LYNN MCPHAILThe Early Adult Transition is a cross-era transition, It is the concluding period of the childhood era and, at the same time, the initial period of the early adult era. It also brings about the termination of the Adolescent Life Structure and the initiation of the Entry Life Structure. In the homemaker sample it began at age 17 or 18 and ended at 22 or 23. It lasted four or five years, with a single exception of six years.
I’ll discuss first the developmental tasks of this period, and then explore the major components of the homemakers’ lives.
The basic developmental tasks of all transitional periods are termination, individuation, and initiation (see Chapter 2), although the form taken by these tasks depends upon the place of the particular transition in the life cycle. The character of the Early Adult Transition is shaped by its place on the boundary between childhood and early adulthood. It is important to terminate the Adolescent Life Structure and the relationships with family, peers, school, and other significant parts of the adolescent world. It is important also to become more individuated—to modify the childhood self and move toward an adult self that is more ready to engage with the responsibilities, burdens, and satisfactions of early adulthood. A final task is to initiate and test out new relationships in the adult world, laying the basis for building an Entry Life Structure in the next period.
The Early Adult Transition of the homemakers generally began within a year before or after graduation from high school. Graduation did not in itself cause the developmental shift. Rather, the completion of high school was part of a broad array of social, psychological, and biological changes propelling the girl/woman into adulthood.
At the start of the Early Adult Transition each young woman was living within a life structure centered on her family of origin (or a surrogate). Over its course she moved toward a first adult life structure that was both continuous with and different from the adolescent one. In some cases the change was so great that we would miss the continuity if we didn’t look closely at the actual relationships in each component. In other cases the continuity was so obvious that we might easily overlook the subtle changes. In every case, careful exploration revealed continuity as well as change in the various components and in the overall life structure. The major components of the life structure-in-transition usually included family of origin, home base, education/occupation post high school, love/marriage/family, other relationships, and community.
During the period of the Early Adult Transition there is a growing recognition by the young woman, her family, and the surrounding world that she cannot continue living much longer within the family. She must begin the process of “leaving the nest.”
The completion of high school usually instigated a change in the young woman’s place in the family of origin and thrust her further into the adult world. Most parents now felt that she was getting beyond childhood. It was time for her to start becoming more independent, assuming adult roles and moving from the parental home to a new home base of her own. Parents differed widely in the degree to which they welcomed and dreaded this change. On the one hand, they gained great satisfaction from seeing their “little girl” blossom into young womanhood. They were relieved to be emptying the nest and ending the financial and psychological burdens of child-rearing. On the other hand, parents often wished to continue the old relationship with the daughter as little girl and to maintain the existing form of family life. Her departure meant that they, too, were moving on to something new and uncertain.
The move out of the parental home was generally a mixed blessing for the young woman as well. She usually wished to get out from under parental control and become more independent. Adulthood would, she hoped, bring great benefits, but the benefits were defined mainly as the absence of the things that made adolescence so difficult. She often had opposite feelings as well: “If my parents don’t take care of me, who will?” To the extent that the parental home offered nurturing, protection, and structure, it was hard to give these up when the alternatives were so unclear.
I use the term “home base” to include not only one’s primary place of residence but also its meaning as “home” and the functions it serves in one’s life. A given residence—the parental home, a college dormitory, an apartment with husband or roommates—has different meanings and functions for different women, and for the same woman at different times in her life. In the Adolescent Life Structure our subjects had a home base in the parental home, which provided a center for their lives. During the Early Adult Transition the homemakers, even most of those who went to college or vocational school, remained closely tied to the parental home. Almost all of them had their home base with parents until they married. After marrying, they typically formed an adult home base that was geographically close to the parents and part of the extended family.
It usually takes a young woman five to ten years to depart fully from the parental home and to form her own, independent home base. The relationship of daughter to parents continues (with minor or major changes) throughout her lifetime. Her parents exist both as actual persons in the external world and as figures in her self. The daughter’s developmental task in the Early Adult Transition is to transform the relationship to the family of origin from the childhood pattern to one that is more adult, not cut it off altogether. It is important to diminish certain aspects of the existing relationship; for example, those in which she is the excessively submissive or defiant child in relation to all-controlling parents. It is important also to sustain other aspects and to build in new qualities such as mutual respect between individuals who have separate (though still partially intertwined) lives. The parents, who are now usually in their forties, are involved in changing the character of their own relationships with offspring, spouse, and family, as part of their own development. If the relationships cannot be modified in a way appropriate to the developmental needs of both offspring and parents, they will become increasingly stressful and may in time wither away—a much more widespread phenomenon than is usually recognized.
Modifying the childhood relationship with parents is a major issue in the daughter’s adult development. In the Early Adult Transition she can take, at best, only a small step in this direction. A young woman in these years forms a preliminary, tentative sense of herself as a female adult. She attempts to live as a woman while still feeling in many respects like a little girl. One of her crucial life questions becomes: Do I want to be like my mother and to live as she has, or do I want something different?
The homemakers generally answered this question without much conscious thought or conflict. The internal Traditional Homemaker Figure predominated. The young women saw themselves as homemakers in an ethnic-class-community context much like that of their origins. A little happier than their mothers, perhaps, or more “modern,” but living the same basic pattern. Staying close to the family—especially the mother—implies a whole set of choices with regard to marriage/family, education, work, values, sense of self, and initial adult life structure. It limits a woman’s possibilities for exploration and individuation, but it also promises greater stability, continuity, rootedness in a known community and tradition. Moving away from the family (as the career women usually did) generally leads toward greater independence, involvement in the occupational world, starting a family at a later age, and forming a different kind of Entry Life Structure in her twenties.
The end of high school is a major turning point that places one on the threshold of adulthood. The nature of this threshold is strongly shaped by education. It makes a huge difference in terms of life choices whether a young woman obtains further education and, if she does, what kind. In the homemaker sample, the women who did not go beyond high school were generally expected—by parents, community, and themselves—to take on adult responsibilities soon after leaving high school. Their main options were to get a low-paying, unskilled job and/or to get married and start a family. The homemakers who obtained vocational training or a college degree were not required to marry or to hold a full-time job while they were in school. Instead, they generally lived in the parental home, improved their prospects for a “better” marriage, got some skills and credentials for future work should the need arise, and envisioned an adult life as homemaker.
The young woman’s educational level strongly influenced her course through the Early Adult Transition. The homemakers varied in the amount and kind of education they received after high school, and we can distinguish three groups on this basis.
Five women—Nora Cole, Carol O’Brien, Angela Capelli, Ruth Allen, Lynn McPhail—came from working-class or marginally poor families which had neither the expectation nor the financial means of providing for a daughter once she finished high school. Graduation from high school was considered the end of her childhood; it was now time for her dependence on parents to end. Her chief options were to get married or to take a low-paying, unskilled job and become a self-sufficient adult.
