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Journal of Women's History 13.3 (2001) 166-168



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Ma and Pa Kettle Go to the AHA

Robert Westbrook


In her fine article, Jane Levey joins a chorus of historians who have sought to complicate not only the picture of women's experience in the two decades after World War II but also the ideological surround of that experience by challenging the conventional view of the period as one simply marked, in both life and thought, by a triumphant and unrivaled celebration of reactionary domesticity. She also lends her voice to those who have sought to characterize American culture generally in the years immediately following the war as particularly unsettled, a "culture of uncertainty," as William Graebner has termed it in his excellent survey of the cultural history of the 1940s. As Graebner notes in his own effort to unite these two themes, "Postwar domesticity was a powerful social and cultural force from which few Americans were completely free. Yet despite its strength, it was also depicted in the 1940s as a fragile frame, as vulnerable and besieged as the cold-war engaged nation itself." 1

Levey closely examines two best-selling postwar memoirs of marriage and family life (both set before 1930): Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I, and Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. Levey reads the first as a witty, ironic, understated assault on domesticity, motherhood, and wifely duty. She reads the second as a telling portrait of a family that complicated prevailing gender roles, blurred boundaries between work and home, and raised questions about the very nature of patriarchal authority, even while asserting it. Both books, she concludes, suggest that in the immediate postwar years "the triumph of the middle-class nuclear family ideal was far from assured" (144).

I find Levey's readings subtle, intriguing, and often persuasive. I would only raise a couple of doubts and reservations. First, although MacDonald was bitterly funny about the shortcomings of her marriage, I find it more difficult than Levey does to discern a general attack on the wife's estate in the book. I am not sure Betty would have found much grounds for complaint had Bob MacDonald dragged her off to a less primitive farm in a less remote region than Cape Flattery, Washington. At the end of the book, when he tells her he has purchased a new ranch nearer to Seattle, one complete with modern conveniences, she reports that "I coasted around the house propelled by visions of linoleum floors, bathtubs, electric stoves and flushing toilets. It seemed to me that from now on life was going to be pure joy." 2 Not to be, of course. But it does suggest that hers was a less adversarial stance than Levey argues.

I would also suggest that Cheaper by the Dozen might be read as a less [End Page 166] adversarial text than Levey contends, less as a brief for new forms of fatherhood than as an unwitting caricature of the ongoing invasion of the family by helping professionals determined to subject it to their expertise. If, as historian Christopher Lasch suggested, the socialization of production by means of scientific management and the socialization of reproduction by means of expert supervision of child rearing were of a piece, then they were no more evidently so than in the Gilbreth household. 3 Father Frank was the iron hand of Taylorization in both workplace and home, while mother Lillian took charge of the softer, psychological side of personnel management, and "in her own way, she got even better results with the family than Dad." 4 The humor of the story lies in the literalness with which the Gilbreths sought to wed worker and child, but as caricature it dramatizes a more subtle loss of parental authority. Frank Gilbreth did not wish so much to redefine the father's role as render it subordinate to, even unnecessary to, a rationalized system of household management designed by experts. The point is obscured because he was himself both...

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