ELAINE OLSONWe begin now a series of chapters that carry the homemakers through the successive developmental periods of early adulthood. The first of these periods is the Early Adult Transition, which forms a bridge between childhood and early adulthood and is part of both. It follows the Adolescent Life Structure which, extending from 13 or 14 to 17 or 18, is the last period that falls entirely within childhood. The Adolescent Life Structure provides a base from which we begin the shift into adulthood, and terminating it is a major developmental task of the Early Adult Transition. I’ll begin with a consideration of the Adolescent Life Structure and the familial-social context in which it is embedded.
For the homemakers, the period of the Adolescent Life Structure typically extended through the high school years, occasionally a year longer. In every case it ended at 17 or 18. During this time all fifteen homemakers lived in the parental home and went to a public high school. The central components of their lives were the family, the high school, and the adolescent peer world. As graduation from high school approached, they began to think more seriously about leaving the parental home and beginning an “adult” life.
The homemaker sample represented a variety of social backgrounds and early life circumstances. Six women were Catholic, six Protestant, one mixed Catholic-Protestant, and two Jewish, and within each faith differed widely in religious views and involvement. Thirteen were white and two African-American. One woman had eleven years of education, four completed high school, five had vocational training, and five completed a four-year college degree right after high school. Although all of them lived in the New Haven area at the time they were interviewed, their regional origins were diverse:five were born and raised in Connecticut; the other ten grew up elsewhere in the country, and moved to New Haven between the ages of 16 and 31.
There was variety as well in the socio-economic status of the family of origin:
(1) Three women—Emily Swift, Wendy Lewis, Claire Berman—had college-educated parents who led relatively comfortable, middle-class lives. The family took it for granted that the girls would go to college, marry men of similar or better circumstances, and become homemakers in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise—as they did.
(2) Six women—Jenny Abatello, Elaine Olson, Beth Logan, Sara Cushing, Kay Ryan, Nan Krummel—came from stable working-class or lower-middle-class homes. Their fathers’ occupations included skilled factory worker, credit manager, schoolteacher. Fathers and mothers had twelve years or fewer of education, except for two who completed college. Four of these women got vocational training (as R.N., secretary, technician), and two went to college. All were preparing for adult lives as homemakers.
(3) Six women—Nora Cole, Carol O’Brien, Ruth Allen, Angela Capelli, Lynn McPhail, Vicky Perrelli—grew up in conditions of poverty and hardship. Their fathers’ occupations included hospital cook, handyman, local truck driver, mine worker. Their mothers were homemakers who often held full-time, unskilled jobs. Four of these women had no education after high school; Vicky Perrelli and Nora Cole got vocational training that enabled them to improve their lives. All six married by age 20 and quickly started a family. Five of the husbands had very limited occupational skills and inner psychological resources, so that the family lived in marginal circumstances. This group had an average of four children (range 2 to 7), as compared to under three for the others. They also had the highest divorce rate: two were currently in their first marriage; two were in their second, and two were divorced.
In our culture, the “normal” family is seen as a haven for all of its members. It is supposed to be a place where spouses come together to find loving, peaceful solace. Children have carefree lives, wrapped in the love and protection of the family. They receive the psychological and material sustenance needed so that they can develop into well-adjusted, responsible adults. The homemakers in this study generally did not grow up in such families or have such benign childhoods. Rather, they encountered a relatively high incidence of abuse (of parents as well as children), alcoholism, fragmented or “dysfunctional” families, and anguished adolescents stumbling into adulthood on the worst of terms. Standard survey research using brief methods and larger samples, and statistics gathered by various government agencies, generally give a more positive or blander picture of childhood and a lower incidence of the kinds of problems reported here.
Are the present findings unbalanced? Do they reflect an abnormally disturbed sample or an excessive emphasis in the interviewing upon problems rather than pleasures? Perhaps. No one study can be conclusive. In my opinion, however, the kinds of developmental difficulties and environmental stresses or constraints evident here—among the career women as well as the homemakers—exist roughly as often in the general population as in our sample. The frequency and severity of the problems, and the concrete forms they take, no doubt differ to some degree among classes, subcultures, and specific groups, but the basic theme remains: a very sizable minority of children and adults live under conditions that are in some ways inimical to their development.
Only a few homemakers gave a strongly positive account of their family life in childhood and adolescence:
ELAINE OLSONMy parents were the most loving, wonderful people, very family oriented. We went to church every Sunday and on vacations together in the summer. We saw my grandparents every weekend and spent all the holidays with our large group of aunts, uncles, and cousins. My younger sister became a nun, and we are still very close. I still phone or visit my mother every day. I would be lost without that supportive family circle. I wouldn’t consider moving far from New Haven.
