Excerpts Chapters 5 - 8

CHAPTER 5: FASHION: From Glamour to Grunge

The symbol of refinement for women in mid-century was the ubiquitous hat and white gloves. No well-dressed lady would be seen publicly sans these items, and many a comment was made about her particular choice of hat. Although less rigid than the Victorian days, this “perfectly dressed” outfit reflected the button-downed woman of the day, who was ostensibly the perfect wife and mother, who knew which floor wax was best, and could make a great martini.

Germaine Pfister Colvin, Topeka, KS, 1940

I’m so glad the casual look came into fashion and I can be more myself now without worrying what the neighbors will think if I go out to dinner without the obligatory hat and white gloves. It was the uniform of the day back in the ‘50s, and you didn’t want to be seen in public without them. I compared it to the tyranny of neckties that men are enslaved to. The whole get-up was so prissy, and besides that they were hot and sweaty when you had to wear them on a humid summer day in New Jersey. And of course a proper lady had to wear the long elbow-length gloves with anything formal. It was expensive too because naturally they had to be spotless, and that meant constantly washing them until they were ready to fall apart, and having a half-dozen on hand for daily wear.

But I have to acknowledge Jackie Kennedy looked pretty classy when she’d go to a dance in a formal gown and gently pull off those long white gloves. Or, when she’d wear those little pill box hats and short white gloves for daily wear. But for me, that’s a fashion statement I’m glad to be rid of!

- Margaret Coppel, born 1938, New Jersey

I bought my first girdle when I was only sixteen back in 1944. It had some boning and elasticized front panels for extra control of my barely noticeable tummy, and of course it had garters to hold up my stockings. Although it was constricting, it was a big improvement over the corset my mother wore with stays that laced up the back and left her barely able to breathe. After pantyhose came on the market, they soon developed some with an elasticized “control top,” and an all-in-one girdle and panty. Then came bodysuits, and pants with built-in tummy control. Not many women wear girdles anymore, and when you get to be my age you’re thankfully free of all that nonsense.

- Dawn Thomas, department store supervisor, born 1928, Maine

Ad in Good Housekeeping, 1934

I worked as an office clerk in Indianapolis in the early fifties when Metracal™ hit the market. Almost all of us girls immediately went on it. It was really torture because it only lasted about an hour and then you were starving again. We’d sneak in a few crackers here and there, and then go home and eat like a horse at dinner. Of course that defeated the purpose, but we were so convinced that there was something magical about this little can of powdered milk, sugar and soy protein that we stuck to it. Naturally the weight we lost from starving all came back on, but it wasn’t until the eighties that we found out that starving yourself half to death didn’t work for permanent weight loss. Then I went on the all-protein diet, and then the all-fruit diet, then just vegetables and salad, then that Beverly Hills Diet, just pineapples and papaya, and then the all-rice diet, then just eggs and grapefruit, then Weight Watchers, ™ then liquid protein --that one was dangerous-- then Jenny Craig, ™ and finally just broccoli soup. In between I did the shots at the doctor’s office, I heard they came from a pregnant woman’s urine, but they caused me to lose a pound a day, so I was thrilled. But it all came back within a year. Guess what? I now weigh the most I ever have in my life; but now I don’t care!

- Betty Goodwin, retired teletype operator, born 1935, Indian

CHAPTER 6: UNDERSTANDING YOUR MIND and SAVING YOUR SOUL: From Sigmund Freud to Jerry Falwell

PSYCHIATRY

The idea that there is a part of our mind that is “unconscious,” or hidden, was a totally foreign concept until the twentieth century. Great literature, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, alluded to the idea, but it wasn’t until the thirties that it was popularized by Sigmund Freud. Of course we forget some things, but the theory that traumatic incidents were repressed by unknown mechanisms, and could only be brought to light through a strange process known as “psychoanalysis,” was astonishing, and some considered it laughable. Many people, including those in the medical profession, initially scoffed at the idea, and the Church opposed it because it threatened the concept of free will, upon which the idea of committing sin is based.