The parents usually allowed her a brief interim phase of several months to a year in which she could continue her financial dependence, perhaps work part-time, and get her bearings. The interim phase was seen by all as a kind of special parental gift: even though she ought to be an independent adult by now, the parents were providing an extra bonus of material and moral support. To live entirely on her own during the interim phase was not morally acceptable in her world and she was unprepared for that degree of independence. Her primary goal was to get married as soon as possible. This would enable her to form a new home base, stop working, and start a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. She was ready to work before marriage and, if necessary, afterward. Work was primarily an external necessity, of no intrinsic value. Still, it might serve various functions for her: to become more competent and independent, to get out from under parental control, to find a more adult peer world and, through that, a husband.
All Group A women married in the Early Adult Transition at age 17 to 21. The decision to marry did not emerge out of a long-term intimate relationship and a clear view of the future. It was based, rather, on strong pressure (external as well as within herself) to stop working and to extricate herself from the family of origin. The home situation was becoming unbearable. Several left home to get away from overt conflict or to prevent a suppressed conflict from erupting. They could not go on living at home as children but could find no way to live there as adults. The parents, usually with mixed feelings, acted increasingly to extrude the young women. Further education was not readily available, nor did they seek it. The only work available was in low-paying service jobs that offered few immediate satisfactions and no chance for advancement. These young women had no reason to expect more: occupation was not a potentially meaningful component of their world.
In short, early marriage was the most viable option available to these young women—the largest subgroup of American women—in the Early Adult Transition. They married before they had done much exploring of the adult world, of themselves as novice adults, of sexuality, of relationships with men in general and their husbands-to-be in particular. Their social environments did almost nothing to facilitate exploration of themselves and the adult world during the Early Adult Transition. They were required to act as responsible adults with little support for becoming psychologically adult. These premature choices complicated their entry into adulthood and left them with much undone growing up to do. It is not easy for anyone, female or male, to attain a reasonably satisfactory balance of dependence and independence by the end of the Early Adult Transition (or often much later).
LYNN MCPHAILI quit school in eleventh grade at 16 because my father got TB and couldn’t work. I went to work for the phone company. I enjoyed working and not going to school. I kept $5 from my paycheck each week and gave the rest to my family. When I was 17 I started going out with girlfriends after work, having a ball, innocent fun, dances, movies. I wasn’t interested then in getting engaged and married.
When I was 18 you just start wanting to get married, I don’t know why. In them days you get out of school, you get a job, now you find somebody and get married and become a Mrs. Somebody. I was having some friction at home with my mother and sister. Sometimes I think I got married so young just to get away from home and that friction, I really do. I got engaged at 18, married at 19, and had my first child at 20.
Five women—Vicky Perrelli, Sara Cushing, Nan Krummel, Elaine Olson, Beth Logan—received one to three years of training for a vocation such as nurse, technician, secretary. They came from working-class or lower-middle-class families of somewhat greater stability, education, and income than those in Group A. The parents actively supported the daughter’s decision to get more schooling. Most of these young women were the first members of their families to go beyond a high school education. The parents hoped that the additional education would contribute to their daughter’s chances for a better life without taking her too far from her origins. Once the training was completed the daughter was officially “adult” and expected to become financially independent or marry. Like the Group A parents, they allowed her a brief interim phase in which to be partially dependent while seeking marriage and/or work.
The young women lived at home or in the supervised dormitory of a nearby school. They remained closely tied to the family of origin and had the continuing guidance of parents. The schooling thus provided a benign time in which to remain at home, mature a little, get some job skills, and seek a husband. The vocational training was clearly not for the purpose of having a long-term career. Rather, it gave her an occupation that would help her obtain a reasonably interesting, remunerative job before marriage and, should the need arise, later.
The tacitly understood timetable called for the young woman to marry and form a Traditional Marriage Enterprise soon after completing her training. Vicky Perrelli was right on schedule: at 20 she graduated from nursing school, married her high school sweetheart, and immediately started a family. Sara Cushing took a little longer: after finishing secretarial school at 18, she lived in the parental home, worked, and married at 22. Both Elaine Olson and Nan Krummel had a courting relationship that went awry; they did not marry until 28 and 25, respectively. Beth Logan completed the interim phase at 19, more quickly than expected: in the middle of her technician training program she got pregnant and married.
VICKY PERRELLIIn the preceding chapter we followed Vicky Perrelli’s turbulent courting relationship with Frank through the period of her Adolescent Life Structure. Let’s continue the story now to her marriage at 20.
I graduated at 20. I didn’t care about a career. I figured it was something I could fall back on if necessary. I couldn’t wait to get married and have a baby. If you weren’t married and didn’t have kids by 21 you were an old maid. You had babies right away because that’s what you got married for. I thought at the time I loved Frank. I know now I wasn’t ready to get married. I had never been independent of somebody, whether it was my parents or my husband. I was always a good girl and did what was expected. I got married at 20 and got pregnant on the honeymoon.
One of these five women, Jenny Abatello, was the first in her working-class family to attend college; she got there largely on her own initiative but with her mother’s strong moral support. The other four women had college-educated, middle-class parents who assumed that their children would go to college and who fostered some degree of academic achievement. They wanted the daughter to have an opportunity, through attending college, to find a husband who would provide the kind of middle-class life that the parents had achieved or aspired to. In their minds, going to college was part of her “growing up” and thus something they had a parental obligation to provide. With the end of college she was officially on her own, except that again there was available an interim phase of parental support while she moved toward marriage or a more independent life.
Kay Ryan and Jenny Abatello went to local colleges and lived in the parental home, an arrangement that kept them close to their origins. Claire Berman went to college in another state and became somewhat more independent; but she had no strong academic or occupational interests, and the college provided little stimulus for change. Wendy Lewis and Emily Swift left home to attend academically excellent colleges that sought to expand their students’ horizons. Wendy Lewis returned to the parental home and a local college after two years (see below), and Emily Swift did not develop occupational goals in college.
All five young women lived on the boundary between family of origin, school, and adult world. Going to college gave them the freedom, if they so chose, to neither marry nor enter the work world (except for occasional or summer jobs) until graduation. Nonetheless, the same basic understanding existed here as in the other two groups: this was the last time in which the parents would provide major support and buffering; when it was over, the daughter would have to get married or take a full-time job and establish her own adult life. The main purpose of the college education was to find a husband of appropriate education and prospects.
WENDY LEWISI was a great achiever in high school. I was going to go to law school. My parents and I always felt I could do anything. I graduated from high school at 17 and went to a first-rate college. I was a good student and enjoyed college. When I was 18 I met my future husband, Hank, who was four years older. He was an unusual person and impressive: played the piano and had a brand-new Porsche. Two weeks after we met he asked me to marry him. I don’t think I was passionately in love with him, but he was a good catch. We got engaged right away. He went to graduate school in my hometown. He really fell in love with my family, and they were crazy about him. When we got engaged he lived with my parents. In my sophomore year I transferred to a local college near home and lived at home with my parents and Hank.
