Another Cliché Another Strip
Yesterday in For Better or For Worse, we dealt with the standard motherhood cliché line, “What do you do all day?” and now we get another one “Thank God! A grownup!” I remember hearing my wife being told she would experience this, all the time during our early years of parenthood -- how the mom needs to get moments away from the children, so she can have an adult conversation.
As it turned out, there was a veritable plethora of moms' groups and organized playgroups in the area where we lived near Dallas, so I often found my wife was having more adult conversations when she was home with the kids than I was having sitting in a cubicle at work. I didn’t have young children in 1979 so my nearest corresponding recollection would be my own childhood in the 1960s. When I was Michael’s age of 5, I spent my time with a same-aged boy and his older brother who lived in the apartment a few doors down from mine. We were out and about the apartment complex most of the day. My mom, with my younger sister, spent a good part of her day socializing with my friend’s mother and that was how things were.
By the time we finally got into a house, my parents picked a neighbourhood with plenty of kids and plenty of moms. I honestly cannot remember my mother ever complaining for an adult conversation. I know that these kinds of jokes are only funny if they are based on truth, so somewhere, some place, some mom must have had an issue with it --- like a mom who lived in a neighbourhood with no kids, or with homes too far apart for easy visiting. The other possibility is that I was too little to recognize it or mom didn’t complain about it. I don’t know.
However, what it boils down to is that Elly, with Annie Nichols on one side and her kids, and with Connie Poirier on the other side with Lawrence; sequestered herself in the house with her children and after a period of time with this, became desperate for adult conversation, but not so desperate she would call someone herself or go visit either of her neighbours. Hand-sewing is a very portable hobby; so I don't think that should have stopped her.
What I can imagine is that Lynn Johnston, doing the art and story for her comic strip, while taking care of two kids at home, did remove herself from adult contact by the necessity to do her work (substituted for sewing in the strip) without distraction.
As it turned out, there was a veritable plethora of moms' groups and organized playgroups in the area where we lived near Dallas, so I often found my wife was having more adult conversations when she was home with the kids than I was having sitting in a cubicle at work. I didn’t have young children in 1979 so my nearest corresponding recollection would be my own childhood in the 1960s. When I was Michael’s age of 5, I spent my time with a same-aged boy and his older brother who lived in the apartment a few doors down from mine. We were out and about the apartment complex most of the day. My mom, with my younger sister, spent a good part of her day socializing with my friend’s mother and that was how things were.
By the time we finally got into a house, my parents picked a neighbourhood with plenty of kids and plenty of moms. I honestly cannot remember my mother ever complaining for an adult conversation. I know that these kinds of jokes are only funny if they are based on truth, so somewhere, some place, some mom must have had an issue with it --- like a mom who lived in a neighbourhood with no kids, or with homes too far apart for easy visiting. The other possibility is that I was too little to recognize it or mom didn’t complain about it. I don’t know.
However, what it boils down to is that Elly, with Annie Nichols on one side and her kids, and with Connie Poirier on the other side with Lawrence; sequestered herself in the house with her children and after a period of time with this, became desperate for adult conversation, but not so desperate she would call someone herself or go visit either of her neighbours. Hand-sewing is a very portable hobby; so I don't think that should have stopped her.
What I can imagine is that Lynn Johnston, doing the art and story for her comic strip, while taking care of two kids at home, did remove herself from adult contact by the necessity to do her work (substituted for sewing in the strip) without distraction.
posted by howard at 11:29 PM
15 Comments:
So, your premise is that she's interpreting the results of her self-imposed isolation as a universal truth even though it may not have much basis in fact. Given that I've seen other examples of uncommon common knowledge over the last twenty eight and a half years, I'd have to say your point is well proven.
I know my mom had this complaint back in the day (1970s, 1980s). She did not have much time to socialize with the other housewives, nor they with her. My dad had exacting standards. For example, if he came home and found even one toy not put away, he would scream at my mother and ruin the entire evening. The other housewives had somewhat more reasonable husbands, but those husbands were still demanding.