Freud and His Daughter, Anna in 1913

THE TALKING CURE

During the fifties people who experienced emotional distress and could afford it, found themselves on the psychiatrist’s couch. He (almost always male) was a medical doctor who could prescribe drugs if necessary, and sat behind or beside the patient scribbling notes throughout the session. For all the patient knew, he could have been figuring out his taxes, because there was little feedback. Nevertheless, patients continued to spend a fifty-minute-hour on his couch four or even five times a week, sometimes for several years. For people who were functional and didn’t need hospitalization, but suffered from neuroses, there was no other alternative except the family doctor or local priest, neither of whom were much help in dealing with severe emotional dysfunctions.

The ubiquitous leather couch, once the hallmark of psychoanalysis, is now seldom seen in the psychotherapist’s office, and the famous non-committal “hmmm,” has been replaced by a therapist seated directly across from the “client” and perpetually inquiring: “How do you feel about that?”

In 1957 when I was twenty-seven years old I decided to see a psychiatrist because I was feeling depressed a lot. I realize now the reason was that I had four kids and was stuck in the house all day. The biggest event of the week was when I had to go to the store to get some more diapers. When my husband came home from work he played with the kids for about five minutes, ate his supper almost in silence, showed no interest in hearing about anything I’d done that day, and then retired to the living room with the newspaper. I really couldn’t blame him for not being interested in my day, because I thought it was really boring myself.

I hoped the psychiatrist would help me understand why I wasn’t absolutely delighted to be a wife a mother like my girlfriends appeared to be. I lay down on his leather couch three times a week and just started talking about anything because he didn’t ask me any questions or give me any direction. All he did was grunt “mmhmm,” and mutter an occasional “go on” when I was silent. I never got any feedback from him, and it started to make me paranoid. Each week I was getting more nervous that I wouldn’t have anything to say to him, and he’d think I was wasting his time. I kept wondering: “Does he think I’m crazy?” “Does he like me?” “Does he think I can’t be cured?” I really started feeling hopeless, and also guilty because I was spending a lot of my husband’s hard-earned money. Finally I quit before it made me more neurotic than I already was. I went out and got a part-time job, and started interacting with adults and that helped my self-esteem, and my depression cleared up.

Years later when I was married to my second husband, we went to a marriage and family therapist for couple counseling. The experience was totally different. She sat in a chair in front of us without a desk in between, and discussed our problems with us. She taught us some communication skills, gave us some homework exercises to do, and lots of feedback on how we interacted with each other. It really helped.

- Anita, advertising executive, born 1927, Edmonton, Ontario.

RELIGION

I went to a Methodist church as a child in the twenties. The sermons were very tedious, but they were delivered in colorful language about God’s punishment of eternal hell-fire, where we would be gnashing our teeth and continuously smelling burning flesh. This certainly served to frighten us about the evils of sin. The preacher usually banged on the pulpit a lot as he screamed at us to “Repent Ye Sinners,” and “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ or you will be condemned to eternal damnation.” We knew that God carefully watched every single thing we did, including what we might do under the covers in the dark. So, when our parents weren’t there to see us, God was, which kept our hands out of places where they didn’t belong.

We lived on a farm and, getting everyone dressed in their Sunday best, and piled into a horse and buggy for the long trek to church, was an all-day affair. The whole event actually took an entire weekend because the night before everyone had to have a bath and get their hair washed, and that meant filling up the large metal tub with water heated on the stove. Then we had to have our clothes ironed by the flat-iron that mother kept heated on the stove.

When we arrived we had Sunday school first, then the sermon, followed by hymn singing, Bible reading, and a prayer meeting, then socializing afterward, all of which took the better part of a day. On the way home father would quiz us kids about whatever portions of the Bible we had studied in Sunday school, so one had better pay attention.

Walter and Minnie Worrell in 1903 on their way to church.
Photo from Dayne Shaw, Germantown, OH

What I did like about church was that I got to see other kids and, even though most of us were very shy, we could spend some time bashfully interacting with them while learning more about the Bible. Girls quickly caught my fancy and sent me fantasizing about love and lust, but one had to be very careful not to reveal that they had any impure thoughts. I had plenty of them, and just being able to interact with girls sent me fantasizing about sex until the following Sunday when the cycle began all over again. The only thing I knew about females came from the pictures of underwear I’d seen in the Sears’ catalog, and my father telling me how a girl got pregnant. That was to make sure I never got one in that condition..

