcliffe, has noted of her own experience in

college: "I did not see a woman teacher for four years," nor did she read the work of any

woman poets (qtd. in Gubar, 1952-1953). Despite the accomplishment of publishing her

first book of poetry, A Change of World, in the same year of her graduation, Rich was

"determined to have a 'full' woman's life" (qtd. in Gubar 1953). She married two years

later, published a second book in 1955, and had three children. Her next book, Snapshots

of a Daughter-in-Law, didn't appear until eight years later.

Rich wrote the book's title poem between 1958 and 1960, beginning at age

twenty-nine. In her 1976 prose book, Of Woman Born, Rich writes of her feelings during

her experiences of motherhood and pregnancy: "I committed myself to an outward

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serenity and a profound inner boredom" (39). The subject of Rich's poem, "Snapshots of

a Daughter-in-Law" experiences a similar feeling of intellectual stagnation, as evidenced

in the lines:

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,

heavy with useless experience, rich

with suspicion, rumor, fantasy

crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge

of mere fact. In the prime of your life (7-11).

The simile "moldering like wedding-cake" is particularly telling. The cake is cut at a

wedding reception, a time of celebration, of hope, ambition, and enthusiasm for the

future. The juxtaposition of "moldering" (meaning "to crumble") can only suggest a loss

of these aspirations. The mind's power for unique, engaging thought has been arrested,

then, at the onset of the institutions: the effects of marriage and motherhood on the

poem's subject - the woman. The only way her mind is "rich" is through trivial thoughts,

through "suspicion, rumor, fantasy." These are intellectually encumbering things that

Tillie Olsen renames "the vices of slaves: dissembling, flattering, manipulating,

appeasing. Bolstering. Vicarious living, infantilization, trivialization" (Silences 26-27).

Was this the predicament of my grandmother Muriel as well? Like the woman in

Rich's poem, did she find her own intellect stifled, her most creative thoughts crowded

out by suspicions and rumors, fantasies? Adrienne Rich's situation was different from

most other women's, but, in the words of that poet, "it was not unique" (Of Woman Born

40). Before she got down to the all-consuming business of raising children, she had two

books of poetry published. She must've had a basis for her own discontent, realizing the

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qualitative difference between her former intellectual life and her new lifestyle

characterized by "inner boredom." Many of the women quoted in Friedan's The

Feminine Mystique also felt discontent, but were unable to pinpoint its source, hence

Friedan's label, "the problem that has no name." These were often the same women

whose "highest ambition [was] to have five children and a beautiful house, their only

fight to get and keep their husbands" (Friedan 14). Rich, through determination,

education, and work upon her craft from a young age, was able to build the beginnings of

a career before slipping into the non-productive void that characterized marriage and

motherhood in the 1950's. Contemporary woman poet and critic Eavan Boland explains

Rich's and other literary women's predicaments:

When a woman writer leaves the center of a society, becomes a wife,

mother and housewife, she ceases automatically to be a member of that

dominant class which she belonged to when she was visible chiefly as a

writer.... Whatever her writing abilities, henceforth she ceases to be

defined by them and becomes defined instead by subsidiary female roles

(251).

Boland wrote this statement in the 1990's out of her own experience of becoming a wife

and mother. I can only imagine how intense this same feeling of exclusion must have felt

for women writers in the 1950's, a decade that Ruth Rosen has characterized as one which

"quarantined dissent and oozed conformity" (8).

Fiction and nonfiction writer Tillie Olsen also dealt with obstacles put before her

own writing when she became a wife and mother, and like Plath, Sexton, and Rich, her

experiences informed the fine work she was able to produce despite these obstacles.

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Olsen was writing before her 1943 marriage to Jack Olsen, with whom she raised four

children, while working "everyday" jobs to help support the family. After the birth of her

first child, Olsen's writing activity decreased considerably. She only began to write again

when her youngest child was five years old, and, then, in the course of eight years, she

produced four stories that were published in 1961 under the name of the title novella,

"Tell Me a Riddle." That story won the O. Henry Award for best American story of the

year.

