Reviews of New Books
By Florence King and Brandon Bosworth

Stoic Women
By Florence King

Voices of the Silent Generation: Strong Women Tell Their Stories
Barbara Baillet Moran
Avisson Press, 389 pages, $29.95

To hear feminists tell it, American women who came of age in the 1950s were only slightly better off than Afghani women under the Taliban. We are their gold standard of gender discrimination, their template of unassertive conformity, their Rosebud of low self-esteem, kept high-heeled and pregnant by men, the beasts, and forbidden to do anything with our minds except lose them in a battle against what Betty Friedan called "the problem with no name."

Here is a book with a refreshingly different point of view. Compiled by Barbara Baillet Moran, writer and long-time academic presence at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, it is a collection of oral histories of 17 women of varied backgrounds who, like herself and this reviewer, were born between 1930 and 1940. Interviewing them initially in the 1980s when they were fifty-ish, she did follow-ups on their seventy-ish present, and fleshed out their attitudes and idiosyncrasies in an excellent overview of the Eisenhower years that is a model of compact readability.

What sets our generation apart is that we did not know we were a generation--and we almost weren't. The Depression years produced one of the smallest birth cohorts in American history: 27 million of us, versus 76 million Boomers. Today Boomers are 40 percent of the population, while we are only 10 to 12 percent. We were such a blip that we did not even have a name. Time magazine finally christened us the "Silent Generation" for our apolitical disinterest in idealistic causes, but it more accurately describes another kind of silence: We were the last generation to grow up without television.

Our deprivations produced a multitude of virtues and Moran proudly lists them. Having no television made readers, frequently compulsive ones, out of us. World War II deprived us of consumer goods but it infused us with patriotism and confidence in authority, and inspired movies whose love themes were subordinate to the theme of honor, like Casablanca. The Depression may have impoverished our parents, but "poverty breeds inhibitions," notes Moran, and so dignity, the only thing the poor had left, was seen as the supreme virtue. Children of the 1930s were taught stoicism: never wear your heart on your sleeve, never wash dirty linen in public, and never display unseemly emotions when people are looking.

Anyone who has read what are now called "gender studies" will find it hard to believe that this is a book by and about women. Nobody in it confesses to affairs, sexually transmitted diseases, addictions, childhood molestation, battered wifery, abortions, miscarriages, childbirth, or breast feeding in airports. There are no detailed accounts of ravaged private parts requiring hysterectomies; no uteri, no ovaries, no Fallopian tubes, no cervixes are to be found herein. As for that whistlestop between maidenhead and personhood on the feminist train of thought, the clitoris, there is nary a word.

Instead we meet women who rebelled without rocking the boat. Doris Betts, prize-winning fiction writer and doyenne of the Chapel Hill literary scene, grew up poor but academically precocious in North Carolina cotton-mill country. Like most female scholars in the 1950s, she was defensive about her burgeoning intellect and took the typical way out: protesting too much about her preference for male company. Her conflict was solved when, with male help, she entered Greensboro WomanÍs College and found her brand of feminism in single-sex education: "I had never before been surrounded by highly intelligent women."

Sidney Callahan, who wrote the first feminist book for religious women, The Illusion of Eve: Modern Woman's Search for Identity (1965), defends Miss Goody Two-Shoes with a quotation from Anna Freud: "The great defenses for adolescents are being ascetic and intellectual." She demolishes the having-it-all myth that writing can be done in fits and starts during children's naptimes: "Being an intellectual and a writer is at variance with being a mother," she says bluntly, and admits that women in "more extroverted fields" are better at mothering than women whose professions require silence and solitude. She also has some very 1950-ish advice on aging: "The challenge as you get older is how to look like a distinguished person when you're not cute and pretty anymore."

The best body blow is delivered by French-history scholar Daryl Maslow Hafter, a classmate of Gloria Steinem at Smith College. "I never experienced any of what she described," writes Hafter. She recalls the Dean of Students advising graduates not to marry: "Don't do it! Don't do it! A Smith woman is independent."

