If you think that “Ladies in Aprons” will do just as well as “Dames à Tablier” — well never mind. Consider it a branding issue. My thoughts about women lately have run under the rubric “Dames.” This is “dames” as in grandes dames, not as in Guys & Dolls. The women I’ve been thinking about were born into prosperity (or arguable dreams of it), and nothing was expected of them beyond marriage and children. But that was not enough for them, and often they needed to help out with the family finances. Diana Vreeland is my number-one dame, but Julia Child (who always regretted the lack of children in her marriage) comes close. I wonder if they ever met!

The phrase dames à tablier came to me yesterday, while I was mulling over Julia Klein’s piece about Betty Friedan and the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique. Klein tells us that the book’s origins lay in a survey that Friedan conducted of her fellow Smith ’42 classmates, in the late Fifties.

Most had since married and had children, and few worked outside the home. In interviews, Friedan discovered evidence of “the problem that has no name,” which manifested itself in discontent, depression and physical illness. She would ultimately define that problem as “simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities.” (Her focus, as critics have noted, was on middle-class women who could afford to renounce paid work, not the millions in mostly menial jobs outside the home.) Feminism, for Friedan, was fundamentally humanism, seen through a psychological lens: a question of growth, maturation and identity.

Something about this passage suggested a name for the problem. It was confirmed by a quotation from Mystique:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”

The nameless problem was the servant problem — and we still haven’t addressed it.

Betty Friedan’s grandmothers were perhaps not very affluent women, but surely most of her classmates’ very much were. Consider the difference between such a grandmother, circa 1900, and her granddaughter, circa 1955. Both women would have had similar ideas about domestic hygiene, meals, and, given changes in style, décor. (Both would have been horrified by stained upholstery; both would have insisted on clean-looking draperies in the windows.) Both would be involuntary participants in the display of bourgeois respectability, giving dinner parties and volunteering for charity work. But the granddaughter, unless she had married into great wealth, would have had, at best, the help of a “cleaning lady,” a working-class servant who might show up every day or just one day a week. Our alumna would not employ a cook. She would not have a personal maid to manage her wardrobe and to help her to dress (essential for ladies of 1900). She would not have a flock of nannies to shepherd her children from point to point. No, our Smith ’42 housewife, in 1955, aided by a car and a batterie of domestic appliances, would have found herself up to her eyeballs in housework. And — here’s the clincher — she would have done it all in a nice dress.

Somewhere around 1980, everything changed. I would peg it, somewhat whimsically, to the introduction of the food processor. The food processor made it possible to reproduce a number of hitherto unthinkably difficult dishes into everyday cuisine. It also made preparing them tidy and kind of fun. The “California kitchen,” now ubiquitous in new construction, brought the dinner guests into the kitchen, because, by 1980, it had been established that well-run kitchens are neat, clean, and convenient spaces — nothing to be ashamed of. Guests could be handed a glass of wine and asked to tear apart a head of lettuce. The making of food became part of the meal. Younger people who grew up in this environment cannot imagine how unthinkable it was in 1955, when a proper dinner party entailed a host of jobs — pressing table linens and polishing silver, just to name the two least popular — that had once been seen to by servants, and seen to well out of sight. It took ladies in aprons — my dames à tablier — about thirty years, not to take their aprons off, but to change what they were wearing underneath, and to simplify what they were expected to do. In the course of this time, feminism was put into practice on a front that few of even the most visionary suffragettes would have foreseen in 1900: well brought-up housewives had freed themselves from the postwar obligation to maintain prewar standards of living. They no longer did the work of servants.

But as any good butler will tell you, scrubbing is the easy part. Women are still saddled with domestic management problems that nobody seems to be able to talk about. Men diddle with their project management apps, but the laundry and dry cleaning remain obdurately inflexible. Cars and houses are full-time maintenance headaches. Untended bathrooms go swampy with the speed of a fatal fever. Dishwashers must be emptied and refrigerators restocked. Don’t get me started on lawn care! If feminists eliminated much of the “menial” work that servants had done for their grandmothers, they stalled at the next step, and that’s where we still are. And while the man in the house can never help out quite enough, I think that most women (my wife excluded) would be very unhappy to have a man, even their beloved husband, running their homes for real.

There remains much to be learned.

***

Must run, but I want to say how much I’m enjoying Diana Athill’s Somewhere Toward the End. I feel the oddest contradiction: beyond polite conversation, I don’t think that she and I would get on very well; we like different things. But our ideas about “life” are quite similar. I’m thinking especially of her modest, humane, but rock-ribbed atheism, which she writes about in Chapter 4 so beautifully that I’m going to hunt down my Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins books and give them the heave-ho. There is no need to say more than what Athill has written.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 26th, 2013 at 11:28 am.