I married at 19, the summer between my sophomore and junior years. Our parents paid for our tuition, and we got a one-bedroom apartment. He worked full-time and went to school nights, and I went to school days and got a job at night. We saw relatively little of each other the first few years of marriage. We were so busy going to school and trying to pay the bills that we sometimes only saw each other in passing. I got pregnant at 19 and had our daughter Gwen at 20. I was still planning to go to law school. Gwen was not an accident. I’d stopped taking birth control. Really, how stupid! I wanted a baby, and we thought we could do everything. I went to school only part-time after that, which was fine. My mother took care of Gwen. The next year the marriage was more difficult. We were both so busy. We had a lot of arguments. I don’t even remember my twenty-first birthday at all; it’s a blur: going to school, working, taking care of the baby.
In my senior year, I was 22, I applied to law school and was accepted. Then I got pregnant again. Neither pregnancy was a “mistake.” We’ve never had a problem with birth control—when we used it, it worked. I just stopped using it. It was one of those half-conscious decisions: I knew what I was doing but I didn’t. I made the decision before I consciously chose family and not law school. I was half-aware of the contradictions in applying to law school and getting pregnant at the same time. My parents were really hot for law school. I didn’t want to disappoint them, and Icouldn’t tell them how I felt. I remember pretending that not going to law school was temporary, though I knew it was permanent. My mother had been taking care of my daughter and insisted that she could handle two children. She had never realized her own career dreams and wanted me to do it. But I was into having children at that point. I still think I made the right decision for me.
At 22 Wendy was a college graduate, the mother of one child and pregnant with another, and she had given up all pretense of wanting a legal career. She was ready to shift her home base from parents to husband and to build an Entry Life Structure around a Traditional Marriage Enterprise.
Graduation from high school had very different meanings in each of the three groups. For the young women in Group A, it marked the end of childhood and a fateful turning point in the life course. If a woman married at around this time, she started to take on the adult roles of wife (with motherhood soon to follow), homemaker, and perhaps jobholder—even though she still felt so much like a girl. For the women in groups B and C, high school graduation was a vivid reminder of things soon to come. The handwriting was on the wall: they had a year or two or four to enjoy their freedom from major responsibility but they had to use this time to prepare themselves for the adult life they would be abruptly thrown into after their next graduation. They were now placed, haphazardly, on the path to matrimony and family.
For men, educational aspirations are generally linked to occupational aspirations. They seek the amount and kind of education required for a specific occupation or a broad category of occupations. For the homemakers, in contrast, educational aspirations were closely linked to marital aspirations. They wanted the amount and kind of education required to marry an “appropriate” man. A traditional function of education for a woman is to enable her to marry a man who, by virtue of his education, occupation, and place in the world, can offer her a life consistent with her own interests and values.
In the traditional scheme of things, a woman who wants to be a member of the educated middle class has to attend an appropriate college: first, in order to associate with eligible young men; and second, in order to acquire the education, skills, and culture required by her future roles as wife, mother, homemaker, and member of the community that she will enter through the marriage.
Most homemakers married men of education and class origins roughly equal to their own. Women who sought only a high school education expected to marry a similarly educated man and to continue living in the working-class or lower-middle-class world in which they grew up. Those who went to college usually wanted to marry a man going into business or professional life, and all but one young woman did just that. They were in college, as several mentioned, chiefly to get the “MRS. Degree.”
The three groups differed also in the support they had for doing the developmental work of the Early Adult Transition. Those in Group A entered this period with relatively the fewest resources and the greatest pressure to assume adult roles and responsibilities. After finishing high school they took unskilled, unrewarding jobs, often lived with parents in a state of overt or latent conflict, and saw marriage as the only viable option for adulthood. All five married soon after high school and four immediately started a family, acquiring the appearance though not the inner experience of being fully adult.
The women in Group B had a longer phase of parental support after high school. They had greater opportunity to form an occupation that would increase their potential income. Yet they, too, gave first priority to marriage/family and made only a minimal commitment to occupation. Three of the young women in this group married at age 19 to 22, soon after the end of their vocational training, and quickly started a family. Elaine Olson and Nan Krummel had courting relationships that didn’t work out; in their early twenties they began building an Entry Life Structure as single, working, marriage-seeking young women.
The young women in Group C had parental support and protection during the four years of college. Wendy Lewis married and started a family while in college but continued to live within the parental nest. Jenny Abatello and Kay Ryan lived sheltered lives based in the parental home; they married at graduation and quickly started a family. To their regret, Emily Swift and Claire Berman were not married at graduation. They then became financially and residentially independent, marrying at 26 and 27.
Along with subgroup differences, there were common themes for the homemaker sample as a whole. All fifteen women went through the Early Adult Transition as an actual or a would-be homemaker. They knew—as a concrete axiomatic given, not an abstract belief—that they would lead family-centered lives built around a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. All of them accepted a timetable calling for marriage as soon as possible once education was complete. Eleven married by age 22, within a few weeks to a few years of their final school graduation. The remaining four married at age 25 to 28. All but two got pregnant within a year of the marriage; both of the others tried but did not become pregnant. The marriages evolved in diverse ways, as we shall see. Seven homemakers had divorced by the time they were interviewed: four in Group A and three in Group B. Of those who did not divorce,several barely weathered severe marital storms in the Early Adult Transition or later.
Love/Marriage/Family is a component of the life structure which has many potential parts, not all of which may be present in a given life structure.
Love relationships ordinarily include marriage as well as other relationships that have romantic, sexual, or courtship aspects. The term “love” is commonly used in characterizing such relationships but is often misleading. There is little or no love in many marriages, courtships, and sexual affairs. And there may be a strongly loving quality in friendships and other relationships that are not sexual or romantic.
I will use the terms “courting” and “matrimonial” interchangeably to refer to those relationships in which marriage was the desired outcome for at least one person in a couple. The term “marriage” is meant to include legal marriage as well as psychological marriage. The latter is a relatively enduring relationship in which the two regard themselves as partners in many respects, sharing a household and/or other joint ventures.
A couple becomes a family when they have a child. The “nuclear family” includes parents and their children. “Family of origin” is the one in which one grew up as a child. “Extended family” includes the nuclear family and relatives who are part of a socially defined kinship system.
Love relationships, marriage, and family are usually interrelated in our thoughts and feelings, if not in actuality, as facets of a single broad pattern. They are often a single though complex component of the life structure. They may also exist separately. Even when they coexist within a single life, each has its own significance and meaning. In each life we must determine the nature of the facets that exist at a given time, how they are interrelated, how they fit within the current life structure, and how they evolve over time. For the homemakers this component was all of a piece in the Early Adult Transition. Having a romantic love relationship was closely linked with getting married, and marriage with starting a family.
