House Beautiful--Search for a Sixpence

Phyllis McGinley's Sixpence In Her Shoe should be required reading for every Radcliffe student.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet talks about the job of being a housewife. She enjoys it. The author and her husband bought a house:

Only a rare and incorrigibly urban heart never stirs with immemorial longings, has never urged its owners to arise and go now to some local Isle of Innisfree, there to plant nine bean rows, keep a bee, and put up summer screens.

furnished it:

From Ireland, instead of tweed and cashmere, we came home with two chests of drawers, three occasional tables, a pair of Hepplewaite-influenced chairs out of a jury room ... and the Chinese platter which now hangs in our dining room.

and began to live in it.

Why would Radcliffe students laugh at her? Because they laugh at the housewife. Many consider this a role they must fight, a series of menial chores which society tries to impose on them.

Paradoxically, the current emphasis on combining career and home is indirectly responsible for the Cliffie who glorifies the career and vilifies the home. To be sure, programs like the new house system do encourage respect for the woman who likes being both housewife and career woman. When asking members of the Radcliffe Institute to dinner, for instance, Cliffies frequently include the woman's whole family. And many dormitories have replaced the traditional "housemother" with a young couple and their family. Despite such programs, a number of Radcliffe students distort the question of combining career and home.

Distort Question

The average freshman, like her counterpart at Harvard, has been admitted to the University by a rather mysterious process. Even official literature from the Dean's Office may avow that "the number of qualified applicants far exceeds the number of available places." Certainly most students can name a few high school friends who "should have" been admitted. Convincing himself that he deserved his letter of acceptance is difficult for the Harvard freshman. Everyone admits that the community which he is entering provides few universally-accepted standards. In groups seem to reject each other's criteria: group standing, athletic prowess or membership in a final club are hardly respected by all.

The Radcliffe freshman, on the other hand, may justify her admission to the University by distorting the career-home question. She can decide that this is a community which scorns the "happy housewife" ideal which is upheld by other colleges, high school friends, and even her family. She can visualize Radcliffe's "community of scholars" as a community of future career women. These distortions will strengthen her own tentative career-plans--and award her a place in a clearly-defined group. And they will generate a self-perpetuating cycle; the more students consider this a community of anti-house-wives, the more it actually becomes one.

Dorm Adds Disdain

Furthermore, because she is living in an academic environment, she must spend a good deal more time thinking about her physics assignment than about the evening's meal. In fact, living in a dormitory isolates her from such considerations as planning a menu. Save for the small percentage who live in their own apartments, cooperative or off-campus houses, Radcliffe girls must spend four years in a peculiarly incomplete atmosphere. The dormitory forces them to study without the distraction--or perspective--of running a home. They may gripe about meals, sweep their own rooms, invite their professors to dinner--all of which allow them to ignore the real problems of preparing a meal, cleaning a home or organizing a party. And they may ignore their ignorance.

The president of one dormitory proudly announced to the incoming freshmen, "The college has taken care of most of the things which could interfere with your studying." She forgot, however, that four years in such an atmosphere can well perpetuate the attitude underlying her own words: managing a house involves a number of menial details, all of which interfere with the really important things in life.

Many Radcliffe students also disdain the family for whom one runs a home. A college woman realizes that an early marriage can demand an unfortunate interruption of her career. Premarital affairs naturally make pregnancy seem a threat; and, after marriage, an unwanted child may cut short a much-wanted career.

Two Faces of Eve

Such attitudes could produce two kinds of housewives. The Radcliffe student may bypass the responsibility of running a home. She will serve frozen dinners not as a substitute excused by the demands of her career but as a positive good liberating her from the demands of her home. Her career may well force her to spend less time on household chores--if so, she must avoid considering the housewife's role as a collection of trivia.

On the other hand, the Radcliffe student may decide to approach her home with the same grim determination she needs in her career. If she must cook, she will create gourmet delicacies. But this attitude will rob her, and her family of the relaxed household they need.

For creating the sort of house where a family can feel at home remains the woman's unique responsibility. Among Daedalus articles lauding the career woman and condemning our society for assuming any difference between the sexes, Erik Erikson warned that "True equality can only mean the right to be uniquely creative."

Warning Required

This warning is particularly needed in Erikson's own university. Harvard and Radcliffe are full of sociologists who debate the fine points of a woman's psychology--and of students who ignore one of the major points about her role. Whether or not subtle distinctions exist between the sexies, for some time our society will con- tinue to delegate the serious responsibility of running a home to the woman--and continue to depend on her success in accepting this responsibility.

She need not accept the Madison Avenue glamorization of domestic details like scrubbing pots nor reject the encouraging trend of returning to a career. But in taking advantage of the opportunities for a career, the Radcliffe girl need not deny the important opportunities open to the housewife. Although it may not need the academic abilities required by an English paper, cooking a good meal demands imagination and skill. Planning a party may not test the intelligence expected in a chemistry experiment, but it does require an acute understanding of people. Raising children may not benefit from a textbook knowledge of their physiology, but it is a responsibility which demands sensitivity and good humor. In rustic England, Miss McGinley tells us, the successful housewife would occasionally find a sixpence in her shoe, a mark of appreciation for her special skills.

And behind all of her attributes stands the graciousness one feels in the sort of house where people are comfortable. The successful housewife embodies the creativity of which Erikson wrote in her ability to make people feel at home in her house.

Whatever psychologists and sociologists surmise about other aspects of the female character, graciousness is certainly a cultivated rather than an innate characteristic. And this fact points up both the weakness in the average student's view of the housewife and a possible remedy for this attitude. Of course, an increased number of off-campus houses and apartments would develop enjoyment of, and pride in, the challenges of running a home. The magic solution is each woman's recognition of and respect for that graciousness which can adorn her unique role as housewife