When I became a teenager I was allowed to go to the carefully supervised local Methodist dance on Saturday nights where everyone was chaperoned, but the most sinful and devious of males would secrete a bottle of liquor somewhere on their person, and share it in the bathroom stall with their closest friends. If they got caught, they knew right there and then what hell was!

-Ned Henderson, retired railroad train operator, born 1919

EDUCATION

At the beginning of the century only about twenty percent of people completed high school, whereas in 1995 seventy-nine percent of people were high school graduates. In 1918 Missouri became the last state to ratify the “Compulsory School Attendance” law, making it a crime for parents not to send their children to school. Some parents, particularly in rural areas, thought it was more important for their children to help out on the farm, than to get an education.

A Classroom from the ‘40s, with a pot-bellied stove
in the corner and inkwells on every desk.

In 1910 only three percent of adults completed four years of college, almost all were males because women were often denied entrance. In 1940 the U.S. Census listed nearly ten million adults as virtually illiterate! By 1995 twenty-two percent of Americans held a baccalaureate degree, and more women than men were enrolled in college.

My teacher rode to school on a horse, and we kids walked, but my dad would drive us if it were raining. A two-mile trip in the car over unpaved roads took a half hour. By 1924 there were some buses but, if you lived more than two miles from the schoolhouse, you had to walk. There was no kindergarten; grades one-to-eight were combined, so there were children from ages five-to-fourteen in one schoolroom. Our teacher had to get there early to shake down the pot-bellied stove, arrange the kindling, throw in some kerosene and coal, and get the place warm before we arrived. School in those days began at nine o’clock, and let out at four. After teaching about thirty-five pupils by herself all day, and preparing lessons and homework for them, before leaving she had to clean the blackboards and sweep the floors. For all this she was paid thirty-five dollars per month.

- Amy Levitt, retired schoolteacher, born 1919, Salinas, CA

This picture is of grades 1-8 in the one-room Brown Center School
near Janesville, Wisconsin where I went to school in 1951
– Marilyn Johnson, third from right in the front row.

I went to a rural school in Kansas in the forties. It was a one-room schoolhouse with grades one to four on the left, and five to eight on the right. We always started off every morning by bowing our heads and saying the Lord’s Prayer. Usually the kids in the higher grades would help those in the lower ones because the teacher was too busy to monitor all of them. Of course children were well-behaved in those days and they did what the teacher said and didn’t sass her. Teachers were respected by both students and their parents or this system would never have worked. If a kid did talk back to the teacher they would promptly get the strap and be sent home with a note for their parents, which often got them the strap again. Corporal punishment was accepted both at home and in school, but the favorite method was making you stand in the corner with your back to the other students, a humiliating and tedious experience.”

- Richard Woosley, accountant, born 1936, Palm Springs, Ca

CHAPTER 7: HI HO, HI HO, IT’S OFF TO WORK WE GO

In the early 1920s, Freeda Bogad and her new husband boarded a bus in New York to go to Los Angeles, where they heard you could buy a house for practically nothing. Discovering this tale to be untrue, her husband found work at a fruit stand for $1 a day, and Freeda walked downtown to work at a factory that had a hundred women sitting in front of sewing machines. She sewed cotton blouses in a hot, dusty room with windows that wouldn’t open, for $l.50 a week. On Friday nights, after a week of grueling work, she would trudge up five flights of stairs to the family’s one-room apartment and hand over her entire paycheck to her widowed mother. Then she would ask for a nickel to go to a movie, but most of the time the family couldn’t afford it.

At the beginning of the century, the average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year. A competent accountant could expect to earn $2,000 per year, a dentist $2,500 and a veterinarian between $l,500 and $4,000. To put such low wages in perspective, sugar costs four cents a pound, coffee fifteen cents a pound, and you could buy a dozen eggs for only fourteen cents. The majority of people lived on farms but, as a result of the growth in industry, a migration to the cities began. Hired farmhands made about fifty cents an hour, working seven days a week, ten hours a day. Small family farms began disappearing as large corporations moved in, mass-producing food with machines, spraying it with pesticides, and increasing production with chemical fertilizers. The quality of food, and even the taste of some foods, such as tomatoes, deteriorated.

