It used to be that any time girls excelled at something that was supposed to be the province of males, they were called "tomboys."
When she was a young girl, Mom threw a baseball better than most men and could run faster too, so they labeled her a tomboy. Being a tomboy usually meant boys kept their distance. Girls of athletic prowess were thus, in a way, punished by boys. It would teach girls to know their place. That didn’t seem to bother Mom, who continued to outrun and out-hit the boys. And it didn’t seem to keep Dad away either.
To hear Dad tell it, he was in awe of Mom the first time he met her in the late 1920s. She lived close enough to almost qualify as the girl next door. The ironic part is, long after they were married and had two kids, I believe Mom could still outrun and out-hit Dad. The truth was that as muscular and strong as he was, he was never any kind of ballplayer. One of the few times he ever disappointed me was at his Police Athletic League softball game. Up to that point, I had assumed with all of the arrogance of youth that Dad was the star of the team. You can imagine my disappointment when I saw he batted ninth, struck out his only time up and threw like, well, a girl! Apparently seeing the disappointment in my eyes afterward, Dad assured me that Mom would have done a helluva lot better. But in those days, mothers didn’t spend their leisure hours hitting a softball.
Women weren’t supposed to do a lot of things back in the day. You’ve heard all the glorious tales of Rosie the Riveter from World War II, but the reason that was such a big deal is men had to swallow their pride in wartime and allow their wives to work. Mom worked only briefly, but talked longingly about it. She talked about having a few bucks of her own instead of depending on Dad. But Dad would have none of it. His male pride couldn’t tolerate a wife of his working. Why, it would have seemed to friends and family that he wasn’t man enough to support her. One of her sisters worked in a candy factory and Mom would have given anything to be out there on that assembly line. It wasn’t that she didn’t like being a housewife and a mother; I think she didn’t like that she had no choice about it.
Mom wasn’t allowed to drive either. In those days, driving schools weren’t in vogue and most women had to depend on their spouse to teach them to drive. Families had one car if they were lucky and since it was the man who went to work, it was the man who drove the car. She ached to drive. I often heard her softly tell Dad that she knew she could do it. But Dad saw no reason for her to drive. There were maniacs on the road out there. She had no need to drive. He would drive her anywhere she wanted to go. So Mom let the subject drop. Dad didn’t like what he called "Sunday drivers" – those that were only on the road once a week to take the family shopping or sightseeing. But he saved his worst scorn for "women drivers."
Dad never understood the feelings that were bottled up in Mom. He was a great guy, but he carried the attitudes of his time and place. I could sense her frustration underneath the dutiful way she went about her business as wife and mother. And it wasn’t that Dad was uncaring; in fact, he worshipped her. He placed her high up on that horrible pedestal that we placed women back then – horrible because with all of our adoration, we smothered their potential as full human beings. They had won the right to vote many years before, but their husbands were still pulling the lever in the voting booths. Women had to be protected. They had to be sheltered. The benefit to men was that we ensured they needed us.
I didn’t find out until about a year before she died that Mom had exercised one small measure of independence. We were chatting one Sunday afternoon on the terrace of her nursing home as we often did. No one was there except us and an occasional bird flying in and around the huge Center City skyscrapers that surrounded us. Somehow we got on the subject of politics and I mentioned that in a family of Republicans, I must be considered the black sheep. With a mischievous smile on her face, she leaned toward me and said in a determined voice, "Your father was a Republican, but I was a Democrat."
It was apparent in the way she said it that somewhere along the line, he had stopped pulling the lever for her too.