These women were BUSY. Most had 3+ young kids. In our Milborough-type neighborhood, the houses were big. By then, even upper-middle class women did not commonly have housekeeping help. The houses were expected to be immaculate all the time. There was no such thing as "take out" food or frozen dinners. The husbands all expected their wives to make from-scratch meals for dinner every single day. Nice stuff. If Mom made a pan of homemade beefaroni, or other "quick" meal, Dad was not happy. The women cooked stuff like coq au vin as a matter of course for nightly dinners. My father thought the neighbor husband was nuts for taking his family out to eat once a week. It was considered odd.
Their husbands often gave them "assignments" to do related to their jobs. Like, my mother had to throw dinner parties and buy gifts for secretaries, that sort of thing. Not to mention the responsibility the women had for pressing dress shirts and handkerchiefs, getting suits to the cleaners, making breakfast to eat on the train, sometimes packing lunches for the husband, etc. There were no Wal-Marts then, either. I remember being dragged from the supermarket to the butcher to the bakery to the garden supply store to the hardware store, etc.
The result: Mom and her contemporaries were constantly chained to the house or running errands. My mother and the neighbor lady were happy if they got to talk for 10 minutes a day. If their husbands found out they were spending a large portion of their days just socializing with other housewives, they were not happy, because it meant that things they wanted were not getting done. My mother NEVER played with us when we were kids. She didn't have time. Nor did the other mothers.
Today, I think the problem is slightly different. I know SAHMs who socialize with other moms, but who complain that all they ever talk about are "mom topics" and that they feel stifled because they miss having other interests. Actually, one of my working friends complains that, after all their friends had kids, they became very boring and one-dimensional to socialize with. Since she's a schoolteacher, work is not really a place to talk about non-kid stuff.
Forgot to add something related to the strip:
My mother was expected to sew a lot of her own, everyday clothes, and a lot of our baby clothes as well. This was also standard in our neighborhood. Mom has some pics of a neighborhood garden party at home. All the women are wearing dresses and skirts that they sewed themselves. One woman is in an obviously store-bought dress. The men in the neighborhood considered her a spendthrift and her husband to be a fool for allowing that sort of thing.
Being a housewife in those days was WAY more inconvenient than it is now. It was significantly cheaper to do things by hand/from scratch, and economy was one of a housewife's chief jobs. Now, we have really cheap convenience items everywhere. Life is totally different now.
qnjones--well, I'm kind of flabbergasted at your description of SAHMs when you were little.
I guess there were a lot of advantages to being lower middle-class! My mom worked and managed to keep the house, cooking, washing, etc. under control. Course it was a pretty small house for a family of four. And my mom was a social butterfly; she added selling Avon to her activities, just because she loved visiting and could make money doing it!
However, your family does sound a little like my husband's family. They were upper middle class also, plus locked in sterotypical roles. And my mother-in-law totally allowed her husband to treat her like a servant, basically so she would have someone to support her and not have to work.
Guess this is the model Lynn Johnston based the Patterson on also.
qnjones,
Like debjyn, I am going to have to plead the advantages of being lower middle class.
For example, if he came home and found even one toy not put away, he would scream at my mother and ruin the entire evening. The other housewives had somewhat more reasonable husbands, but those husbands were still demanding.
Holy cow,qnjones! My mom was a bit of a slob, and would never have been able to meet that requirement. I remember my dad used to get upset when she didn’t allow enough time to cook potatoes and then she would serve them basically still pretty hard. My dad liked the living room by the front door to be clean. That was about it when it came to demanding.
If Mom made a pan of homemade beefaroni, or other "quick" meal, Dad was not happy. The women cooked stuff like coq au vin as a matter of course for nightly dinners.
Holy cow,qnjones. Coq au vin? My mom was not known for her great cooking. She had about 7-8 recipes she did reasonably well with, and we had them over and over again. Spaghetti, meat loaf, chicken and dumplings, and things like that.
My father thought the neighbor husband was nuts for taking his family out to eat once a week.
Yes. Eating out was for special occasions like Mother’s Day. However, given that the town in which we lived had only 3 restaurants and 2 of them were fast food and 1 of them was a greasy diner, this was not that surprising. You had to travel to eat out any place reasonably nice.
Like, my mother had to throw dinner parties and buy gifts for secretaries, that sort of thing.
My mom did have to throw the occasional dinner party.
Not to mention the responsibility the women had for pressing dress shirts and handkerchiefs, getting suits to the cleaners, making breakfast to eat on the train, sometimes packing lunches for the husband, etc.