"Tell Me a Riddle" is a poignant and emotional story depicting a Russian

immigrant woman, Eva, who, in the last months of her life, is bitter over the sacrifices

she made for her children and her husband. Now, with all her children grown up and

raising their own families, her husband tries to persuade her to move into the "Haven," a

type of senior home where all their needs will be taken care of. But Eva resists, thinking

of her hard-won solitude, and protecting what she can now savor:

...a reconciled peace. Tranquility from having the empty house no longer

an enemy, for it stayed clean -- not as in the days when it was her family,

the life in it, that had seemed the enemy: tracking, smudging, littering,

dirtying, engaging her in the endless defeating battle -- and on whom her

endless defeat had been spewed (Tell Me 68).

There is universality in this, among women. The above paragraph illustrates the all-

consuming job of caring for others. Decades of feeling her own "defeat" have made Eva

crave solitude, reconcilement.

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When her husband learns that Eva has cancer, he takes her on long trips to visit

her children and grandchildren. On a visit to her daughter Vivi's chaotic household, the

newborn baby is thrust into Eva's lap. Her response is to recoil. Olsen wrote:

They put the baby in her lap. Immediacy to embrace, and the breath of

that past: warm flesh like this that had claims and nuzzled away all else

and with lovely mouths devoured; hot-living like an animal -- and now;

the turning maze; the long drunkenness; the drowning into needing and

being needed (Tell Me 84).

It was a need like this one that kept Olsen herself from her work. Olsen touches upon

this fact throughout her 1972 collection of essays entitled Silences. As the primary

caregiver to her four children, as was considered proper for women in the 1950's, Tillie

Olsen had little time to focus on her creative talents. She admits, "The years when I

should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks... The

habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily

broken...habits of years...stay with you, mark you, become you" (Silences 39). Even as a

productive writer after her children were grown, Olsen had difficulty identifying herself

as a writer first and foremost: "habits of years...become you." Like Eva in "Tell Me a

Riddle," Olsen is still profoundly affected psychologically by her experiences with

motherhood. Writing the essays in Silences out of her own knowledge and drawing

extensively from outside sources, Olsen also acknowledges that which many women

encountered in the 1950's: "the agony -- peculiarly mid-century, escaped by their sisters

of pre-Freudian, pre-Jungian times -- that 'creation and femininity are incompatible.'

Anaїs Nin's words" (30). This statement is ironic when considering that one form of

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creation was widely accepted for women to participate in at the time: the "natural"

occupation of creating children. Coupled with demands to give children their full

attention, decreased activity often resulted in other, less "natural" forms of creation for

women, such as writing.

"One woman writer for every twelve men" was Tillie Olsen's diagnosis in 1972.

How much more dismal Olsen's findings might have been if there were not women like

Plath, Sexton, Rich, and Olsen herself, who served as models to encourage other women

to write. They have proven by example that all forms of creation for women are possible

and can be compatible with one another. A woman can create a union with her mate, can

create children, can create health and open-mindedness in her children, and she can

create art, literature, an impact on the world. Contemporary woman poet Eavan Boland

discussed finding a unity between these elements:

The more I lifted a child, conscious of nothing but the sweetness of a

child's skin, or the light behind an apple tree, or rain on slates, the more

language and poetry came to my assistance. The words that had felt

stilted, dutiful, and decorative when I was a young and anxious poet, now

sang and flew. Finally, I had joined together my life as a woman and a

poet. On the best days I lived as a poet, the language at the end of my day

-- when the children were asleep and the curtains drawn -- was the

language all through the day: it had waited for me. I had wanted to feel

that those things I had lived as a woman I could write as a poet. Once I

did that, I felt there was a fusion, a not-to-be-denied indebtedness between

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those identities: the woman providing the experience, the poet the

expression (qtd. in McQuade, 339).

This is a fairly recent development for women writers, who, instead of shedding their

traditionally "feminine" roles to join the (still) male-dominated literary world, can choose

to embrace them in order to express their own unique experiences from the perspective of

women.

Traces of this type of expression can be found in the writings of the women

writers I have discussed here. Plath understood the objectification of women. Sexton

recognized the influence of our mother's lives upon the ways we live our own. Rich

explored the disillusionment of married women who find their thoughts ruled by trivial

matters. Olsen portrayed a woman beaten down by years of single-handed care of a large

family. All of this out of women's personal experiences.

I still lack the information I so desire about the intricacies of my grandmother

Muriel's experiences. I have heard from family members that she was involved in her

community. I have heard that she loved each and every one of her children and provided

them with confidence and bright outlooks for their futures. She raised my father, who in

turn helped to raise me to believe in my abilities and myself. I have now come to

understand the wider society she lived in while she made somewhat limited decisions

about the course her life would take. I do not wish to diminish her life to that of a victim

of what Friedan termed "the feminine mystique." That is merely one aspect of her life.

