The owner of the town department store has died, and his go-getting nephew Jerome Willing has inherited the business. The novel is set in a small rural mid-west town. In this novel Lester is the bread-winner, and Eva is the home-maker, and the family is crumbling to pieces with misery. If they did, society disapproved violently unless the man was unable to work, and then he carried the burden of shame unless obvious illness or incapacity was the reason.
Men wore the trousers, men earned the family income, and married women simply didn’t work. At the cutting edge of civilised life, in the cities, men and women’s fashions were getting less restricted, men could act less masculinely, and women could act more independently, but, compared to today, social expectations were still pretty rigid. Things had loosened up a little in terms of how men and women’s social roles were dictated, so let’s be fair. The cause of happiness, or unhappiness, is people being allowed to do the work that’s right for them, and in the 1920s there were fixed idea about this, especially in small-town communities.
This is the kind of novel you may want to gallop through at a sitting – it usually takes me a rather intense three hours – because it’s packed with uncertainty as to how things will turn out: disaster, or a happy ending? All the action is focused on the characters’ happiness, and the awful things that will happen to their minds and their bodies, and to the family, if they aren’t happy. It’s also about shopping, cooking, cleaning, parenting and selling an idea. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Homemaker is a brilliant dissection of who should earn the family income. This time in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, I’m in 1920s small town America, in the midst of an unhappy family where the father hates working and wants to stay at home taking care of the children, and the mother hates being trapped in the house and longs to be out in the world.
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