With my mom, suits to the cleaners would have been on her list. Dad did his own shirt pressing thanks to his having worked in a men’s clothing store in his youth, he was extremely particular about his clothes ironing (a habit I picked up, so I iron my own clothes). Breakfast in the morning (not on a train) before anyone left. No lunches (dad was a university professor and I think he ate for free at their cafeteria).
My mother NEVER played with us when we were kids.
Past a certain age, my mother didn’t either. That’s what the neighbourhood kids were for.
I know SAHMs who socialize with other moms, but who complain that all they ever talk about are "mom topics" and that they feel stifled because they miss having other interests.
That is true. My wife was/is the same way. It was very difficult to get her off kid topics, because she and the other wives were constantly sharing information about this-and-that having to do with kids. Of course, with my boy, a lot of conversation has to do with the various aspects of Asperger’s Syndrome, and I understand that focus.
My mother was expected to sew a lot of her own, everyday clothes, and a lot of our baby clothes as well.
My mom sewed too, but she was not very good at it. She made a number of costumes for shows I was in. The bulk of our clothing until my teenaged years was hand-me-downs from other parents she knew. My sisters delight in looking at pictures of themselves in their younger years, where clothes they are wearing are strikingly ugly, even by the standards of the day.
debjyn
And my mom was a social butterfly; she added selling Avon to her activities, just because she loved visiting and could make money doing it!
I remember Avon. With my mom, after the kids were all in school, she became a kindergarten teacher for a few years, until a job opened up at the local high school to be a high school choir director.
Given your description and qnjones, upper middle class is the way it seems for the model Lynn Johnston used. However, given the backgrounds of the characters, with John coming from a dad who was a miner, and Elly coming from a dad who worked in a department store; I am not sure why they would have that standard, unless they were trying to adjust to the standards of the people around them. Anne Nichols is portrayed as mother supreme, but also dealing with her husband Steve turning the house into a scrapyard. Connie was a single mom for much of the strip. So, I don’t know where it came from.
I haven't the vaguest notion why John and Elly act like they're upper middle class when they have Kraft Dinner and meatloaf tastes either. There's keeping up with the Joneses (I apologize to qnjones) and then there's being stupid. Your Humble Author thinks the Pattersons fall nicely into the latter category.
I haven't the vaguest notion why John and Elly act like they're upper middle class when they have Kraft Dinner and meatloaf tastes either.
I suppose it would make sense if Lynn was drawing from her own personal experience. They were living at Lynn Lake at the time, and Lynn made it no secret that she did not like it there. In a CBC interview with her while she was living there, she made a remark about how sometimes she would have troubles in conversations because she was distracted by the idea of turning parts of their conversation into one of her comic strips. I can see Lynn Lake as a meatloaf kind of town, and Lynn Johnston herself as someone who did not spend a lot of time visiting with other parents. John Patterson's upper middle class expectations of Elly, may have come from Rod Johnston's expectations due to his position in the town as the dentist. I don't know that much about Rod's background to know how he was raised.
My father worked as a laborer, so our economic situation was significantly different from Howard’s. We never ate out, traveled, or went to the movies as a family, but the family dynamics was similar. I knew my parents loved us and also loved each other, despite the fact that they yelled at us and argued with each other.
Most importantly, I truly believed that I had the best parents in the world. I considered (and still do!) my father extremely intelligent even though his formal education ended in the 9th grade. My mother completed one year of college and then got married. She worked part-time as a secretary and did not aspire to do anything else.
Anon NYC
qnjones did bring up one great memory - going to all the different stores. I used to love going to the butcher shop, the bakery, and then the regular grocery store, because we usually got some kind of little treat at each one. The butcher always gave us a slice of cheese I think and my mom would buy us a donut to split (and to probably shut us up for 5 minutes).
My dad was a CPA and always seemed to work very late. We never ate dinner with him, although now that I think about it, he probably got home around 7. Today we eat dinner every night at 7 and I don't think that is late.
I guess we were upper middle, but I don't seem to remember alot of societal pressures like the others are talking about, but then I was born in 1964, maybe by 1970 when I can really remember from those had started to recede.
Patti
I doubt we would have ever learned all that much about Rod's background even if he hadn't strayed. It seems to me that Lynn probably didn't think it was all that important. What always got my curiosity aroused is wondering what the people of Lynn Lake thought of Lynn herself. It would be interesting to poll a selection of neighboring housewives at random for their opinion of her.