Millions of other women endured the same proscriptive attitudes that swayed them in

their life decisions. That is not to say that their lives were not filled with laughter,

closeness, and love. But I feel that no human being should have their potential snuffed

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out by a commonly held belief system that dictates some may participate in the world, the

bettering of the world for further generations, and some simply may not. Too many

women have participated in the world vicariously through their children, or their

grandchildren.

Part of what I consider my personal definition of feminism is to recognize those

whom Tillie Olsen has called the "silenced":

We must not speak of women writers in our century (as we cannot speak

of any area of recognized human achievement) without speaking also of

the invisible, the as-innately-capable: the born to wrong circumstances --

diminished, excluded, foundered, silenced (Silences 39).

They are a nameless mass of women, who, like my grandmother, lived anonymously and

without making a widely recognized large-scale contribution to the world. It is they who

endured and still endure the repercussions of an unbalanced system of power that favors

men, worldwide.

In 1929 the British writer Virginia Woolf spoke of many conditions necessary for

women to escape being "silenced" to become writers:

"if we...have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we

have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think;

if we escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings

not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality...if we

face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go

alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the

world of men and women, then the opportunity will come" (Woolf 1344).

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There is accuracy in this statement in Woolf's, my grandmother's, and in my own time.

Woolf's formula for acquiring the "habit of freedom" involves the rejection of

traditionally gender-defined roles: "our relation is to the world of reality and not only to

the world of men and women." She seems to say in this statement that narrowness of

opportunity comes from a narrow perspective. Look to reality, not to the world created

by the often narrow-minded ideas of men and women who seek to define that reality.

Plath, Sexton, Rich, and Olsen struggled against the gender roles created by their society,

roles that shaped their experiences, their reality.

Woolf's famous words, "if we...have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of

our own," are relevant even today, while women still find their freedoms bound by the

constraints of marriage, motherhood, and persistent attitudes about the proper behavior

for women to live by. Certain conditions must exist for a woman to find her own

measure of freedom. My own examination of the lives of American women is indeed

possible because of my possession of the figurative room of my own. But I would add

that a tradition of women writing has also contributed to my choice to write. With

increased participation in literature, women have also drawn attention to those who were

"silenced," their voices drowned out in other aspects of participation in the wider world.

I believe that this was the predicament of my grandmother and many in her generation.

My own voice, my thoughts on being a woman and a woman who writes, will, I hope,

have volume and resonance in the future, so that my own grandchildren, should I have

any, will hear me crystal clear.

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Works Cited:

Boland, Eavan. "Letter to a Young Woman Poet." By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. Ed. Molly McQuade. Graywolf Press: Saint Paul, MN, 2000. 339.

Boland, Eavan. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1995

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, 1963. New York: Dell, 1974.

Gilbert, Sandra M., Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: Norton, 1996.

Kumin, Maxine. Foreword. "How It Was: Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton." xxxiv. Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981.

Lowell, Robert. Foreword. Sylvia Plath, Ariel. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Muske, Carol. Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Olsen, Tillie. Tell Me a Riddle, 1956. New York: Dell, 1994.

Olsen, Tillie. Silences, 1965. New York: Dell, 1989.

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 1976. New York: Norton, 1986.

Rich, Adrienne. "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law." The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Eds. Gilbert, Gubar. New York: Norton, 1996. 1955-1959.

Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Ruth, Sheila. Issues in Feminism: an Introduction to Women's Studies. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 2001.

Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981.

Woolf, Virginia. "A Room of One's Own." The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Eds. Gilbert, Gubar. New York: Norton, 1996. 1344.

22

On WomenPoetry

Leah Sewell

With thanks to the WU-CSI Grant Committeeand my advisor Amy Fleury

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Bessie Sings a Tent Show

I rise to the stage, clad in long smock,with beads every inch like rainbow fish scales.No hat like the white women wear, lidsto keep them shut up. My headdress is the courtship dance of a peacock, is sexfocused at the temples. The audience looks

at my mouth through a haze of smoke, waitsfor the words to catch hold of my breathand ride a ribbon of twisting air that goesslow over their heads and touches downin a funnel, tornado, to enter the listening ear.