During the Early Adult Transition these women knew a variety of males in family, neighborhood, work, school. In reviewing the early adult years, they did not single out their relationships with males as generally negative or problematic. From their actual accounts of various incidents and persons,however, we see that the relationships were for the most part limited, organized around specific activities and lacking in intimacy.
The father was rarely regarded as a valued adviser so far as major life choices were concerned, or a source of great encouragement. It was also rare that daughter and father were totally at odds or in a state of enmity. The daughter generally felt that she loved her father and was in some elemental sense loved by him. She seldom went beyond this opaque view to examine more closely the actual character of the relationship. The father was usually portrayed not as a major character in the life story but as a rather distant, ambiguous figure. The daughter had little sense of him as a person and did not expect to be known in any personal way by him. These bland relationships were ultimately depriving for the young woman. They contributed to her experience of the barriers that separate the genders and that hinder the development of mutually satisfying female/male relationships.
A similar distance was evident in their relationships with brothers. There were no instances of close relationships with brothers in the Early Adult Transition and beyond. Most young women were psychologically distant from their brothers and lived in a different, gender-defined world. A young woman might have the sense of a “family bond” with a brother, but the relationship usually played a minor part in her adult life.
This was also true of relationships with male relatives such as grandfathers, uncles, and cousins. A few women had a special relationship (good and/or bad) with a particular male relative, but for the most part the ties were minimal. Likewise, those who attended school in the Early Adult Transition rarely mentioned a significant friendship or mentoring relationship with a male teacher or other adult.
Most males in the woman’s life during this period were age-peers—men of roughly the same age with whom she worked, went to school, dated, participated in social activities. These relationships had great significance for her evolving life structure. In them she was beginning to experience (or not experience) the possibilities for adult friendship, intimacy, sexuality, exploitation, collaborative work, romantic love, marriage. Partly through her relationships with men, she was forming (or failing to form) a more concrete sense of herself as an adult—friend, lover, student, worker, wife, mother, daughter, member of the community—in the domestic as well as public worlds.
Despite the potential importance of such relationships, they were remarkably limited in number and quality. The young women had contact with men chiefly in school, work, or social situations that strongly hindered the formation of personal ties. They sometimes had “crushes” and other forms of intense romantic attachment, but these were usually private fantasies involving someone who was unavailable or unaware of her feelings. Almost none had a close, enduring, nonromantic friendship with a man during this period (or after). Indeed, virtually the only significant relationships reported are the ones with the man they married and, in some cases, a previous love relationship.
The young women’s stories of life in the Early Adult Transition give powerful evidence, as much by what is absent as by what is said, that women and men traditionally live in largely separate worlds. Even the women who went to co-educational colleges had minimal contact with men beyond seeing them in classes, around campus, and on dates that usually followed an impersonal, ritualized pattern. The young women who got vocational training were typically in segregated “female” schools and occupations. They met men in related occupations, but the status difference between the occupations was a great obstacle to the formation of more personal relationships. The women who worked in this period generally had unskilled “female” jobs or vocations. Gender segregation was (and is) pervasive in the workplace. Young men and women do similar kinds of work in offices, stores, and fast food chains, but women are generally paid less and promoted less. Women often work near men, rarely with men. Informal but strong social barriers separate “the girls” from “the men.”
Included here are all cross-gender relationships that are part of the path to matrimony. We have no standard name for these relationships. No single term adequately encompasses the full range of psychological and social qualities they may involve. They are often called “love relationships.” I shall sometimes use this term—with the recognition that love may be present in many forms or may be entirely absent. Likewise, these relationships may or may not include sexual behavior, passion, emotional intimacy, affection, mutuality, or any other quality commonly thought to be part of romantic love.
Engaging in love relationships is an important though often painful part of adult development. It is also essential to our culturally preferred system of voluntary (rather than arranged) marital choice on the basis of romantic love. If a woman is to marry the man of her own special choice, she needs to explore a variety of woman/man relationships. These relationships enable her to learn what various men are like, what they may offer and want from her, what she may offer and want from them, the myriad ways in which they can love, admire, excite, sustain, and hurt each other. This learning may enable her to combine love and wisdom in choosing a husband with whom,as our cultural ideal has it, she lives happily ever after. The romantic ideal holds a magical promise and a heavy burden: it promises a marriage that is loving and fulfilling for both partners, but it demands great wisdom in choosing a mate and engaging in a marital relationship. We must be able to go beyond “blind” infatuation to a “seeing” love that knows the other and can make a considered judgment about the possibility of having an enduring, fruitful marriage. This task is difficult to fulfill in early adulthood.
The homemakers did remarkably little exploring and had extremely limited relationships with men during the Early Adult Transition. Most of them did some dating and had romantic fantasies about a loving male hero—fantasies nourished more by their private desires and the mass media than by the actualities of their lives. The men they knew were not especially loving or heroic. For the most part, they were politely distant or sexually demanding. Neither partner was ready for a more loving, intimate relationship. Marriage as a concrete way of life was still rather unreal.
Each young woman saw only two possible options once her schooling was completed: to get married or to become a single working woman. She thought of marriage with some mixture of anticipation, anxiety, and confusion. Still, whatever her misgivings, marriage was the preferred choice in her world and in her own mind. If she was not married soon after completing her education, she faced the greatest disaster of all: to “end up an old maid.”
As their schooling came to an end, all fifteen young women felt a tremendous pressure to get married. Every relationship with a man occurred in the shadow of matrimony. A woman got involved in a relationship only when marriage seemed a likely and desired outcome. She could not afford the luxury of letting a relationship develop for some time before considering whether to marry.
Given the paucity of choices, one question was paramount: Is this an available man who meets my minimum requirements for a husband? The minimum requirements had to do with his role in the Traditional Marriage Enterprise—that he be an adequate provider, head of household, and link to a valued community. Some hoped for certain personal qualities: a man who was especially loving, admirable, and exciting; who was gentle or macho, ambitious or “steady,” sexually passionate or restrained. In most cases, however, the relationship was so undeveloped that she hardly knew him as a person, nor he her. Eleven homemakers married between the ages of 17 and 22. Many young women had serious misgivings as they married but either denied them (until later) or decided to settle for what they had. None of the early marriers had had a significant personal relationship with a man other than their husband. Most got married after a courtship of less than a year. The decision to marry was based more on a sense of urgency to be married than on the quality of the relationship.
Two thirds of the entire homemaker sample were aware at the time of their marriage that they were not in love with their husbands:
I fell into like with him. Everyone else was getting engaged and married.
I wasn’t passionately attracted to him, but he seemed nice.
I didn’t fall in love with him but I liked him very much. He was nice to be with and didn’t put any demands on me sexually. He was a really decent guy. I liked his family very much, and my family liked him. Our families and backgrounds were similar. I thought I could have a nice life with him.