Nora Cole gives a positive but more complex view of her childhood.
NORA COLEMy father was a coal miner with four years of schooling. I remember running down the road to meet him coming home from work, his face covered with black soot. It was a very dangerous job, and they worked the miners like animals. We lived in constant fear of the whistle blowing that signaled an explosion in the mines. I adored my father. He was a proud man who loved his family and was involved in the community. We knew as children that our parents loved each other a lot. You would see them walking down that country road to church holding hands. I was raised very sheltered, which was good but didn’t prepare me for a lot of harsh things I had to face in life. Our home was just a beautiful haven. I never heard my parents argue about bills, so I thought marriage was always like that [laughs].
My parents loved us children but did not spare the rod at any time. Boy, would they break our butts with the belt when we did something they thought was wrong or would get us into trouble. I still remember one Christmas: all of us children would go to the Company store to look at the toys. The store owner told us black children, “You go and you look but you don’t touch the toys.” The white children were allowed to touch. Well, one year I had had enough. I didn’t care what anyone said, I was going to play with those toys. I got behind the counter and turned them on. The Ferris wheel started going round and round, and the train moved, and the plane whirred and spinned. The clerk yelled, “Okay, Nora, turn it off, and get back where you belong!” I knew I was in trouble the minute I did it but I didn’t care. When I got home my parents had the belt ready. Boy, did my father give it to me that day. I said to myself, “I don’t care, I’ve done what I wanted, and that’s that.” So I took my comeuppance. I knew that my parents were scared for me; they didn’t want me to break the rules that would get me in trouble.
In high school I was a good student. I never had a white teacher. I was a big girl, almost 200 pounds, interested in sports. I was definitely not sexually active. Thoughts entered my mind that it would be great to be held in a boy’s arms but the fear of God and Mama struck in my heart [laughs]. Religion was a ruling force in our home, and I was very active in the church. Summers I went to New Haven to work and live with my dad’s brother and his family.
At 16 I graduated from high school. No job was available at home, so I moved to New Haven. My sister had done the same thing: finished high school, went to New Haven, got a job, and married a year later. I was hoping to work and earn money and do things for me. I lived with my uncle and his sister and worked as a secretary. It was kind of lonely coming home and finding no one there and no dinner made. Not like home! The guys in New Haven were faster and just wanted to have sex. I’d say, “No way,” and that would be the end of that guy. He’d say, “You’ve wasted enough of my time—she’s not about nothing.” I got tired of their lines fast; it was leading nowhere.
My husband-to-be, Walter, lived on the first floor where I lived. He was twenty years older, and his wife had died a few years earlier. He worked in a factory. One thing that attracted me to him was his concern; he cared about how I felt and what I liked. His whole approach was different from the 18-year-old guys I dated. He was a very gentle person, experienced in life. He’d see that no dinner was ready when I came home from work. He’d say, “I’ll bring you some food because you need to eat before going to choir rehearsal.” He drank heavily at times; I wasn’t used to that and didn’t know what to make of it.
Walter and I admired each other from a distance for a while. Then in May we started dating. My parents got wind of it and made me go back home. I knew they loved me and were concerned about the age difference but I was certain that I cared enough for Walter to want to marry him, and he felt the same way. That’s when I began to differ from my parents and make my own decisions. Finally, my parents just resigned themselves. I got married at 17 and had my first child at 18. There were a lot of rough times in the marriage when I wanted to give up and go back home but I knew that all my relatives were just sitting there waiting for the breakup. I stuck it out to show them I had not made a mistake.
In stark contrast to Elaine Olson and Nora Cole, the great majority of the homemakers painted a more negative picture of their parents and their own childhood lives:
CAROL O’BRIENMy parents fought a lot, and there was an atmosphere of violence in our home. I just had a sense of chaos. My mother had a severe drinking problem and was verbally abusive. She told me that God would not give me kids because I was so bad—I didn’t take care of her the way she wanted. When I was in high school things got so bad that I lived with my best friend’s family for a year. At 21 I married the first guy who asked me. All I ever wanted was to get married and stop working and have a home and family of my own. I hoped to be rescued from the kind of life I’d had at home by becoming the perfect wife to a perfect husband; I would make him happy, he would make me happy, and we’d have perfect, happy children. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.
RUTH ALLENI grew up in the rural South. I was raised by my grandparents and rarely saw my mother, who was not married. We were poor but I always had food and care and the comfort of the black Baptist church. At 6 I went to live with my mother, her boyfriend, and their newborn child. We all lived in one room. Those were harsh, harsh years—a lot of suffering for me and my sister. My mother physically abused us. She tried to have food for us but that man just took it all for himself. We went hungry a lot and had no clothes and no heat. My sister and I just sat all day on that cold floor in that one room. At 8, I and my sister and my pregnant mother went back home with my grandparents, and life became happier. At least there was food, clothing, and heat. I didn’t realize how poor we were because everyone was poor in that town. When I was 12 my mother married a man who was strict but kind, and things were better. He worked as a janitor in a nearby town and came home weekends. My mother was a cleaning lady for a white family.