They are women, many. They want me to singof their heartache, their blues. Something gut-loaded and heavy, to make them feel weightless,for as long as I sing at tent walls. I give it to them:

I killed my man cause he wouldn't be right to meI stabbed him with my knife cause he wouldn't be rightMy life's done and over, that judge won't set me free

I do a sway with my body like a curtain in the window of a lonely woman's room,watching out for her low-down man to returnfrom the arms of another. I cry with fingerswhen behind me the brass man blows,I let the tips drizzle fat full tears, sprinklethem over those women who moan in the solos.

And what do those men think, standing there casual?Vests button up their puffed chests. Do their heartsgo with me? Are their eyes still scaled over about the waysof women, about the lava of their veins and the quiverof their lips over love, love, this hateful, careless love?

Later I'll unwind my sashes, drink in moonshine, and take water to the powder on my face, look at my face, at rivulets in the mirror. It's all about the words that I grumble and bellow.A storm calms the hearerwho has tossed all night in a bed lined with voodoo, can rip the familiarfront yard tree, throw its branches twisted. I wantmy words like thunder.

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Camille Claudel's Maturity

The woman's body contortedon the clean marble floor of Musée d' Orsay,tenuous grip on a single finger of a man, her manwho is being led away by an enemy, a devil, a dark hooded face that whispers and cajoles.She is vulnerable naked on her bronze knees.

Whose maturity has she portrayed? The woman'sfeatures are twisted into verge of childish tantrum.One cannot travel far on the knees.The hair is a neatly formed bun.The stone that bruises kneecaps is lowerthan where her man stands, resigned to follow the tempter.

Outside on Paris narrow streets women click heels, upright, fashioned like sculptures, make the passerby eye dancefrom hip to bust to face, to legs to face, to the whole.Claudel's woman must follow them to the shops and brasseries,down Metro tunnels and over the bridges of the Seine.

Put your feet flat on the stone, woman, let go of that man.He can go where he is led. Erase that regret from your eyes.Turn them to the light, sun-bathed cobbled streets.Put your feet flat on the stone. Dismount from your frozen pose.

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Distrust in a World

Sad Muriel, grandmother, why so sadin this photograph where you are walking?Forties. San Diego. Storefronts boast flags.White-clad sailors behind you are talking,

grim-faced too, knowing bombs and holocaust.To the north in LA they are beatingzoot-suited, duck-tailed Hispanics, distrustin a world where the red scare is seeding.

Sad Muriel, grandmother, do you frownfor those lives melting in Hiroshima?For those brown-skinned children yet to know Brownv. The Board? For your cruel America?

Here the clue: Your belly round with a child.Here is the reason why you cannot smile.

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Missus Watches Her Neighbors

What makes me laugh at the big manbending over a small garden with pink-eyed flowers?Who does he think he is to wear a sun-hat and over alls and bend like that to pick weedswith those big clunky hands of his? Just whodoes he think he is? And why am I shyabout the prostitute whose hands are balled like chain link fence posts and hates the sunon her shoulders? And why does she hateit so? What made her frown like a lemon eater?Why do I look away from the way she pullsthe honeysuckle vine like a slinky when she passes?But then why does she fly from my eyes? Whydoes she use that sidewalk like a speeding escalator?

What does the bird woman think she's doing now?Does anyone want to see her white flesh like a closeteddoll, how the rubber recliner leaves ladders in her thighs?Does anyone really want to see it? And how can she laughwhen the crows bend to pluck her bread from her weedy lawn,and how can she think that is pleasant? Why does she lether man bound around her like a sparrow caffeinated,like a sparrow jumping from twig to branch, like the danceof a two year old ring boy? Why do I care when the cross streetgirls crawl on their knees to their mother? Why do I sigh when she drives away, leaves them with knee cap grass stainsand long afternoons in the mud pie factories of back yard summer?Will they grow to be bird women, prostitutes? Will their husbandsbend over tiny gardens while the meal burns black in their kitchens?

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Mother Portraits

Black and white suits the graysof your dustbowl days, mother,migrant woman with the crevicesabout your eyes. How you remind

me of mine, but she in color,three babes about her rose-paisley skirt. She, like you, squintsinto an uncertain future, the kind

that blinds with its unrelenting sun.You had to wake to face it each morningdays when no one cared about the womenand children, and beg relief from a jungle

thorny and overrun with worries like your own, and your own babeshungry, hungry, crying from want.Mother, I see all your creases and know

that my mother's wrinkles at the cornersof her eyes come from occasional worrycrowding out the occasional smile. Mostlymothers are still in the wind, and watchful.