SARA CUSHINGAfter graduating from high school at 17, Sara Cushing took a one-year program in secretarial school and maintained her Adolescent Life Structure. At 18 she got a clerical job and made her initial foray into the adult world. She continued to live in the parental home, having few domestic responsibilities and receiving a weekly allowance in return for her paycheck—a system of forced saving managed by her mother. At 20 Sara began thinking seriously about marriage. Her first courtship relationship was with Larry, who was in the Army. She saw him only occasionally but had a special feeling for him and hoped they would marry. When she was 21 he asked that they have a sexual relationship. Morally outraged and disappointed, she stopped seeing him and began to think about living on her own:
With the encouragement of an older girlfriend I found an apartment but my mother said I couldn’t move out. Part of me wanted to go but another part didn’t; girls didn’t live alone before marriage back then. I’d had very overprotective parents and was a very good girl—I never did anything wrong or questioned anything they said.
My biggest fear was being an old maid. I was a bridesmaid in three weddings and was really worried I’d never get married. At 21 I met and began dating Bill, the brother of a girl at work. He was in the Army, stationed in another state. I only saw him weekends and never alone; we always double dated. We got engaged six months later. I got married because I wanted to be married, and I wanted to be taken care of. I saw Bill as a sensitive, caring person who was attracted to me. He was a nice guy but I was not attracted to him. I never had a sense of what I wanted, only what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to live at home anymore, and I didn’t want to be an old maid.
We married when I was 22. The marriage was not good from the beginning. We didn’t know each other. We had never been alone together and had never talked about what each of us wanted in a marriage. I wanted to be a mother and quit my job and stay home. He just wanted to have fun, fun, fun. His mother had always worked full-time, and he wanted me to work, too. He had no ambition. He complained every moment he was home about how much he hated his job. It was horrible! I was unhappy and felt trapped—I had no place to go. I didn’t want to admit to my parents that I had made a mistake. And I’d had such a fear of being an old maid that, no matter how miserable I was, at least I was married. I thought maybe if I had a baby everything would be fine in the marriage. I got pregnant after five months and had my daughter at 23.
In contrast to the eleven early marriers, there were four homemakers—Nan Krummel, Emily Swift, Claire Berman, and Elaine Olson—who did not marry by 22. The absence of matrimony did not stem from a lack of interest. All four had a courting relationship in the Early Adult Transition and were disappointed that it did not result in marriage.
ELAINE OLSONAfter high school Elaine Olson entered a two-year program. She engaged in many social activities but did no one-on-one dating.
My whole life changed at 20, after graduation—I lost 30 pounds and became a working girl and a dating girl, all at the same time. I was a bridesmaid in nine weddings from 20 to 21; all my friends got married at 21 and had a baby at 22. I met John when I was 21. He was a house painter, very tall, dark, handsome, very, very nice. I met him at a singles dance, and the attraction was very fast and very mutual. He was very nice to me. He was my knight in shining armor. I felt like a princess who had met her prince. I was in a whirlwind. It was wonderful. Everyone loved him. He loved my family, called my mother Mom. We dated a year and then John told me he was divorced and had a child! I was crushed! I told my mother but didn’t dare tell my father. She told me I had to end the relationship. But how do you love someone and then just cut it off? But I really didn’t want to get involved in all that, either. He had child support payments. He couldn’t attend the Catholic church because he’d been divorced, and I went to church every Sunday. I started seeing him less and less.
Then my father learned that John was divorced and confronted me and said I couldn’t see him again. I told John we had to end. For six months I pined for him, didn’t date anyone else. You don’t just love someone and stop. It changed in terms of potential for marriage but not feelings. Everyone couldn’t believe I’d broken up with him. “Elaine, how could you ever break up with him? He was such a good person, and he was gorgeous and he was a good dancer and treated you so good.” But you know, still today I can’t imagine marrying a divorced man. For the next few years I dated but nothing serious.
What is it like to marry and start a family in the Early Adult Transition? For both spouses the actual character of the marriage was generally quite different from the anticipated ideal. A great hazard of marriage in the Early Adult Transition is that the relationship is formed, and the initial choice made, while one is still heavily embroiled in the process of separating from the childhood self and world. In getting married, a woman ordinarily moves out of the parental home and begins her official existence as an adult. Marriage in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise often limits her work on the developmental tasks of this period and locks her into a life structure not conducive to her further development as an adult. Although such marriages are not necessarily doomed to failure, they involve vulnerabilities that must in time be dealt with. As we shall see, some couples managed to do so in subsequent periods; a larger number did not, the consequence being divorce or an enduring yet unsatisfying marriage.
Problems arose during the first few years as the Traditional Marriage Enterprise took clearer shape. The division of labor between the spouses, and the splitting of the domestic and public worlds, turned out to be much greater than most of the young women had imagined. They were partners in a family enterprise but the partnership involved a minimum of direct collaboration or even contact. It was as though husband and wife were owner-manager-operators of a small business—the family—with a chronic shortage of help and resources. He performed the “outside” functions required to produce income and keep the family afloat. She in turn did chiefly the “inside” work of child-rearing and household chores. Her outside involvements were mostly with family of origin and neighbors, and were closely tied to her domestic concerns. If she had a paid job, it was mainly out of financial need and did little to bring her into the wider public world.
From the start, then, the spouses were leading relatively parallel unconnected lives. They had little time together, and what time they had was devoted largely to managing the family enterprise—dealing with money, housing, child care, schedules, details of all kinds. Even when the enterprise went well, the marital relationship tended to remain psychologically limited. For the most part they lived in different, barely overlapping worlds and were involved with different persons, groups, and activities. It was hard to find a common ground. Since the gender division was so widespread and “natural” in their world, they had trouble identifying the sources of strain and making a concerted effort to modify them. Many women, moreover, did not regard the lack of psychological connection between them and their husbands as a problem; they sought less from the marital relationship than from the relationships with children, extended family, or others.
Ten of the eleven women who married in the Early Adult Transition got pregnant within a few weeks to a year of marriage (one was already pregnant). Angela Capelli tried but did not conceive. The pregnancies did not stem from clear-cut, conscious decisions by the women or an explicitly discussed decision by the couples. The basic decision was not to use birth control. Some women objected to birth control on moral-religious grounds, but this did not seem to be the only factor, since they overcame the objection when they had as many children as they wanted or could manage. The most powerful reason for not using birth control was an unquestioned assumption that matrimony and motherhood were inexorably linked in the natural order of things. Reflecting on the “choice” to start a family, they found it difficult to identify specific motives or conscious goals:
You get married at 19 or 20 and have a baby right away; I never thought about it then.
I just thought it was God’s will.
We didn’t talk about having a child; we just had sex and figured, “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be”—and it was.
I grew up with the thing that if you didn’t marry and have kids by 21 you were an old maid. Naturally, as soon as you got married you got pregnant—this was why you got married. Having kids was the point of it all.