In high school I was a straight A student. I had supportive teachers who made sure I had breakfast and gave me odd jobs to earn money for clothes. It was understood that I would receive a scholarship from my all-black high school to the nearby all-black college. At that time the integration of schools began on a voluntary basis. I wanted to stay in my high school but my stepfather insisted that I transfer to a formerly all-white high school even though I didn’t want to, and even though it meant that I would not get the college scholarship. No way would a black student get a scholarship—it would kill the whites to recognize a black student like that. My parents said that if I wanted to go to college bad enough I could do it on my own, but there was no way. At 17 I graduated and went to live with an aunt in Boston.
In high school the girls began involving themselves in adolescent peer group activities, dating, working part-time, becoming part of the world outside of the family. They began, slowly, to feel more grown up, “not a child anymore.” What is most striking is not that these changes occurred—they are well-known aspects of adolescent life—but that they occurred to such a limited degree. As high school graduation approached, these girls were minimally connected to the adult world and minimally prepared to take their place in it. Their parents wanted them to become more responsible yet did little to help them form a sense of the adult world and of themselves as adults. The adolescent peer world served more as a buffer against the adult world than as a direct link to it. Very few of the girls had a significant personal relationship with even one adult (teacher, friend, coworker, relative) who strongly affirmed their budding adult interests and identity. They generally studied hard enough to get grades appropriate to their educational-occupational goals. But, equally generally, they regarded schoolwork as a tolerable or oppressive chore rather than something of intrinsic value or interest. High school was not an intellectual treasure house, a stimulus to the imagination, an inviting world in which they could invest themselves with a sense of excitement and visions of the future. They experienced their teachers as alien: evenhanded and vaguely nice at best, unfair and vindictive at worst, but almost never friends, mentors, persons with whom they could have a meaningful relationship. This picture holds, I believe, for the great majority of American high school students. (Compare the experiences of the career women in Chapter 10.)
During this period the girls began to form personal relationships involving some degree of friendship, romantic love, and sexuality with boys. A few went steady for a year or more. In most cases the boyfriend lived some distance away and they hardly knew each other. The relationship thus had the advantages of giving her the prestige associated with going steady, of protecting her from the demands of more immediately pressing boys, and of having a like-minded boyfriend who could enjoy the romantic fantasy without having to deal with the day-by-day complexities of an intense relationship. All of the homemakers felt that it would be morally wrong to have sexual intercourse before marriage. They were also afraid of getting pregnant (in a time when birth control was not readily available to single women). Four young women violated this injunction, all with boyfriends they expected to marry. The stories of Vicky Perrelli and Angela Capelli exemplify many themes of the Adolescent Life Structure.
VICKY PERRELLII met Frank when I was 13 and he was 14. He was a good-looking, macho, high school athlete. Right away we started going steady. Once you did that no one else asked you out. He loved being part of my family, and they loved him. He was like a brother to me. When I was 15 he graduated, moved out of state, and visited me every other weekend for the next two years.
Frank put a lot of pressure on me to have sex. I lost my virginity in my senior year. I gave in only because he would go to someone else, and I didn’t want to lose him. What a traumatic experience! It was against my religion, and I was terrified of pregnancy. To me sex wasn’t that important; I never enjoyed it until after we got married. That first time I didn’t know what he was doing until after it was done. I knew he wanted to “do it,” but I had no idea of what was actually involved. It’s really ironic: my daughter is now a senior in high school, and I said to my husband, “Do you remember my senior year of high school?” He smiled—he knew what I meant. I said, “Now, how would you like that to happen to your daughter?” He stopped smiling. I was really angry. I still am, in a way. The fighting about sex went on until we married three years later.
I had no one to talk to about sex. You didn’t talk to your girlfriends because they would think you were horrible. We could never talk about sex in my house. Once I told my mother about a single girl who got pregnant. She said in horror, “Oh, whatever you do, don’t disgrace me like that. If you want to get married out of high school I’ll let you—but don’t disgrace me like that!” I lived with that fear.
As graduation approached I had absolutely no ambition. I just knew I wasn’t ready to get married. My friends were all becoming registered nurses, so I thought I might do that too. Nursing school was great. I didn’t really leave home. I went to a nursing school seven miles from home and was still under the parental wing. The students were like family, and I loved taking care of people.
