Kimberly Steele

All of my grandparents were solidly middle-class and raising kids in the 50s. One grandmother worked for the sheriff's office, and the other grandmother was a homemaker... but only because she had crippling arthritis and could not work (she'd worked previously as a secretary, to support herself and my young uncle, after her first husband died). She felt lousy about it, too, because all her peers had jobs, and she felt like she should be contributing to the household. Sort of to make up for it, she wound up being the driver for the whole neighborhood's worth of kids-- she had a car and she was available and by golly she was going to make herself useful somehow. One of her sisters had a lifelong career with Bell telephone as a regional manager, having worked her way up from switchboard operator-- that job outlasted both her marriages. Another sister ran a deli with her husband for many years, and a third retired from a long career with a department store, where she made custom drapes (husband ditched her with 2 small kids to support). People now have weird ideas about what the 50s were actually like for women-- maybe it depended on where you lived, but looking at people I know, I get the impression that the two-parent nuclear family with a working husband and SAHM is more the exception than the rule.

The generation of women before that... weren't exactly slouches either. Just off the top of my head, in my great-grands' generation: two aunties who owned and ran an ice-cream parlor, one who played the organ for both the church, and for silent movies, one who ran a small hotel, one who was in charge of payroll at a military base, one career nutritionist, and one too busy running a rural homestead to have a paying job (don't ever tell a farmwife she "doesn't work"!).

So where *did* that housewife stereotype come from, exactly?