The linking of matrimony and motherhood is axiomatic in the Traditional Marriage Enterprise: a woman and man join together in order to create a family. Having and raising children are not only her chief functions in the family, they are the justification for her existence. Any other work she does is in addition to, not instead of, the child-rearing. To become an adult is to embark on marriage and motherhood.
Despite the strong urge to have children, the homemakers had very mixed feelings about raising children. They wanted to be good mothers and made sure that their children had adequate food and bodily care. It turned out, however, that motherhood was much more difficult than they had imagined. They were young and poorly equipped for motherhood at the start, and they received little education or support as they went along. By and large, they succeeded in giving their children adequate custodial care—meeting their basic requirements for physical well-being, protection, and control. They did less well in providing psychological care—forming a differentiated relationship, understanding the child as a person in her/his own right, and fostering its psychological development. They did more for and to than with the child.
It was difficult at best—and conditions were generally far from “best”—for a young woman in her teens or early twenties to function with any maturity as a mother when she was still early in the process of separating from her own mother. Being in the maternal position in relation to her baby did not necessarily mean that, in her subjective experience, she was solely or primarily the mother. Indeed, she was often psychologically much more the little girl seeking to be loved than the adult mother in a loving, responsible relation to the child. These feelings were reflected in the young mother’s experience of cuddling her small child, especially in the first two or three years. This was for many mothers a pleasurable and important part of maternal life. The cuddling also allowed the young woman to bask in a bodily contact that filled her with a sense of giving and receiving love. This experience did not involve an intimate sharing between two separate selves. It was more a fusion in which she was both mother and child, the holder and the one being held, filling the other and being filled herself.
SARA CUSHINGI loved cuddling my little girl. It gave me that feeling of being loved and giving love. Mothering is about being fulfilled. She was everything I had dreamed of. It was perfect. I loved cleaning my house and taking care of my little girl, being the perfect mother with the perfect child. I used to sit there for hours waiting for her to wake up so I could cuddle and play with her. It was just me and her. I didn’t need my husband anymore—I finally had somebody to center my life with. She fulfilled the need of being needed, of being able to show your love and feel loved. I wanted the world for her. I wanted us to have more in our life for her, and I resented that my husband didn’t earn enough money to give her that. I felt she was mine and not his; I never let him get really close to her.
Cuddling provided Sara Cushing (and others) an opportunity for re-mothering of self. It helped overcome her sense of loneliness in the marriage. In cuddling the child, she experienced herself as being lovable, fulfilled, “perfect.” Her life now had a purpose. She could attribute her disappointment in her husband primarily to his failure as a father rather than his failure as a husband. Having these satisfactions from the child enabled her to need him less and to tolerate him more. As she realized only later, she had during her twenties very little sense of an adult self and of her own wishes, goals, and responsibilities in the adult world. She resented her husband’s inability to give their daughter “the world” but felt no personal responsibility to see it as their joint concern.
The newlyweds were faced with great burdens as they began to form a household. The shift from couple to family intensified the burdens and the separateness between spouses. Every marriage was under severe strain during the first several years of family life. One source of strain was that matrimony took these young women away from the family of origin and required them to build a home base for which they had primary responsibility. They had to modify their relationships with the family of origin and to establish themselves in the husband’s family. Some became outsiders in a new community, where they were dependent on husbands who provided little companionship. Some experienced the loneliness of great social isolation, others the loneliness of being a newcomer in an uncongenial, often frightening community and extended family. They usually did not form a marital alliance that would enrich their private life and facilitate their entry into a social world.
The young mothers were unprepared for the unending, draining rigors of domestic life. Children and household made unexpectedly heavy demands on them. It was fun to play with the children but oppressive to be continually faced with their neediness. Help was sometimes available from their mothers, relatives, or friends (rarely from husbands). In actuality, however, the young women had remarkably little guidance or assistance in their novitiate as homemakers. The problems were compounded for those who had to hold outside jobs or to make do under conditions of great material scarcity.
The severity of the problems faced by these young couples in their early marriage and family life is suggested by the incidence of divorce and major overt conflict. Of the eleven women who married in the Early Adult Transition, six subsequently divorced. Two divorced at the end of this period, four others in the Age 30 Transition or the late thirties. At the time of the interviewing some of the five intact marriages were in jeopardy (see Chapters 8 and 9).
RUTH ALLENAfter finishing high school at 17, Ruth Allen left her family home in a small Southern town to live with an aunt in Boston.
I wanted to get a job and earn some money. Marriage was not on my mind at all. I hadn’t found Ruth yet. I had lived in one room with three sisters for all those years, and we were so poor. All I wanted was a place of my own and to take care of myself. I knew what my goals were: I wanted to get a job and earn my own money, have an apartment and fix it up my own way. I wanted to get away from home. I wanted freedom from being so poor. I wanted to find out if I could make it on my own. I wanted to know what there was out there that I hadn’t seen yet.
Boston was a huge disappointment: a vast, uncaring, frightening city where the uprooted African-American girl felt utterly lost. She had no job, no friends, no prospects. Within months her life was becoming intolerable but she could not bear to go home in defeat. A few months after her move to Boston, a hometown boy wrote to her and proposed marriage.
Nathan was a small man, not attractive to me. He was ugly. But I felt he would make a good husband, and we could have a good life together. I began to think about it—maybe we could work things out together. He could work, and I could work, and we’d save our money, and then we could buy a home and then start our family. That’s what I really wanted.
We got married the summer before I turned 18. Was I a virgin? You better believe I was a virgin! I had never seen a naked man. I was scared and ready to go home to Mama. What was this man going to do to me? I hadn’t known what to expect with sex, and I was not sexually attracted to him. On our wedding night Nathan grew impatient with me and just forced himself on me. That was traumatic. I got used to sex, it was part of marriage, but I never enjoyed sex with him throughout the marriage.
We moved to Philadelphia into a one-room apartment. The city was huge and strange to me, and I was very isolated because I didn’t know anyone there. That marriage was bad from the start. Nathan was extremely jealous. He said, “No wife of mine is going to work.” Within a month he was beating me and drinking and had a white girlfriend. He lost his job, and we moved into his brother’s apartment. Nathan was a mean, lazy leech. I got pregnant after three months of marriage and had my daughter at 18. All my plans went right down the drain quickly. Then we moved to his mother’s farm in Michigan. We were one mile from the nearest neighbor. We starved. We had beans three times a day, seven days a week. It was horrendous. I couldn’t take the isolation and the poverty. Nathan completely ignored me except for sex. I went into a state of deep depression. When I was pregnant again at 20, Nathan kicked me in the stomach, and I lost the baby.
I found the church, and it saved my life. There would be people and music, and I could forget my life for the few hours I was in church. The only thing I had in my life was the church and my baby. The best thing was breast-feeding her and feeling that cuddling closeness. She was my life and joy. I could talk to her, and even though she was an infant I felt she knew what I was saying, and I didn’t get any back talk from her.