During the depression it was impossible to find a job. My brother and I were both laid off and we would get up at the crack of dawn every morning and go down to the docks, or to any place where we thought there might be a possibility of work, and we’d stand in line for hours, along with hundreds of other hungry people. We hoped for anything we could get, no matter how hard or dirty, or how little it paid. I had a wife and three kids to support in those days, and all we had to give them to eat were watery soup and potatoes. My youngest daughter got bitten by bed bugs because the place we lived in was a flea bag, but it was all we could afford. I used to go around the city collecting bottles that I could turn in for a few pennies, much like the homeless do now. Of course our parents helped out, but they didn’t have much either. It was a terrible time for everyone, and those who couldn’t take it committed suicide.

- Kevin Jameson, retired Teamster, born 1914, Pennsylvania

Men lining up for unemployment benefits in 1938 in San Francisco. 10 million
people were out of work. They received from $6 to $15 per week for 16 weeks.
Dorothea Lange, Photographer. Courtesy Library of Congress

Just before the Depression started, I graduated with a B.A. in engineering, but it took me eleven months to get a job. If I hadn't been able to live at home with my folks, I would have been out on the street. Families took care of each other then, out of necessity. I was happy to get a job that paid me forty cents an hour, with no unemployment, pension or medical benefits. If the boss asked me to work overtime, I did it without complaint and without extra pay because I was grateful to have a job and he knew it. If I complained, he could replace me by the next day, and the new man would be willing to work as many hours as the boss wanted.

- Ralph Edellson, retired electrical engineer, born 1912, Rochester, N.Y.

When I got my first job in 1945 I was hired to work in a typing pool. My application was a single page, and all they wanted to know was where I went to secretarial school, and then I had to take a typing and shorthand test. There were no questions about college, or even high school, because very few women graduated from high school in those days, and almost none went to college. After all, why waste education funds on someone who was only going to get married and have babies? There was a question about my religion, and another asking my nationality. At the bottom of the application it said: “Only girls of good moral character will be employed by this firm.” In those days, if they didn’t like the color of your face, or if you were too fat or too old, they simply didn’t hire you, no reason given, and there was no such thing as suing for discrimination. Married woman often weren’t hired because they were afraid you’d quit as soon as you conceived, which often did happen. If a girl got pregnant, married or not, she was automatically fired. If you really needed your job, you tried to cover it up as long as possible. Of course if you weren’t married, you were fired for being an immoral woman.

- Kay Johnston, retired clerk- typist, born 1926, Grand Rapids, MI

Chapter 8: HEALTH AND MEDICINE:
Doctors Don’t Make House Calls Anymore

IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE?

At the beginning of the century, if a doctor came to the house, he probably was not college educated. Instead, ninety percent of all physicians attended medical schools, many of which were condemned by the government and the press as “substandard.” As time went by the public demanded that doctors have more education, and faith in them began to increase as they became more skilled.

Before the 1960s doctors made house calls in the morning before they went to the office, and then again in the evening on the way home, and they were also available on weekends for emergencies. At the beginning of the century ninety-five percent of all births took place at home, so the doctor visited the home to deliver the baby, often with help from a midwife. Doctors were held in high respect, and people tried not to call them unless it was absolutely necessary, especially at night. When he arrived (and it was always a man), he was treated like royalty, usually offered coffee, cake or cookies, and the housewife cleaned the bathroom and put out her best towels for him to wash his hands. Although doctors lacked examining equipment that was not available in the home, they felt they could learn more by visiting the household environment. Parents felt reassured when he studied their child’s tongue, used his stethoscope to hear her lungs, then took her temperature and pulse while consulting his pocket watch, and pronounced she simply had a mild fever and would be better tomorrow. “If not, bring her down to the office in the morning.” As cities grew larger, taking the time to drive to a patient’s home became increasingly impossible.

People were not very conscious of hygiene in the first half of the century. In public restrooms there were racks that held cloth towels that were pulled down in circular fashion, so that they often got reused if the roll wasn’t immediately replaced. The same bar of soap was used by everyone who frequented the restroom because people weren’t very conscious of how germs were transmitted. Liquid soap eventually replaced the bars, and toilet paper replaced old cut-up newspapers. Now we even have toilet seat covers for the meticulous who don’t want to sit where some stranger recently sat.

