Diary of a Tongue-Loving Feminist

Let's start with the archaic title: Diary of a Mad Housewife.

Do we even use the term "housewife" anymore? "Stay-at-home mom" is as close a term as I can think of to describe women who don't have an outside job beyond housekeeper, child-raiser, chauffeur, cook and laundress.

In my continuing pursuit of revisiting some classic feminist literature, I moved from the very liberated 1973 classic Fear of Flying, here, to an earlier book and time period documenting women's quest to break out of constraining societal roles.

Back before feminism became a bad word with subsequent generations, truly a sad thing.

Diary of a Mad Housewife was written in 1967 and while a six-year difference may not sound like much, I found the life of heroine Bettina much more rooted in the Eisenhower years' traditional roles for women than FoF's Isadora.

But that's because I discovered rereading this book that 1967 was the olden days. You know how different things were then?

Bettina's building on Central Park West has an elevator man, yes, a man whose job it was to push the button for you.

In uniform, no less.

She calls for a Jamaican laundress to come do the dirty clothes brought back from vacation after her husband complains about their trunks still sitting around.

Trunks?

She and her husband sleep in separate beds, with him saying, "Hey, Teen, how about an ole roll in the hay?" when he wants to come to her bed for sex.

Ew, just ew.

She regularly cooks tongue and serves it for dinner with horseradish because her husband and daughters like it.

Striking for me was that it wasn't unusual to still be cooking tongue for dinner in 1967.

There is a smoking room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a store nurse at Lord & Taylor.

Before a party, she puts cigarettes in boxes and urns (?) for their guests.

Milk still comes in bottles and is delivered, with the empty bottles sitting on the back landing until the milkman comes again.

Their black housekeeper has to remind them that no cab driver will take her uptown at 8:30 at night.

The Yellow Pages didn't list doctors by specialty.

A married woman did not have a checking account, instead getting a weekly allowance from her husband.

And, perhaps most unbelievably, bacon has a negative connotation. Her husband comes home and yells that the whole apartment smells of bacon.

"It's  perfectly respectable smell, " she tells him calmly.

"It's a smell that takes hours to go away. It'll be just like the Bronx when our guests arrive," he rages.

And god forbid it should smell like the Bronx.

Somehow, when I think of 1967, I think of the Beatles releasing "Sgt. Pepper" and mini-skirts and the musical Hair, but after reading Diary of a Mad Housewife, I realize that most women were not living that life.

Instead, like Bettina, they were catering to demanding husbands who sent them to therapists to get their "heads straight," making sure dinner was on the table when hubby got home and sinking into depression (and self-medicating) to deal with such a stifling life.

This was so not the swinging '60s.

When she puts on jeans to go walk the dog, her daughter tells her she can't wear those pants downstairs.

Why not, you ask? "Ladies your age don't wear jeans," she's told. For the record, she's in her thirties.

No wonder the poor thing was having a crisis and felt the need to secretly scribble notes to herself about the unsatisfying life she was living and hide them away from the world.

Having just recently finished Diary of a Mad Housewife, I couldn't have asked for a better opportunity to discuss it than the one that unexpectedly presented itself this afternoon.

I was interviewing a painter, a woman who had come of age in the '60s, and told her of my re-reading of this classic piece of feminist writing.

Pointing out some of the surprisingly dated things I'd read, she nodded knowingly.

During her first marriage back in the '60s, she got an allowance from her husband. Allowed him to tell her what to do and when, and then did it. Accepted the staus quo until she couldn't anymore and then got the hell out.

Now she's happily married to the same man for 30 years and they deliberately keep separate bank accounts.

He reminds her when she gets stressed to go back to doing what she loves, thus supporting her and allowing her to decide what makes her happiest.

We've come a long way, baby, in 46 years.

The lucky ones grew up after the Bettinas and Isadoras had blazed the trail so that the rest of us could do what we wanted...in relationships, in careers, in life.

Namely wear jeans (or not, in my case), manage our own money and cook as much smelly bacon as we damn well please.

Don't kid yourselves, girls. That is feminism.