Then I was pregnant again! No way in this world did I want to be pregnant again. I was getting deeper and deeper into a state of depression and just stopped talking. I just sat there gazing at the bare walls and couldn’t deal with what was going on. I felt my husband had taken me away from life and had just thrown me away. He didn’t want to work and wouldn’t let us go on welfare. He said, “I’m the man of the house, and I will take care of my family.” But he didn’t. He was a mean, mean man.
I returned home to live with my mother when I was 21 but Nathan followed me there. We got a place to live and went on welfare. My daughter Hanna was born that year. It was like a fresh start in our life trying to become a family. But then Nathan would get jealous, and all hell would break loose, and he’d beat me in front of the children.
I took a part-time job evenings. I got out and finally began breathing free air again; that’s the way it felt. Once I went to work my children had clothes and never went hungry again. I’ll never forget the day I got my first paycheck. I bought the children clothes. When I got home Nathan demanded the money. Why was I wasting it on the children? That was what I had to put up with.
I got pregnant again, and my son was born when I was 22. But I wasn’t depressed anymore because I was back in my hometown with my family and friends and could go to church whenever I wanted to. Having all the turmoil in my marriage, going to church was very peaceful for me. It was the one place I could go without being screamed at and beaten. I went to church with black eyes and swollen lips. The church was my escape. As long as I was there I knew no one was going to hurt me. I felt safe there. At home there was no peace at all. But I never thought of leaving Nathan.
I kept wondering why this man kept beating on me. I’d never done anything to him. I wanted to be a good wife and a good mother. His clothes were always clean, his house was always clean. His food was always ready, and I wasn’t out running around. He blamed me for his life. He admitted that he wasn’t able to keep a job and take care of his family, but he said it was my fault because I didn’t believe in him. How could anyone believe in anyone like that? He was taking my food stamps and selling them. I had to go to work so my children could have food. He wouldn’t even baby-sit while I went to work evenings; I had to leave the children with a friend. I’d get home from work after midnight, and that’s when all hell would break loose, and he’d start beating on me. The children were terrified of him because all they ever saw was him screaming and beating their mother.
I was beginning to realize that I could work and take care of myself and my children alone. After all those years I finally asked myself, “Ruth, what in the world are you doing? Why are you letting this happen to you?” I began to realize that it wasn’t good for the kids to live in that kind of terror.
When I was 23 I came home from work one night, and the house was a mess, as usual. I went into the kitchen and started boiling water on the stove to wash the dinner dishes. Nathan was sitting on the couch with the TV going full blast. He threw a cup at me, and something snapped in me. The cup whizzed past my head, and the next thing I knew I’d thrown the pot of boiling water on Nathan and was sitting on top of him with a knife at his throat. I told him if he moved an inch I’d kill him, and I would have. I’d had it. All those years of abuse just built up all this anger that finally exploded. I told him if he ever hit me again I’d kill him, and I meant it. I told him I’d taken too much shit off of him. He was burned pretty bad and begged me to help him. I told him the way he was burning then was how I’d been burning for years. I had no pity left for that man. I’d taken it for years, and I wasn’t going to take anymore.
I didn’t have sex with him after that; I didn’t trust him. I gave him money for a bus ticket out of town my next payday, and I haven’t seen him since. I felt good when he left, never missed him. It was just such a relief that he was gone. I felt like a brand-new person. I was a young woman, and I made a new beginning.
A woman makes a place for herself in a community and forms her own social world within it. The community may be the one she grew up in, or another very much like it, or yet another that stands in sharp contrast to her origins. She may devote herself actively to certain aspects of public life or remain focused on home or work.
The eleven young women who married in the Early Adult Transition centered their lives in the family, holding outside jobs only when financially necessary. Their job experience was negative or only minimally satisfying. None made a major investment of self in forming an occupation. They retained strong ties to the family of origin and did little to expand their horizons. Most had few friendships with women, no friendships with men, and no mentoring relationships with either. For Nora Cole and Ruth Allen, religion provided both a sustaining personal experience and a means of participation in the public world.
Six early marriers left the parental home and moved to another community during the Early Adult Transition. They had difficulty in adapting to the new community. The move tended more to separate them from their husbands than to bring them together. They felt isolated and lonely in a strange place.
VICKY PERRELLII married Frank at 20. He worked and lived 300 miles from my home. I didn’t want to move that far away but there was no choice! I think I cried the entire five years we were there. We never used birth control. We figured if it was meant to be, it was meant to be, and it was; I got pregnant on the honeymoon. I had Eric at 21.
I was alone in an apartment while Frank worked long hours. I was isolated, without friends or family. We had no money. I couldn’t handle it. He and I fought constantly, and I demanded that we go visit my parents every weekend. We really didn’t know each other; we had only seen each other every other weekend for all those years. I kept saying to myself, “What did I get married for?” It was just a legal way to have sex. And the sexual relationship was very limited. We had fought all those years about having sex, and then once we got married Frank never seemed that interested anymore.
I hated those years of my life. My son was a colicky baby and cried constantly. I hated him. I hated my life. It was horrible. Nothing had prepared me for any of this. If I hadn’t been Catholic I would have divorced. I talked about divorce with my mother, and she said, “You can’t come home; where will you go?” So I stayed. I was pregnant again at 22 and had Alice at 23.
BETH LOGANI graduated from high school at 18, commuted to a local college, and worked part-time at a department store. I thought I’d try a two-year program and get through as fast as I could. I hated college. I didn’t make any friends and never had any dates. I wasn’t getting very good grades, either. In my first year I met Kevin on a blind date. He was a senior at a local school. He seemed like a very steady kind of guy. We only saw each other weekends. I was not passionately in love with him. We dated a year. I never dated anyone else, just kind of went along, and assumed we would marry. Kevin urged that the relationship become sexual, and I thought, “Why not?—We’re getting married anyway.” We never discussed birth control.
Then Kevin took a job out West and left. I think if I had not gotten pregnant we would have gone our separate ways. I phoned him when I learned I was pregnant, and he said he would marry me. I quit college but that was no problem; I never pictured myself with a career really or living alone and working and taking care of myself. I just assumed you got married and had kids and lived happily ever after [laughs].
We got married when I was 19. We had not seen each other except once in the last six months, and here we were married and pregnant and moving to the West together. Leaving my parents was no problem; I kind of went from being taken care of by my parents to being taken care of by my husband. We lived in a 10 by 12 trailer in an isolated area and didn’t know anyone. Kevin worked long hours and was never home. He ate three meals at work, came home at 8 p.m., was asleep by 9 p.m., and left for work at 5:30 a.m., six days a week. We never fought because we never saw each other or talked to each other. All we did together was have sex, which I found pleasant enough. I kind of went along. There was very little cooking or cleaning to do, so I spent my time watching TV. We were very poor and had no money for anything other than the bare necessities. It was a very, very narrow life but I was happy enough. I felt that Kevin would be doing better and would take better care of me, and that’s all that mattered.
