Serendipity strikes at the public library again! Months ago, a dear friend recommended Phyllis McGinley’s “Sixpence in Her Shoe.” This collection of essays on being a housewife by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet here-to-fore unknown to me. Available through the vast storehouses of the public library, I put it on hold. Circumstances delayed my receiving it, much to my frustration, when, lo, what happy circumstance that it came into my life the same week I picked up Caitlin Flanagan’s “To Hell With All That.”
The two works, written by thoughtful women of boundless wit, mark an unbroken chain of domestic innovation and meditation. The story that women gained freedom and independence only 50 years ago and for time immemorial have been nothing but drudges in the velvet handcuffs of housewifery is shattered by the enduring reflections of the likes of McGinley and Flanagan.
Like Flanagan’s book, McGinley’s began as magazine essays, a series in the Lady’s Home Journal in the 1950s. It’s a bit like the orderly American version of Alice Thomas Ellis’s “Home Life.”
McGinley is a commanding presence on the page, confident in her pronouncements. There is a quiet, meditative humor through the whole work. Not laugh-out-loud witty lines, but a jovial sense of contentment and the ability to poke fun. I will admit that I was stunned to find the first essay proclaiming that being a housewife was the real world’s oldest profession. She has a good point. You can’t make a counterfeit without the genuine article.
“Sixpence in Her Shoe” is taken from an English folk tale that the good housewife may be given a reward for her labors. McGinley writes in the preface, “Provided she was clean, kind, thrifty, and industrious, she every now and then found sixpence in her shoe, left there stealthily as a sign of approbation by whichever sylvan deity inhabited her countryside.” In this one sentence, the reader sees several words outside common usage and the influence of a literary tradition that has been watered down and fumbled in the intervening half-century.
Besides exquisite prose, McGinley provides for the reader a valuable and rare perspective. She was married during the Great Depression and captures details of daily life not widely available or remembered. What emerges is a genuine tradition, a way of life passed between living people, adaptable to individual proclivities, for the purpose of living a good life.
Many of her reflections deserve much more thought and exploration, especially her meditations on education as “A Jewel in the Pocket” and the perennial requests she received in the 1950s to speak about whether housewives may seek employment outside the home. How much more nuanced is her response than blockheads these days would assume!
For now, let us turn to a lovely instance of her use of analogy: “Rearing a family or assembling a house, you come up against equal obstacles. Do it by the book and the result may lack warmth. Do it by ear and you are apt to make mistakes. The requisites for success are the same in both cases—a combination of patience, intuition, effort, and devotion. Money is useful, although it is not quite the primary need. An ability to compromise is essential, since houses, like people, are individuals and make individual demands. And it helps, of course, to have taste.”
This analogy gets to the heart of the feminine psyche: that fascination with and attraction to, as Caitlin Flanagan puts it, “places women love and loathe: laundry rooms and nurseries, sunny kitchens and dark ones, the marriage bed.”
Many women, including me, are riveted by descriptions of daily schedules, laundry routine, favorite family meals, and strategies for approaching personal apparel, home decorating, and plant shopping. These subtle feminine arts cannot be dictated with exactitude. When they are, everyone feels a chill. There is a chaotic whimsy needed to meet the needs of individuals and bend cheerfully to the desires of another that makes for a warm home and children who are well-loved.
I’ll be thinking more (and perhaps writing more) about Phyllis McGinley. Between my passionate appreciation for Phyllis Schlafly and my delight in the writing of Phyllis McGinley, I have much more fondness for the name Phyllis than I ever would have anticipated. It does seem Schlafly was a vigorously active person, public facing and highly knowledgeable in international diplomacy. You don’t find her spelling out the methods of her grocery shopping or thoughts on making her husband breakfast (though she did have a publicity photo shoot of her in the act of making her husband’s breakfast). All the more valuable that McGinley seems to have been a more retiring sort of person, one who waxes poetic about her thriftiness or lack thereof (for a small premium, she ordered groceries by telephone) and the enduring love in her marriage (she never cooked her husband breakfast).
“A Sixpence in Her Shoe” is a wonderful book. If you have not the benefit of a vast public library system, fear not. The volume is available through Internet Archive. The dust jacket for the edition on Internet Archive proclaims this is the book that “talks back to ‘The Feminine Mystique.’” Why, yes, please!
In other embarrassing news, I have not read Friedan’s movement-inspiring tome. This deficit has finally become so unavoidable that I will be reading it soon. You guessed it: I’m just waiting for my hold to come in at the library.
