My Mother, the House Wife

A daughter teams up with her mother against the 1950's, in a book of staged photos

Is there one subject in life that has held your interest over time? You notice information about it. You collect people’s viewpoints like puzzle pieces. One day the Big Picture will be revealed!

For me this subject is “Who Was the 1950’s American Woman?” I was just a girl then, but my role models and the cultural environment are still part of me.

I have a book by a woman about my age who took this subject seriously enough to treat it with humor. It’s called Mother.

From the back cover of Mother by Judy Olausen

Judy Olausen is a photojournalist who “wanted to tell the story of what it was like to be a woman in the 1950’s”. Her 74-year-old mother Vivian agreed to join in the project by posing for Judy.

After all, Vivian raised her daughter to think this far out of the box!

“Shocked by Spock” from Mother

Judy says about her mother,

I had never looked at her as a model before — only as my mother. … When I told her about my ideas, she gave me an enthusiastic ‘yes’.

Vivian and Judy, then and now

When Judy went off to college and into a career in the early 1960’s, she realized that her mother and many other women during “the Eisenhower Era” had to struggle with the nation’s focus on the home

“Laundry Promise”

The author explains why she made the book:

The Mother series is a very serious message about the cultural silencing of women and mothers during the 1950s and early 1960s, which I witnessed and was uniquely able and prepared to reveal. I wanted to present a history lesson to the next generation of young women and show them what they narrowly escaped.

“Mother Puts on a Happy Face”

Olausen says,

For this message to be effective, I knew there had to be an element of humor. I didn’t want to deliver an angry message and it could not be subtle. If the photographs were funny but lacked depth the message would be lost and if they were historical but lacked humor, the gravity would be lost.

For many of us growing up in the ‘50’s Father Knows Best was the model family. I can only imagine how my own mother felt about the stereotypes around her, even as she led a life very far from the Suburban Hostess or the Shopper. I wish I could ask her. The woman in this book was not my mom.

“Mother Gets Permed”

Of course in the 1950’s a woman could get a job.

“Mother as Working Girl”, with flames in the wastebasket

She could enable everybody else, before the word “enable” was popular.

“Mother as Enabler”; note the TV

Or she could be invisible, so no one would notice her.

"Mother in Camouflage”

I guess that once all the refrigerators, washers and electric mixers were purchased, and Valium calmed everything down, the nation focused away from the suburbs and on the Vietnam war.

Thus ends Olausen’s story of the housewife. She says,

It was a time before the Sexual Revolution and the advent of birth control, which represented great strides toward taking control over our own bodies, careers, and lifestyles. Almost unbelievably it was a time before some women were able to buy a car or get a checking account without the permission of a husband. This was a story I had to tell.

Her story is one piece of the large puzzle I’m putting together about my generation of women.

But I’m still a little puzzled. I welcome your ideas about the photo below, which seems central to Olausen’s book.

“House Wife”

What is she saying?

Mother, photographs by Judy Olausen, Viking Penguin, NY, 1996

Quotes by Olausen are from an interview