The majority of kids I knew grew up in so-called “traditional families,” with the men going to work each day, and the mothers staying home. Not all women, however, found full-time homemaking an ideal way of life.
In my family, yes, the men left for work at 8 a.m. and returned home at 5:30 p.m. However, my mother also worked because she had no interest in clubs, cards, or sewing circles. From my junior high school years through the end of college, my mother worked with an Oak Park internist.
The belief that mothers should not work outside of the home unless the family had economic problems was promoted by Dr. Benjamin Spock, a leading child care expert.
Spock advised mothers to devote themselves full-time to raising their children, and any distraction from that task, such as a job or hobby, he said, could damage a child.
When I was in school, my grandmother was at home, and I worked as the maintenance guy at our home, and when I reached sixteen, I worked after school as the stock boy at Cannon’s Book Store at Lake Street and Oak Park Avenue, so I never felt lonely or forlorn.
I remember, too, that mass media reinforced traditional family roles. Magazines, movies, and advertisements portrayed the ideal family as traditional. The homemaker’s role included a number of jobs like teacher, doctor, cook, adviser, housekeeper, manager, and chauffeur all in one, whereas the father was the breadwinner.
Television brought this ideal family to life on screen, which also brought amusement to my family when we occasionally watched these shows. For example, in Leave it to Beaver, the stay-at-home mother who wore dresses, high heels, and pearls while working in the kitchen. When asked what kind of girl her eldest son should marry, she said that she wanted him to marry a sensible girl from a nice family who can cook and keep a clean house. The “sensible” dad on Father Knows Best calmly solved any family difficulties when he got home from work each evening.
The television programs were supposed to teach children the role they were expected to play when they became adults, but children got this message in other ways, too.
I remember browsing Reyff’s Toy and Hobby Shop on Oak Park Avenue and seeing shelves filled with dolls, stuffed animals, and tea sets for girls and cowboy outfits and sports equipment for boys, and whenever I went inside Eric Bourne’s home, his 8-year-old sister made certain that I saw her collection of dolls and stuffed bears.
Children’s books reinforced traditional roles. Eric’s sister told me that she had read and felt earnestly that the happiest time of her day occurred when her dad came home from work. The strong emphasis made a few of my mother’s acquaintances state that they hoped their daughters would forgo college in order to get married.
Very few girls that I knew in high school married rather than go to college or work, but more than a few with whom I graduated from college received their MRS degree a short time after graduation.