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In thinking about the extraordinary political activism of Americans of my generation, I had always assumed that it could be traced primarily to the radicalizing experience of the Vietnam War as we were coming to political consciousness: the impact of moral horror and outrage, the apprenticeship in resistance and demonstrations, the lesson in political and social analysis, the fear of the draft, the trauma of serving in the war, and so on. To be sure, those experiences can scarcely be underestimated, yet I found myself significantly revising my views when I belonged to a women's political group that met weekly for a year or so in the early 1980s in Amherst, Mas-sachusetts. Our meetings had some aspects of a support group--we were willing to try to be very honest and personal with each other--but we were interested in directing our energies outward to the world, rather than inward to ourselves. We wanted to explore what political action meant to each of us, why we felt a sort of compulsion to be engaged, and how those sensibilities could best be harnessed to effective action. So we talked, and we talked about ourselves.
Nearly all of us were agemates, as it happened, born in 1942 or 1943 like most members of the Harvard-Radcliffe class of 1965. From civil-rights activism to the antiwar era to the second wave of feminism, we were veterans of marches and movements, we had put our energies and bodies and money on the line, and some of us had even spent time in jail. Yet, to our surprise, we found ourselves talking repeatedly about the way in which our political identities were rooted in the impact of world politics on our birth families, the way that World War II had profoundly shaped our early years. I have come to feel that what my women's group discovered is to a great extent true of all of us born in the war.
As infants, most of us in the class of '65 were called "war babies." We were regarded as somewhat different, marked out as anomalous--precious life springing from death, little lives created and salvaged out of the peril and rubble that were consuming half the world. There weren't a lot of us and we were cherished accordingly. We were the affirmation of the fecundity and endurance of the species, even in the face of the chaos that wrenched our fathers and mothers apart. We were seen as the epitome of the future for whom the fighting was engaged, the hope held in the hearts of all the adults whose lives were being ravaged. We came to awareness of ourselves with the label "war baby" in our ears, with a subliminal sense of the price paid for our lives and our future. That price included sacrifices by those who held us most dear, and sometimes the wounding, disabling, or even death of our own relatives. For American war babies, those relatives at risk were usually fathers and uncles, though there were some grandfathers involved as well.
Children of Chaos"If we were babies when the world was in turmoil, shaken and overturned by war, when a new order was taking shape, how did that affect our lives?" Members of the Harvard-Radcliffe class of 1965 began to address that question in a symposium held during their thirtieth reunion in 1995--the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Literary scholar and activist Maria Fleming Tymoczko '65, Ph.D. '73, and clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Nancy Blackmun '65, Ed.M. '67, rephrase the issue this way in their prologue to Children of Chaos: Born into a World at War, the working title of an unpublished collection of essays, some presented at the symposium, some written since, by 30 members of the class. Although acknowledging that the authors are "in some ways a narrow band," Blackmun and Tymoczko have gathered together, through their fellow essayists, a remarkable range of experiences. Among the authors (almost all born in 1943 and 1944, and newcomers to college in 1961) are people whose families fled the Holocaust and others whose families fled the invading Japanese; children on the occupying and occupied sides in defeated Germany; the daughter of an atomic-bomb scientist; those whose parents were heroic--and those whose parents could not be. By bringing forth the stories of "a cohort that entered adult life at the same time," the classmates reveal much through their acute exploration of personal histories. Tymoczko's essay, published here, tells of growing up on the home front in a world of women, and of the effects of that upbringing--and of consciousness of global events at an early age--in shaping her adult life. It is no more representative of the collection than any other essay; their merit is precisely their individuality. For further information on the collected essays, contact Blackmun at 121 Warren Road, Framingham, Massachusetts 01702, or Tymoczko at tymoczko@complit.umass.edu. ~ The Editors |
My mother's family were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, the sort of immigrants who were doing their best to be upwardly mobile. My grandfather was a shoemaker, a small-scale entrepreneur who had dreams of becoming landed gentry in Slovakia by buying land there with profits from his American shops. My maternal grandmother had nowhere to go but up. She was the daughter of peasants who lived in one room in a farm complex owned by a landlord, peasants whose only possessions were household goods and a clutch of geese. Like my father's mother, this grandmother also began to work at the age of 12, when she was sent to the small city nearest her village to be a servant for a rich Hungarian family. It was an experience that made her determined to seek a better life in America, where she aspired to freedom, equality of a rudimentary sort, and flush toilets.
My mother's family moved back and forth across the ocean, and in fact my mother was born in Slovakia in 1926. All my grandfather's hopes of becoming gentry were curtailed by the Depression (perhaps fortunately so, or else the family would have been in Europe during World War II and behind the Iron Curtain thereafter, suffering as most of our relatives in Slovakia did). When my mother's family returned to the United States in 1930 to monitor their business here, they came to settle for my grandmother's benchmarks: the flush toilets and a little respect, or respectability anyway. My grandmother followed her own leadings even in America. Throughout most of the 1930s, to the embarrassment of her assimilationist children, she fattened the Christmas goose herself, harboring it in her kitchen, even plucking its down for pillows while it was still alive. The aspirations of my mother and her siblings were not unlike those of my father: a working-class American life (without geese), a steady job, and your own home, if you were lucky.
