Imagining the Possibilities: Jane Levey's "Rainbow at Midnight"

When I last taught the second half of the American history survey course, I began by emphasizing that the late nineteenth century was a moment of flux and possibility, a moment in which woman suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton could envision a "triple power" of blacks, women, and white workers, labor leader William Sylvis could chart a course toward a cooperative commonwealth, and novelist Edward Bellamy could imagine a socialist utopia and believe that it might come to pass. Jane Levey does something similar for the late 1940s, exploring the flux and possibility of that moment through rich and provocative readings of two of its important cultural documents, The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen. Levey's primary intellectual debt is to George Lipsitz, whose Class and Culture in Cold War America used the general strike and labor upheavals of 1946 to center the period and, in its subtitle, adopted Ernest Tubb's country song "A Rainbow at Midnight" (1946) as a metaphor of promise in an age of uncertainty. ¹ In addition, Lipsitz is well known for advocating analysis of popular culture as a way of getting at the complex possibilities inherent in every historical moment.

This is the territory that Levey stakes out and defends so persuasively. Betty MacDonald was an unhappy woman, alienated from her husband and her domestic chores. Lillian Gilbreth had a career, and her family was self-consciously democratic, rather than patriarchal, in its decision-making. Hence readers of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen had before them these "designs for living"--that is, critiques or models of gender, domestic, and work relations--that opened a space for "imagining" something other than the traditional nuclear family.

The problem with this position is that we know what happened. We know that Sylvis's producer cooperatives were no match for the giant corporations of 1900, the multinational enterprises of 2000, or the overwhelming power of consumer ideology. We know that Stanton's hopes for an alliance of the weak and downtrodden were doomed. We know that the wildcat strikes of 1946 would yield to the mainstream AFL-CIO of 1955, and that organized labor was on the verge of a half-century decline. And we know--less surely, perhaps--that the domestic possibilities of the late 1940s would coalesce and harden by the mid-1950s into a cult of domesticity that reified the "traditional" family.

Is the past always replete with possibilities, waiting to be unearthed and explored, or are some moments more open than others? Levey inclines toward the latter view, emphasizing how the immediate postwar years produced a climate of uncertainty and anxiety that made it possible for people to imagine the family in new ways. Yet she suggests that the openness of the moment was of an oddly limited sort--openness of the imagination, of imagining the family--and she makes no claim that these imaginings produced a new social reality. Indeed, her last sentence implies an understanding that the "middle-class nuclear family ideal" would soon "triumph," or, put differently, that the imaginings of the 1940s can reveal only that the victory of that "family ideal" had not occurred by 1947 or 1948 (144). Reasonable enough. But what does it mean to write about--to emphasize, focus on, and narrate--moments that do not bear fruit? Of course, one could argue, as other historians have, that this moment does produce results, albeit in the next generation. But there is nothing here to suggest that this is Levey's view, or that she is invested in that perspective.

Given what one can glean from this essay about Levey's position, where might her inquiry go from here? Where does imagining the family lead? The answer, I think, is that it leads where all histories of unfulfilled promise lead: to questions about failure rather than success, limits rather than possibilities, and closings rather than...