Roughly Fifty
A graduate of Smith whose two sons are at college and whose daughter is in hoarding school. ANN LEIGHTON is fast approaching that period of unemployment which she feels is the destiny of the American matron. During the war when her husband teas orerseas she ran the household, did the gardening, tended the bank account—an experience which she has recorded in her book, While We Are Absent. At that time, the prospect of being fiftyseemed one of sanctuary and peace. Then at last she would have leisure. Leisure for what?
by ANN LEIGHTON
LET’S see,” said a gallant college contemporary, who might be expected to know exactly “Let’s see — how old are you now— roughly fifty?”
So that is it. At forty-nine, if one is female and American, one begins to be roughly fifty. And so one, presumably, remains until one breaks one’s hip at ninety. An American woman’s age is marked by no convenient milestones. At sixteen, she is sweet ; at forty, fair and fat; and after that, roughly fifty, as it were, forever.
Not that she herself has ever been one to avoid milestones. The mere fact of attaining fifty has long been shimmering in her sight like the towers of Chartres Cathedral to pilgrims across the flat wheat lands. When I arrive at that haven, she has thought, there will be a reawakening, burly promises can be fulfilled. She will be allowed, and even expected, to pick up all the threads left dangling so invitingly in her youth, when she plunged suddenly into domesticity. Free at last in both time and spirit, eager — now her family is raised to make her personal contribution to her country’s way of life, what is not open to her?
When she first happily announced herself as “middle-aged” and found that it is the one thing American women never are, she began to discover the anomalies of her new existence. Even the word matron is denied her. It is a poison word now, like empire and cartel. Matrons rejoice with maids in happy hymns, but edilors write, “Do we have to use that damn word? It’s so stuffy.” So, roughly fifty it is. But, even after these warnings, it comes as a shock to the average American college-bred woman — who has been anticipating her shift from the domestic squirrel wheel to what she still considers “real life—to discover finally that, for her, roughly fifty equals zero.
Perhaps it all started with the complete disappearance of grandmothers — those charming creatures who rustled softly, smelled sweet, wore little caps, and doled out peppermints. The next to begin to disappear was the full-blown, obviously middle-aged woman. Only buds, in various stages of tightness, were allowed. If they began to open out, remedies were found to close them up again, the way florists manage with wax at the base of petals to give even the oldest blooms a fresh, opening air. For the woman who insisted upon looking her age there was not even an appropriate costume — only styles affected by the very young. Forever dirndls — until she broke that hip and got a shawl, from the attic.
The phenomenon of American society discarding its educated middle-aged women as soon as they are free agents has been noted by anthropologists. Even the most casual observers realize that middleaged women in America are, as such, somehow taboo. None of the great industries, which exist solely for and by the little woman who holds the purse strings, can see her for dust after she exceeds the age and mentality of a child bride. As in the dress trade, so in advertising, the American woman leaps straight from the exuberant young shopper to the jolly ancient at the garden gate. Cosmetic manufacturers have lowered their norms from schoolgirls to babies; their only attention to the frankly aging woman is a blue rinse. And on television and radio and in the illustrated magazines the middle-aged woman exists merely as a prop to be cried upon in soap operas by the ever young sufferers, or as a joke in cartoons of self-indulgent, egg-shaped clubwomen baffled by treasurer’s reports. or as a menace, in serious articles where the middle-aged woman is always a Mom. A prop, a joke, a menace. Secretly many may sympathize with the Moms — at least they have discovered a mode of survival.
Everywhere outside America in the world today, the independent middle-aged woman, freed from family responsibilities, is reabsorbed by the national life. True, the Hindus used to burn widows, which was at least a frank admission of the problem. But the British put a stop to it. The British hate waste and have always found middle-aged women useful. And at best it was rather barbaric — so unlike the modern American custom of telling the average middle-aged woman just to go away and amuse herself at anything as long as it has nothing to do with what is really going on. The conception of a hobby as the thing to keep educated women from doing anything useful is entirely new and American.
Denied her bright and final future, the hobbyresist er still resolves that she will not be caught struggling m a “plight.” When that chloroform pad to stop all protests is produced, it is better just, to lie back, breathe deeply, and give up, clasping one’s hobby.
Though, of course, instead of a hobby, there are lots and lots of things for the middle-aged woman to do that, everyone wants her to do. Nothing really paying, except in its own reward, hut that is what she has been working for up to now anyway. Most of the things she is welcome to do are a continuation of all the things she has been doing, only now the field is wider. She can support more than one church, and any number of charities. She can baby-sit to eternity. She can listen all day to quiz programs and wait for her telephone to ring. Who complains that middleaged women have no opportunities!
And, naturally, if she ever got started in anything “real” before marriage, she can try to get back into that again, and very likely she will be let in, on the fringes, sitting at a. reception desk, or keeping files, or hiring others to do what she wants to do herself. It won’t be what she might, have had if she had combined a career with marriage, but it will he as good as the old soldiers in England dressed up as Beefeaters and set to guard the Crown Jewels behind bars in the Tower of London. It will feel rather like that, too.
But if, encouraged by a national crisis and manpower shortages, the middle-aged women who have made a success of their families and would now like to have a try at making a success of something else, actually think they have anything to offer their country beyond knitting, they have to he disabused. Statistically they may he the hardiest, most, intelligent and reliable group that could be drawn upon, with fewer personal commitments and a greater eagerness to be used, but actually the whole idea of using them at all is unAmerican. For them, Hobby is the only watchword.
And what a host of hobbies there are to choose from! There are those timeless ones of collecting things — all the things no one wants until, perhaps, they are ranged out, mile upon mile, on shelves. And there are the hobbies of making things—such unexpected things out of such unlikely materials that it is almost impossible to tell the Before from the After. And there are those purely original and creative hobbies when one does things one never dreamed one could — like children in a progressive school — sculpture and paintings executed in such innocence of design and technique as to look like those lovely things done by savages. And for the really scholarly, there are studies — Russian, for instance — not that they will ever be allowed to use it. The only stipulation about hobbies is that they, like middle-aged women, stay one remove from reality or usefulness. For instance, carving is recommended, but not building a house. Perhaps it is considered too constructive. American society protects its women.
Is that, then, the trouble? American middleaged women do not want to be protected? Cannot feel that hobbies are more than thumb-twaddling? That is simply faulty adaptation and easily dealt with. The woman in such a state of mind can go to a summer school run by her Alma Mater for just such as she, and there she can learn, as they put it, “to come to terms with herself” as no one else seems to want to. And if she feels still at a loss, she can go to an analyst who will dig and delve and come up with something that attracted her as a very young girl and that will be suggested as the interest for the rest of her life. And if she still thinks she could make a contribution to the national life along a line for which she was trained in college— if she cannot realize the total destruction involved in raising a family—then she will have to go to one of those nice sanitariums where she can take up any number of quieting occupations in none of which she ever had any interest at all.
At least, she thinks, among her peers in the sanitarium, we can think. If the new educators of women reduce education to what will be immediately useful after graduation, the sanitariums will be quite dull when those girls reach middle age. At least now the ladies can discuss dear old Proust and Joyce and remember how they resolved to keep ahead of their children int ellectually and never let themselves become a burden or a bore, and even distinguish themselves in some other than domestic ways after the children were grown.
How amusing to think one could be worth anything after devoting oneself to one’s family!
Oblivion? Nonsense. Hobbyland!
Oh, do you like this pattern? I am so glad. I’ve made a thousand . . .