Reading the 1920s in the 1940s

My one meeting with Jane Levey left a vivid memory of intellectual vitality, one which is conveyed by her essay reinterpreting the public lamentations of social crisis in the American family at the end of and immediately following World War II. Social historians of family life have paid attention to the disruptions of the Great Depression and war years, but perhaps overinfluenced by knowing the next chapter, especially the ideological power of Cold War consensus and domestic containment, many have interpreted the 1940s as simply the seedbed of the 1950s. Levey's insightful close reading of two best-selling books from the second half of the 1940s reminds us that profound social changes set in motion during the Great Depression and World War II did not lead in a straightforward line to singular and predictable outcomes. Gender historians are still trying to piece together what happened to "new woman" experimentation with work/family arrangements in the 1940s. ¹ Levey argues that Betty MacDonald's comic account of living off the land in The Egg and I and the Gilbreth children's loving account of scientifically managed family life in Cheaper by the Dozen uncovered "potential fissures" within the ideology of the middle class nuclear family (129) at the same moment that its ideology was being invented anew. The books' striking challenges to conventional family forms nonetheless remain within the parameters of marriage and childbearing, contesting middle-class domesticity rather than breaking out of the framework that feminist poet Adrienne Rich labeled "compulsory heterosexuality" in the 1970s. ²

I am most struck by how the authors' choices to set these "family stories" in the 1920s, invoking literary themes familiarly associated with that decade, enabled them to intervene delicately in public debates over the family in the post-World War II period. The most noticeable postwar social change underway in the 1940s was white people's relocation to the suburbs, resulting in the primacy of the suburban standard and suburban sexual division of labor as a measure of middle-class family life. In contrast, the stories in these books take place in social milieu worlds apart from the postwar suburbs. But MacDonald could rely on readers' familiarity with a wide field of 1920s texts, which made fun of the provincial and rejected the rural, implicitly promoting cosmopolitan modernism by resolutely parodying rural nostalgia. The deliberate terms in which MacDonald formulates her personal housewife aspirations call attention to artifice, marketing hyperbole, and ballyhoo: in a sentence noted by Levey, MacDonald promised to be "a model farm wife, a veritable one man production line, somewhere between a Grant Wood painting, an Old Dutch Cleanser advertisement, and Mrs. Lincoln' s cookbook." ³ Perhaps gesturing to novelist Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, MacDonald's character Mrs. Hicks, a "believing" housewife, is drawn as sterile, deserving of pity and disdain. ⁴ (Her characterization would be very familiar to later readers of MacDonald's 1950s series of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle children's stories, where mothers who confidently raised their children "by the book" were always objects of ridicule.) Her "country" characters, Ma and Pa Kettle, familiar as part of a long line of humor and vaudeville types, are represented as the repositories for working-class familial virtues of mutuality, reciprocity, and interdependence--and as hopelessly backward. Their later independent popular return appearances in film and radio call to mind the popularity of hillbilly musicians who performed "countryness" for the increasing numbers of displaced rural migrants congregating in industrial centers in the 1940s, and those appearances raise the question of how to distinguish between parodying rural and pastoral nostalgia and mocking rural people. The further away readers were from living amid the consequences of these social changes, the less likely they might be to recognize this difference.

Cheaper by the Dozen presents a family where, under the cover of wealth, servants, and the Gilbreth parents' professional work as consultants, the division between work and home is not nearly so sharp...