Free Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin Page A

of Campbell’s soup, squeezing the grip to tighten the clippers, and then lowering the container to a point where it could drop into my arms.
    One Thanksgiving when my mother was in the hospital, Edna and Carl invited our family to join them for dinner. Since they had decided to stay open in case any of their customers needed something at the last minute, they celebrated in the back of the store, setting out dinner at the big table where each morning they made the tuna and potato salads. When I walked through the decorated cloth curtain which separated the front of the store from the back, I was excited to find this back room as warm and personal as a home; a large wood stove and a small maple table made it cozy, as a kitchen should be on a cold Thanksgiving day.
    The owners of the soda shop next door were not quite as friendly. We were convinced that Mr. and Mrs. Brand hated us. Mrs. Brand was short and fat, with bleached-blond hair and beady eyes. If we took too long in the comics section without buying anything, Mr. Brand, with hair like Brillo, took delight in kicking us out of the store. Their attitude brought out the worst in us. Over and over,we would call the store and ask in disguised voices if they had “Prince Albert in the can.” When they confirmed it, we would start laughing and say, “‘Well, please let him out. He deserves to be free!” For maximum satisfaction one of us would be stationed in the store during the calls to watch Mrs. Brand screw up her prune-like face in anger at the third Prince Albert inquiry and retort, “No, we won’t let him out, but if we catch you, we’ll put
you
in the can!”
    Nevertheless, the Brands made the best sodas in town, boasting more flavors than Howard Johnson’s, and their booths were large and comfortable. They had a son, Eddie, who also worked in the store. He always wore a bow tie, and we sensed that he wanted to be nice to us but was afraid to let his guard down when his parents were there.
    I WAS ONLY two years old when the end of World War II signaled the often involuntary return of women to the homes they had left for the factories and shipyards of wartime America. The re-entry of millions of men into the work force, together with pervasive fear of a return to large-scale unemployment, was fertile ground for the growth of an ideology which sought to persuade women that work and education would destroy their chances for marriage and a happy home life. The media and pundits of the day instructed women that their only true fulfillment could be found as wives and mothers, that sexist discrimination was actually good for them, that the denial of opportunity was, in reality, the manifestation of the highest possible goals of womanhood. The president of Mills College argued that higher education could actually be harmful for women, since the total irrelevance of their studies to their destined roles as wives and mothers would only increase their frustration. If Rosie the Riveter, women pilots,and Women’s Army Corps members had been portrayed as the heroines of the forties, the heroines in the fifties were women who were wise enough to realize that work and marriage were incompatible and had renounced careers to raise a family. This reassertion of dying values worked, at least for a while. Women valedictorians who left the commencement stage to become suburban housewives were praised as paragons of femininity. A renowned concert pianist, Liz Eck, became a media darling, a credit to her gender, for her decision to leave the stage in order to tend her husband and mother her child. Grace Kelly gave up her dazzling Hollywood career to become a wife and mother, albeit with a principality thrown into the bargain. In
Life
magazine in the mid-fifties, Robert Couglan railed against “the disease of working women,” who insisted on ruining their children and their family life.
    If my mother felt a conflict of desire between her own ambitions and her family, she never