Patti,
Actually qnjones is more than 10 years younger than both of us and her time frame of reference for growing up is very close to that of the For Better or For Worse reprints.
I was born in 1962. I wish I had lived in a town that had a butcher shop and a bakery. Those sound neat to me too. The nearest, large town had a cheese shop, which I loved, but we visited very rarely. Growing up where I did, we had the choice of the supermarket, or the old downtown grocery store, which was eventually driven out of business by the supermarket, because it couldn’t keep up with the variety of choices, the price, or the ability to keep fresh food fresh. We went to the supermarket.
dreadedcandiru2,
What always got my curiosity aroused is wondering what the people of Lynn Lake thought of Lynn herself. It would be interesting to poll a selection of neighboring housewives at random for their opinion of her.
Considering the things Lynn has said about living in Lynn Lake, now that she is no longer there, I expect it would be difficult to get an unbiased answer for such a poll.
When you consider that she was known as the dentist's crazy wife at the time, I get the feeling that even then her presence would be an unwelcome one. There's a thing we, like the Australians, call the Tall Poppy Syndrome. People are percieved as being overly arrogant (a characterization Lynn has said she'd had to defend herself against most of her career) about their success are seldom loved in working-class towns and I doubt she was an exception. Of course, I could just as easily be wrong.
To be clear: I was born in 1977 in a very upper-middle class professional suburb of New York City. So my memories begin around the time that FOOB began, and are bolstered by talking to my mom.
howard:
However, given the backgrounds of the characters, with John coming from a dad who was a miner, and Elly coming from a dad who worked in a department store; I am not sure why they would have that standard, unless they were trying to adjust to the standards of the people around them.
Hah! My parents were the children of tenant farmers. Most of the other adults in "our Milborough" had also climbed up from working class backgrounds. It was not where you came from. It was trying to fit into the professional upper-middle class ideal. I find that lawyers, doctors, dentists, and MBAs have a very specific subculture that is very much dedicated to the importance of keeping up appearances, even today.
All those people became self-made millionaires, and in the early years, the ability to save was based on the housewife slaving away to economize. That was why thriftiness, like sewing your own clothes, laundering your own dress shirts, and cooking your own from-scratch meals, was so valued amongst the husbands.
The women did not get much money to buy frivolous things for themselves. Debjyn mentioned Avon. We didn't have Avon, but one woman (viewed as a tad low-class) sold Mary Kay. I remember the crap Dad gave Mom just for going to one Mary Kay party. He was angry that she went out at night and only cooked a fast meal. He was mad to have to stay home alone with the kids. He was mad she spent money on makeup (even though he expected her to look nice at all work-related social functions, and Wall Street firms had at least 1 per month that included wives). And while my dad is an ass, he was not unusual in this regard in our neighborhood. The upwardly mobile men wanted their wives to focus on their duties at all times.
There were no slob housewives in my parents' set. Everything was always immaculate. The women who did not keep perfect houses were looked down on as low class. Even a normal amount of clutter was considered shameful. A messy home was thought to reflect badly on a professional's ability to manage. (Same thing went with messy personal finances.)
Most of the social events that my parents and our neighbors went to had to do with work. Our neighbors belonged to a country club, but when the mom took the kids for lessons or to swim, she was expected to network with the other wives. Even kids had to do it. In fourth grade, I was enrolled in ballroom dancing classes because that is what the children of "the right sort" did and my parents got to meet the parents of the other kids in the class via that connection.
Interestingly, of all the married couples in "our Milborough" who were contemporary with my parents, nearly all but my parents wound up divorced when the kids flew the nest--and my parents are discussing it. All that work and social climbing and pressure made everyone downright miserable. The men commuted 3 hours a day, worked 12 hour days, and came home stressed out and took it out on their frazzled wives. The spouses rarely had any kind of close, personal relationship. The ones who were slightly older than my parents' early baby boomer friends, with older kids, were more relaxed, but I think a lot of them came from money. (Ours was an old-money town that turned into a place that was mostly populated by climbers.) My parents and their contemporaries were climbing the ladder. It did not leave time to nurture a marriage.
I can imagine that John and Elly and Lynn and Rod faced similar issues.
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