Mostly mothers are stoic as statuesor photographs.

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Spinster Activity

I knit and feedpigeons. I flirt

with the waving cloth on the clothesline.I look into the sky.

Then I walkto the market with a roll basket, and my savedpaper bags. I consider jarred chutney. I wink at all the doormenon my slow amble home.

I concoct stew in my kitchen in dead heat of summer.I wear wool and a knit cap and sweatto feel the semblance

of heaving work, the moldingof something out of nothing,hands to the work, to the clay,to the metal, to the very gratifying finish.

I serve steaming bowls to the spiritsof unmade grandchildren, who never complain or say meanbiting child-things. I show them the contents

of my closet, the moth-eaten white dress, the flatunweathered surface of a leather travel bag.Then I switch on the radio dial

and lay me down in a bed for dancing.Listen, Dream, they are playing our song.

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The Bird Woman

This woman screams unstoppable when she seesa fluffy grinning dog. She prefers the company of birds. Throws them bits of rotting food, wings and beaks descend to her lawn. Tortillas today, saythe murder of crows, cawing, smiling at this woman.Torn bits of moldy bread in the points of their mouthsmake the woman squeal with pleasure, she twirls in her front lawn and wings flutter. She wants to fly.

She got herself a big man who circles like a vulture.She suns her white self on the rubber recliner, eats hunks of cheese amidst the shy sparrows dancingwhile he watches out the darkness of the doorway. He frowns in his love for this woman. Soon he comes to the lawn and hops around her, awkward, squinting,saying, What can I do? What can I do? What? What?She screams. She forgets him, her mind light, thoughts wind in her feathers.

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The Lonely Girl Drawer

In my dream I have three drawers to open,rummage inside looking for that one or thisone dream I once had. I know it's in here.

One drawer. Swimming with men flirting,wanting something fleeting. Carry pajamasin their back pockets, plan hours sleeping.

Two drawer. Comfort in there, soft folds of an armchair, man who wants to brew coffee, talk lazy, but this one is dark, I know, on closing.

Three drawer is the junk drawer. I find me there,the various bits of the years. Objects long importantand others new, speak in my voice alone girl. Alone.

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Waiting Out December

Winter, bunking in a Chicago room,the room where city breathed through radiowaves, I felt this grown-up thing start to bloom,a crayon drawing of the lives we'd know.You stretched languidly down the ladder rungstoward me and my scribbled dreams rising up.We'd be the women of sidewalk fashions,we'd be some women both pretty and tough.From bottom I could see your dirty solesdescending. How I hated childhood's stainsthat still showed and still proved: time left to go,slow like December's long wait paper chains.Now the Christmas of our lives is raging,and we grown women know time as aging.

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Waiting to Walk the Dream Walk

On the dreary street women shuffle.Their faces are half-hidden by scarves.I see them through the curtained window.Their skirts float above the wide sidewalk.They are wrapped in silks of all colors.All day this is how they remember,

walking the rhythm to rememberin their youth of the dancing shufflehow their robes glimmered vibrant colors,and their lovers peeled away their scarves.Past loves propel them down the sidewalk.As they pass, their dreams fog my window.

The women don't look at my window.If they see me they will rememberhow I joined them once on the sidewalk,once, I tried to mimic their shuffle.They gazed out at me from their silk scarves.I wanted my dreams the same colors,

their eastern, henna-tinted colors.I tired of my haze-tainted window.Walking, I found my dreams wore no scarves,me a girl, no loves to remember,no reason for colorful shufflewith women who dream down the sidewalk.

See how their skirts drift on the sidewalk.Grown women know thousands of colorsand sadness that brings on the shuffleof heavy feet passing my window.Moving lips to songs, they rememberwhy their faces are hidden by scarves.

Curtains behind gray panes are my scarves.The weak sun spotlight leaves the sidewalkand women, reluctant, rememberdinner, laundry, things without colors.I wish for one glance at the windowbefore, sighing, they cease the shuffle

that helps them remember the colors.They leave their scarves bright on the sidewalk.At my window I wait to shuffle.

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