The closest thing to a celebrity among the interviewees is Virginia Seipt, the first woman producer of sports programs for network television. Ironically, she comes across as the least ambitious woman in the book, majoring in English at Cornell and taking typing and shorthand in the resigned expectation of becoming a secretary. She became one at NBC and was still there in the early-feminist 1960s when the first male chauvinist guilt pangs set in and bosses started looking for a "token woman" to promote. Seipt was it, and by 1972 was following Hank Aaron around the country waiting for him to break Babe Ruth's lifetime record of 714 homers.

Seipt's story took a dramatic turn in 1987 when NBC fired production staffers, forcing them to work freelance so the network could save on health insurance. She was among the axed, and a short time later, alone in New York City without close family ties, she was hit by a car and broke her leg. She doesn't tell us much about it ("Talking about aches and pains is a total bore"), but she made it, and today still works part-time in television.

Voices of the Silent Generation contains no prima donnas, though one or two wouldn't hurt. Several of the narratives teeter on the edge of woman's eternal "doing so much for others" number, though it's now called volunteering, mentoring, and networking. The ghost of female egotistical selflessness is not quite banished.


Florence King is the author of many books, including the recent STET, Damnit!

Literant

There's not much to do while sitting in an airport, waiting for your connection. You can munch on overpriced food from an in-terminal vendor, or try to read a book if all the noise and commotion around you isn't too much of a distraction. Of course, if you are a glutton for punishment, you can people-watch.

Watching folks haul oversized bags (carry-on bags, bags under the eyes, saddlebags, etc.) and rush around like headless chickens or meander like newly conjured zombies can be unpleasant. You realize that yes, the obesity epidemic is real. And if you have any sartorial taste whatsoever, you realize that you are in a definite minority.

It isn't just the tourists and their awful interpretations of resort wear. It isn't merely the overgrown frat boys with trucker caps and puka shell necklaces, nor their distaff equivalents, resplendent in low-rise jeans to show off fresh tramp stamps as they travel to the site of the next "Girls Gone Wild" videos. No, some of the worst offenders are the commuting businessmen--in a way, the most offensive, as they are actually trying to look dressed-up. But with their high-water suit pants revealing poorly matched shoes, their ill-fitted jackets highlighting their ill-maintained bodies, and their badly tied ties peeking through badly collared shirts, they are failing miserably.

But there is hope. As we climb out of the '90s--a decade that attempted to destroy gentlemanly dressing through grunge and hip-hop fashions, along with 'Net-nerd inspired "casual Fridays"--some American men are rethinking slob chic and are actually starting to dress like, well, men.

A would-be gentleman doesn't have to go alone into the foreboding world of bespoke suits and handmade shoes. There are now plenty of books available about classic men's style. One of the newest and best is The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men's Style by Nicholas Antongiavanni, the nom de plume of a major Republican speechwriter. The title is pretty self-evident. Nearly everything a man would want to know about suits and how to wear them is contained in these pages. Ever wonder what suits work best for your body type? Antongiavanni wisely steers readers away from the bland, shapeless "sack suits" of the Ike era to clothing that actually fits. Confused about dress shirt collars? Ties? Footwear? Ever wonder why Tim Russert looks sort of weird in his business clothes? All of these questions are answered with wit and panache.

There are other fine books floating around to help a man in his pursuit of gentlemanly dressing. Bernhard Roetzel's Gentleman: A Timeless Fashion was originally published in Germany, but pops up in the U.S. in English language format from time to time under the simple title Gentleman's Guide. Chock full of photos and covering everything from suiting to vacation wear to undergarments, Roetzel's book is entertaining and informative, though oddly dated for a book that came out in 1999. For example, he mentions how popular saddle shoes and tweed jackets are among American college students. Sure. More like sandals and T-shirts. The out-of-print, collaborative Dressed to Kill: James Bond--The Suited Hero focuses on one of the greatest cinematic style icons of the last 40-plus years. Reviewing the sartorial achievements of the various film Bonds, the book goes a little too easy on Roger Moore, a little too hard on Timothy Dalton, and gushes a little too much over Pierce Brosnan.

Let's face it--it's easy to be fashionable. Just turn on some hipster TV show and copy what you see. Being stylish is more difficult, which is why so few men make the effort. At least there are some good books to help those willing to try. Remember, what is fashionable is not always stylish, but style is always fashionable.

--Brandon Bosworth