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Career,
Dwelling unfettered in my single flat, My life my own, likewise my daily
bread—When I consider this, it's very clear I might have done much worse. I might at that.
Rising Chorus. The strength of Phyllis McGinley's appeal can best be measured by the fact that today, almost by inadvertence, she finds herself the sturdiest exponent of the glory of housewifery, standing almost alone against a rising chorus of voices summoning women away from the hearth. The loudest of the new emancipators is Betty Friedan, another suburban housewife and mother. Mrs. Friedan maintains in her bestselling broadside, The Feminine Mystique, that the college-educated woman who seeks fulfillment in domesticity will never find it, that the clever girl will either go mad in the kitchen or go forth from it, to market her brain in all those places where the men sell theirs.
Phyllis McGinley did not ask to get into the argument. But since she has been praising domesticity all along, in both essay and verse, her publisher prodded her into assembling her thoughts as rebuttal to all those, like Betty Friedan, who deprecate the very role that Housewife McGinley prefers to fill. The result was Sixpence in Her Shoe, in which she restates the proposition for which her own life has been the best evidence: that even today's educated woman can fit happily into the framework of the home. Sixpence sold slowly at first. But after housewives began to get the message, mainly by word of mouth, it climbed to the bestseller lists. There it has remained for the last 26 weeks. Total sales have passed 100,000, and are still rising.
"I feel so sorry for this younger generation," says its author. "They've got this silly guilt. They've been told that they're not contributing to the world if they relax into their normal ocean of domesticity. If you're not a great artist or writer, you shouldn't be made to feel guilty by having to be somebody besides a housewife. These girls are in school, and they're the queens of the world. Then they get married, and they have problems, and they say it's not fair. Self-pity is the most common but the meanest trait there is. Of course, as a friend of mine says, if you don't pity yourself, who will?"
Phyllis McGinley makes a compelling exponent of the housewife's role not just because she presents the case so well in prose and verse. She also happens to be a woman who set an exceptionally high value on the role long before she herself attained it, and, once enclosed by her own four walls, has never stopped marveling at her good luck.
All of Bulwer-Lytton. As the daughter and second child of an unsuccessful and fiddle-footed land speculator, she grew up with no settled home. She was born in Ontario, Ore., but her childhood memories begin with Iliff, Colo. ("It looked like a stage set for High Noon"), where the McGinleys settled awhile to farm an acreage that her father had been unable to sell.
This was not as miserable as it might sound. Admits Phyllis: "We were land poor—the kind of poor that had mahogany furniture and solid silver. We had books, and I read a great deal. I am probably the only person left living who has read the entire works of Bulwer-Lytton—when I was ten years old. We had 35 volumes of them."