At 18 I started questioning my relationship with Frank and we broke up. I had never dated anyone else and wanted to try my wings a little bit, but I didn’t get very far. I only got three dates. After six months I called Frank, and we got back together.
Vicky Perrelli’s account indicates that her Adolescent Life Structure did not end at 17, when she graduated from high school. During the initial months of nursing school her life was still centered in family and school, and she had little sense of becoming an adult. Her Early Adult Transition began at 18, when she began questioning her relationship with Frank and wanting to “try my wings.” Her foray into independence collapsed within a few months, and she returned to the fold. This is a fairly common theme among the homemakers. She and her husband-to-be scarcely knew each other. The relationship was formed in the Adolescent Life Structure, when neither had the inner resources nor the external supports to form a more adult relationship. It had a non-intimate, passionless quality. It was so limited that they couldn’t discuss the sexual conflict, let alone reach some understanding and accommodation. Neither mother nor girlfriends were helpful. (Even now she does not mention the possibility that father or boys might have been confidants; this is an obvious example of gender splitting.)
ANGELA CAPELLII met Harry when I was in the eleventh grade and he was in the twelfth. He really impressed me; he was so attractive and a good dresser. My family liked him and considered him a good catch. During my senior year he was in the service, stationed abroad, and we corresponded. He got back just as I turned 18 and graduated. We got engaged, though we hardly knew each other. Then I got a job as a typist in a garment factory where my parents were unskilled workers. I enjoyed the job and being out of school and having a social life with the people I knew at work. Harry was possessive and jealous of my relationships there. He also wanted to have sex before marriage. It was against my religious beliefs but he kept insisting, and I finally gave in, since we were going to get married anyhow.
I knew that the marriage would not work. Finally, I told my parents I wanted to end the engagement. They said, “Don’t be foolish, everything will be fine.” Once a wedding is planned you’re too ashamed to call it off. How can you? The family has put money into it. In the long run it pays to lose the money but you don’t realize it at the time. I was in a daze. Everyone I knew married by 20—so young and foolish. You’re at all your friends’ weddings and all of a sudden you can’t wait to be a bride, too. I married Harry at 19 and took it for granted that I would have a baby right away. I never thought about what it meant to be a mother; I was just going to be one. But I didn’t get pregnant. We fought constantly. He had a bad temper and often hit me. I kept asking “What did I get myself into?”
Several vignettes above show the emergence of the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. The former operated powerfully in all of the homemakers during the period of the Adolescent Life Structure. They saw it as inevitable and, to varying degrees, desirable that they become homemakers in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Only a few young women questioned this destiny, and even they acceded to it after a brief, unsuccessful search for alternatives. Some would argue that the primary sources of these figures are biological, rooted in the genetic programming that prepared women for motherhood. At this point we simply do not know how strongly the genes shape women’s primordial images of motherhood and family life. We do know, however, that a woman’s images of femininity and womanhood are fed by her experiences within her own family and in the wider culture (via education, religion, the mass media, and so forth). From the stories these women tell of their own childhood, the mother also comes through as a primary source. Here are two examples from the homemakers.
KAY RYANThe predominance of the Traditional Homemaker Figure in Kay Ryan’s adult life was described in Chapter 3. Here is a brief excerpt that connects her adult outlook and her childhood experience:
I could never satisfy my mother. In her terms she’s never been loved enough or appreciated enough by anyone in her life. She’s very unfulfilled. My parents divorced when I was 7. Life was hard for my mother and me after my father left. She had to work, and I’d be home alone, and we didn’t have any money. She had all the responsibilities and worries that go with running a whole household all by yourself. I knew what she wanted most was to be married and to be home with me. I learned from her predicament that the man needs to support the family and it’s the woman’s duty to do whatever is required to make the marriage work.
I never wanted to work. I went to college and expected to be married when I graduated—which I did. All my friends went to that local college, too. But not many graduated—they’d quit to get married and start their family. That’s what everyone did then.
VICKY PERRELLIIn my mother’s day there was no divorce. Women just suffered alcoholic abusive husbands who were never home. She was a very traditional woman. She didn’t have a great marriage or a great life, and I feel sorry for her. She always held a job because my father couldn’t earn enough to support the family. They fought a lot. I always wondered where the families were like Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. But my mother never questioned her life. She always said, “The man is the head of the house, and the woman is the heart, and if you think you can live any differently, you have another think coming.” And that’s how she lived her life. Whether she agreed or not, the decisions always came from my father. As a girl I always wanted my independence, but as a good girl in that family you could never speak your own mind.
Unlike Kay Ryan, Vicky Perrelli tells us that the voice of the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure was not the only one she heard as a girl. There was another, contrary voice within her, that of the Anti-Traditional Figure. It urged her to speak her own mind, to question the father’s authority, to seek a different way.