When I was 20 I met Crystal, who was in her late twenties. She had a car and could take me places. She was married but didn’t have children. She was very good for me because she was delighted that I was pregnant. When I was 20 Paul was born. Crystal had a great interest in taking care of the baby, which was very, very good for me because I slept a lot and wasn’t too involved with the baby. When I was 21 Crystal moved out of state, and it was very lonely for me. I decided to have a second child so Paul wouldn’t be an only child, and I got pregnant at 22.
Kevin had no connection to the babies, never held them or played with them. He only commented when they cried and disturbed his sleep. But I thought that was okay—Kevin worked long hours, and taking care of the kids was my job. But I didn’t feel very close to the babies, either. I felt ill at ease with them and seldom played with them. I diapered them, and fed them, and kept them clean but I really didn’t know what to do. Nobody teaches you how to be a good parent. I’d take a look at the baby and really didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know they needed to be held and cuddled. There was a definite lack there. It was ignorance more than anything else. I was a parent but I wasn’t being a parent. I was a parent biologically, I was a parent by virtue of nature, but I wasn’t emotionally a parent.
I look back on those years and it seems amazing. Where was I? I never questioned anything then. I just meandered through all those years without ever thinking about anything. It was like I lived in a fog. I was totally dependent emotionally and financially on my husband. Anything he said I went along with and never questioned any of his decisions. He took care of me, and that’s all that mattered then. The image that comes to my mind of my twenties is like a cocoon. I sat by myself most of the time except for the kids, just kind of wrapped and cushioned against the real world. I sat there and waited for something to happen. I could have sat there a long, long time.
Most of the women had a moderate to severe crisis during the course of this transition. They had a basic sense of being overwhelmed, of having no way to form a minimally good enough life as an adult. For some the crisis involved considerable turmoil and conscious suffering; others were not clearly aware of the extent of their difficulties. When the total mix of external problems and subjective pain is very strong, we speak of a “rock bottom time.” Over half of the homemakers had a rock bottom time in this period.
NORA COLEThe story of Nora Cole’s courtship and marriage at 17 is given in Chapter 4. Her motherhood began a year later.
Being a wife was so new to me. There were things I had never really done and had to get used to: planning and cooking meals, making sure the laundry was done, cleaning, being responsible for the home on a very limited budget. There was never much money. My husband was twenty years older than me. He’d work all day in the factory and come home tired, and I’d want to go out. I had to learn to slow down my pace of life to his.
I grew up real fast, real fast. I had three girls in three years, 18, 19, and 20. It was unbelievably hectic. One baby would be asleep, and I’d be feeding another, and then the first and third would wake up. Walter did not help with the kids. I was totally responsible for all those lives during the day, in the evening, in the middle of the night, seven days a week. It was exhausting. Sometimes they’d be crying, and I’d be crying right along with them. Those were rough years.
My husband was drinking a lot and doing a lot of gambling weekends, and I’d be home alone with the children. There was a lot of loneliness. When he got drunk he got very angry. He was mostly verbally abusive. I’d try to ignore it, and then he’d fall asleep and when he woke he would be fine. When I couldn’t ignore it we’d have screaming battles. He hit me once, but I hit him right back and sent him to the hospital, and he never hit me again.
At about 20 I did leave him and go home with the girls. But I wasn’t happy there. I was an adult, used to having my own home. My parents told me I could stay and get a job and they’d help take care of the children for me. But I talked with my husband and decided to go back.
At 22 I had a son, my fourth child. When he was about three months old I began to feel an emptiness within. It was like there was a huge glass tunnel straight down the center of me that was empty—something missing in my life. It was a huge chamber of emptiness within me. I realized it must be a religious experience I was missing in my life.’ I wanted something true, I wanted something to hold on to that was real that would help me and not just take from me. I needed to be rejuvenated in some way. I just felt the terrors of raising four small children all on my own. I felt that I was expected by society, by my children, by my husband to do it all well. And I was having difficulty surviving, just plain existing was a problem right then. I was going through a lot of changes and conflicts and depression. I was so burdened. I felt if I opened my mouth to talk I’d start screaming and not be able to stop. I was desperate.
I began to explore various religions. I went to a new church with my children. We sat down, and the children started fussing and whining and crying. One of the ladies from the church said, “Can I hold your baby for you?” Before the service was half over I didn’t have any of my children with me. That was the first time something like that had ever happened to me. That church helped me a great deal. They constantly taught us how we could apply our spiritual experiences to our everyday needs, and how our religion would help us through whatever trials we had in our lives. If your husband stays out late, when he comes home don’t argue with him. Make sure his food is cooked and his clothes are washed and ironed. The church helped lessen my burden.
How do we decide when a transitional period in life structure development comes to an end? This judgment cannot be based on a single event, such as leaving the parental home, getting married, graduating, or making a major geographical move. Such events are important markers of a developmental process, but we can see its shape clearly only by placing the event within the larger life course. A given event may reflect the start or the end of a developmental period. It may also occur in the middle of a period and have a different developmental significance. Likewise, we cannot determine when a period ends by examining only one component of the life structure. A transitional period ends when the tasks of terminating, questioning, and exploring have less urgency, and when first priority is given to the task of building a new life structure.
The homemakers completed the Early Adult Transition at age 22 or 23. Where were they in their life structure development at this time? We can distinguish three basic patterns, each with wide individual variations:
(1) Seven women had already formed a provisional structure as homemakers in Traditional Marriage Enterprises with a family of one to four children. As the Early Adult Transition ended, it was evident that this structure was badly flawed. All seven had major problems stemming from early marriage and motherhood and from stressful life circumstances. They were now trying to build an Entry Life Structure that would better support their adult aspirations.
(2) Three women married and had their first child at 22 or 23. The marriage and pregnancy were marker events for the end of the Early Adult Transition and the start of the Entry Life Structure, in which they hoped to build a life structure as homemakers within a Traditional Marriage Enterprise.
(3) Five women were single (four never-married, one divorced) and without children as this period ended. They began forming an Entry Life Structure as single, working, dating, matrimony-seeking young women. As the new period got under way, occupation was a major though not central component of the life structure, and family was the central, unfilled component.
The voice of the Anti-Traditional Figure could barely be heard in the Adolescent Life Structure and the Early Adult Transition, and it produced only a small blip in most women’s trajectory toward a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. It was a little louder in some homemakers, inaudible or absent in others. In every case, however, the struggle and the balance of power between the two internal figures evolved through the successive developmental periods of early adulthood, as we shall see. The same kind of struggle occurred among the career women, though it differed in nature and intensity. In short, both internal figures exist, and develop in diverse ways, in virtually all women. One is not more “natural” or “basic” than the other. We have much to learn about their sources, about the conditions affecting their development, and about the possibilities for long-term change in both.
We will next follow the evolution of the homemakers’ lives through the period of the Entry Life Structure.