Stoic women.(Voices of the Silent Generation: Strong Women Tell Their Stories)(Book review)

Words may be deeds--Aesop

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.