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Hard to Believe This Happened 12/1/2012 7:48:40 AM
Some of us seem to want to move women back to the days when we were precious jewels owned and controlled by daddy or hubby. Better think twice. It wasn't fun. Hard to Believe This Happened
When my first husband went off to war, I returned to the University to work on my Master’s, and moved into a rooming house with other grad students. My next door neighbor was a violinist named Peggy. Since my husband was a pianist, I felt a natural affinity for this musician and we quickly became friends. She confided to me that she’d come from Kansas to study, not so much because she valued the music department at the University of Michigan as that she wanted to put distance between herself and her family. It seemed her mother had picked out for her a young man from a wealthy family, and pressured her hard toward marriage. Peggy resisted because she didn’t love the man and because she truly hoped she could become a good enough violinist to play in an orchestra and perhaps teach in a school or privately. In short, she wanted to earn her own living, sparing her from having to marry at all. She felt no interest in any part of married life; she had no longing for children, no hunger for the white picket fence and cozy fireside. Quite the contrary, she dreamed of going to a big city, having her own apartment, and being an independent career woman. Since I planned to accompany my musician husband to New York after the war, Peggy and I shared a dream of living in Greenwich Village, in a world of music and the arts. We vowed we’d be neighbors.
There were three of us, Peggy the musician, a younger man with a talent for writing, and me, with hopefully the same. All of us had just barely enough money to allow us to stay in school. Peggy was living on a small legacy from a grandmother, while I was working part time in literary research at the University. The young man had come from a small Michigan town which had somehow neglected to teach grammar, and as he had to learn quickly in order to pass freshman English, he’d asked me to help him out. I loved doing that sort of thing, and Peggy felt she had shortcomings in that area and asked to sit in on our sessions. The three of us became great friends and companions, with a remarkable absence of sexual tension—one of the few times in my life when I can truly say that no one had cause for jealousy nor any reason to feel left out. We enjoyed each other’s company and we awaited war’s end.
The end came, the warriors came home, and Lewis liked my two friends. We made plans for a weekend trip to the beach at Grand Haven, the four of us. It was May, a beautiful month in Michigan, and we were excited at the prospect of hiking on the dunes. But on the day we were to leave, I found Peggy sitting beside her packed suitcase, holding a letter and weeping. It seemed her mother had written forbidding her to take the trip with a man not her designated fiancé. She turned a tear-streaked face to me and announced, “I can’t go, I can’t go. Mother won’t allow it.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Peggy, the graduate student, was twenty three years old. I responded without even thinking. “She can’t do that! You’re of age, you’re a grown woman! She has no jurisdiction over you.”
Peggy stared at me as if that thought had never entered her head. She marveled. “Of course. You’re right. The decision is mine.”
She picked up her suitcase and joined the group. We caught a bus for the trip across the state. But Peggy felt uneasy. When we arrived at Lake Michigan, she insisted that we rent a hotel room with an alcove where she might place a cot, so that she could assure her mother she was properly chaperoned and never alone with the young man in the party. Lewis wasn’t too happy about sharing our room, but with Peggy in a dither, he agreed. Peggy wrote her mother a postcard telling her she’d taken the trip but had made sure of chaperonage.
It was a fun trip but not a fun homecoming. Peggy’s mother arrived from Kansas the night of our return. We never knew anything about it. In the morning her room door stood open, and when I checked, I saw that the closet was empty, as was the bureau top. The violin no longer rested on the end table. The landlady was running the Bissell carpet cleaner in a bare room. I stared in astonishment at the emptiness and asked where Peggy was.
“Gone home to Kansas,” the landlady said. “Her mother arrived in the middle of the night and made her pack her things at once. The pair of them woke me up around five to turn in the key.” When questioned further, the landlady could only add, “The mother was furious and kept talking about some awful older woman who’d influenced Peggy away from her family and encouraged her to travel with a single man not her fiancé. It seemed she had to be rescued from that evil person immediately.”
I was blown away. I could hardly believe, even then, that Peggy, who’d been celebrating her newfound adulthood, would docilely conform to her mother’s demands and return to Kansas. I still have trouble believing it, even though I lived through those times, even though I recall how young women were so often viewed as objects to be protected, precious jewels owned by their parents, with no mind and no rights of their own—and how they feared to fight against that image.
I never saw Peggy nor heard from her again. Obviously, she was forbidden to communicate with the “evil woman” in her life. No doubt a marriage was quickly arranged, and she took on the housewife role she’d resisted so valiantly.
That was only one of the many tragedies among my women friends in those days, when so many of us were unable to escape the role society had designed for us. When I hear of women supporting and even voting for those who would curtail our current rights, I wish I could take them by the hand and lead them back to those awful times, to let them experience the terror of not trusting yourself, of not feeling competent to shape your own future, of crawling back in fear and submission to those who would plan your life as if you were a child without a talent of your own.
It wasn’t fun. Believe me.