In 1925 a doctor came to our elementary school to test everyone for diphtheria because cases had been reported in the town. I remember he put the same stick in everyone’s mouth. Soon after that a dozen children in my class came down with diphtheria. My little sister, Beverly, was diagnosed with it so everyone in the house was quarantined and a yellow sign was put on our door so nobody would come in, and we couldn’t go out. The same thing was done if someone in the house had scarlet fever, another contagious disease of the time. Mom made a separate room in the attic for my sister so she wouldn’t contaminate the rest of us.

Beverly died of diphtheria when she was only seven years old. There was no such thing as immunization then, but an anti-toxin was available as a treatment. It was new and our country doctor wasn’t familiar with it so he didn’t want to try it. Mother gave us sassafras tea to help build our resistance. When my sister was buried all the neighbors came to the graveside, but they wouldn’t get close to the family or hug us, fearing they might get it from us.

Because we didn’t have antibiotics or even an aspirin in those days, mom had a bagfull of remedies for most common illnesses. For a cold she made a fiery mustard plaster and put it on our chest to burn it out. In the morning when it was removed our chest would be beet-red, but the fever had broken and we were on our way to getting well. For rheumatism she had a stinky linament that assaulted one’s nostrils for hours, and “female problems” were helped by Lydia Pinkham’s tonic. If your tummy was upset, you had to down a glass of warm water mixed with bicarbonate of soda. Of course castor oil was a favorite for almost everything, and iodine was used for every cut.”

- Irene Morgenson, Louisville, Kentucky, born 1938

Popeye says: Eat Yer Spinach So You’ll be
Strong and Healthy Like Me!

POLIO: THE TERROR OF SUMMER

Paralytic poliomyelitis was a frightening viral disease that struck tens of thousands of people during the first half of the century. A major epidemic struck America during the twenties. President Roosevelt was stricken in the summer of 1921, during one of the worst outbreaks in history. In New York City nearly ten thousand people were infected, and two thousand of them died. Hysterical families tried to flee the city, but were turned back by police. Many hospitals were so fearful of the contagious nature of polio that they refused to admit patients. Mothers organized the “March of Dimes” to raise money to fight the disease.

Summertime was a time of fear in the forties and fifties because polio once again stalked the neighborhood, crippling and killing children, and everyone knew someone who got it. Mothers were very paranoid about where their children went, and who they associated with, because no one really knew how it was spread or how to prevent it. It was a terrifying scourge which attacked mainly children, and was transmitted like a plague in public places, such as the schoolhouse. Many people died or were partly paralyzed, and some lived for months in Iron Lungs. These were the forerunners of respirators, and were huge, black, ugly, barrel-like machines that compressed and released lungs too weak to breathe for themselves.

LOW TECH HEALTH CARE

When my grandma was 74 years old in 1945, she got really sick and her family doctor came to the house and examined her, and said she’d have to go to the hospital for some tests. My grandma hated hospitals and had never been in one, but she was so sick she reluctantly went. While there she was told she had inoperable cancer and had probably had it for a long time, and so they sent her home to die, without any treatment. My grandpa and my mother took care of her because she got so weak she couldn’t walk around anymore and, about four months later, she died at home. It was really a nice way to die because she didn’t have any tubes in her, and she wasn’t forced to linger long beyond the time her body was ready to go, and she was in her own home surrounded by her family. So she just died peacefully in her sleep without any fuss.

Two days after the funeral my eighty-year-old grandpa, who had also been ill, just didn’t wake up in the morning, so we buried him beside her. We missed them both terribly, but we were grateful that we didn’t have a mountain of medical bills to pay, and we didn’t have our lives interrupted for months, or even years, by having to transport them both in and out of hospitals, and watch them go through the agony of radiation and chemotherapy, and all the other trappings of the medical profession forcing you to stay alive no matter how sick you are. Back then when you were old and had lived a full life, you went quietly when your time came, and you didn’t cling to a miserable life pumped full of poisonous drugs just so you could stay on earth a few more months or years, distressing everyone around you watching you die inch by inch. Maybe it was because we so strongly believed in a heaven back then, which was a much more religious time, that death was easier for us to accept, because we knew that we would be reunited with them again someday.

-Priscilla Flanagan, age seventyish, former bank teller, Oakland. CA

Continue to Chapters 9 - 12