My parents met initially in a junior high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and they married in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor. My father had graduated from high school, but my mother dropped out of tenth grade to marry just after she turned 16. Both were fresh-faced, bright teenagers, with aspirations molded by the Roosevelts and images of stability from the 1930s. My father had led a somewhat wayward and wild youth, which probably was attractive to my mother, who came from a strict and pious Baptist household. She also liked the fact that he was "a real American"--he didn't have the faintest trace of ethnicity.
The 1930s were very hard on people like my parents' families. Survival was the paramount concern and it tightened people's focus on themselves. Both my grandmothers slaved to keep their children alive, one on the assembly lines, the other washing floors. The stories my father told of his youth were not political. They were about living in foster homes so his mother could earn a livelihood, and forays to the library for amusement, and going (with a suitcase of history books) to summer camp for poor children, and hitchhiking cross-country, and minor theft, and local bootlegging. My mother told about wanting to be American, and refusing to speak Slovak, and being hungry, and stealing green tomatoes from vines, and yearning for a Shirley Temple doll. World War II shattered that emotional isolationism bred of economic impoverishment.
During the war and afterwards, the world became the context of our lives. What happened elsewhere mattered in a new way. It had a connection to our daily doings in Cleveland. All the men of my parents' generation were caught up in the war, except my father's brother Bill, who was a quadriplegic, and my mother's brother Johnny, 13 years old when I was born. My father's older brother Jack joined the Marine Corps and became leader of his platoon by virtue of being able to beat all the other men in the group in hand-to-hand fighting. He had been decathlon champion of his high school and a semi-pro boxer before he joined up. My mother's brother Paul had been in the Civilian Conservation Corps during high school, and he joined the army with a band of buddies just after war was declared. I was born in December 1943 and my 19-year-old father enlisted in the army shortly thereafter. Even the men who stayed at home did so because they were part of the war effort. Uncle Joe worked at a foundry in Cleveland, casting parts for bombers, a valuable part of war work that earned him an exemption month after month.
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The world became somewhere family members might be sent and, after the war was done, it was somewhere uncles or friends or neighbors had been. We learned that what happened elsewhere mattered. You couldn't ignore it, because what happened in the world, in politics, might come home, catch your own life up, and change you forever. Because his eyes were so weak, my own father was never shipped out, but he was terrified that he might be during the big buildup before the Normandy landings. So Normandy was close to us. My father might have been there, part of that desperate scramble through the waves, under fire, to gain a beachhead. The Pacific islands were where Uncle Jack was landing with his marines and, later, the place where he rescued a member of his unit who'd been hit in a Japanese ambush, and, later still, the place he was machine-gunned himself and pulled to safety by his loyal and grateful men. Australia was the place where one uncle had a brief marriage and a war bride who wouldn't return to America with him. Her dark sepia photograph was in our family album, smiling and beautiful, flat and unchanging, but she herself, soft and warm, who had kissed my uncle, was still there, in Australia.
Even as a primary-school child, struggling to learn the geography of the housing project I lived in with my parents, and then, as my circles widened, the geography of the neighborhood and the geography of Cleveland, I can remember my father talking to me about events that were happening in the world. Telling me they mattered. Places that were only words to me as a girl--Nuremberg and Korea and Taiwan and Berlin--were a part of our kitchen conversation, had an entitlement in our lives. The family conversations were reinforced at school by the Weekly Reader, which included stories about Egypt, the Suez Canal, Israel, India, and Pakistan, as if those places were our backyard and the politics of those countries a matter that even we children should think about. That sense of our lives being played out across the globe, the whole world, set a context for my response to Vietnam and the U.S. presence in Vietnam decades later, a context shared by many of our generation.
The war influenced us more directly as well. It changed our family living patterns in small ways and large. As the war went on, for example, my family answered the call to grow a victory garden by expanding the plot already laid out in the very back of my grandmother's property, giving up flowers in favor of food production. One of my earliest memories is the planting of that larger garden--I suppose it must have been in the spring of 1945, the second spring after I was born--with Uncle Joe breaking the sod and my grandmother and Aunt Mary and Mother laying it out with words: peas here and beans here and tomatoes against the fence. And myself getting under everyone's feet, clutching dirt in my fist and letting it fall between my fingers, and being shooed out of the way and told not to get dirty. One of their earliest memories of me is from those victory-garden times, probably the next year when I had more words and dimly remembered the routine, when they tell me I asked in my squeaky little voice, "And where will you plant the meat?" Ever since those days, in my mind, in my family's minds, vegetable gardens have had some quality of the victory garden, some primary association with a desire for triumph and with the creation of good things for the self and for the group, creation from seeds so small it feels ex nihilo. I still feel it each spring as I turn the earth and lay out the rows, and each summer and fall as I give the bounty away to neighbors and students and anyone who is willing to accept a zucchini.
The victory gardens I can remember, those small ridges in the flow of childhood time, but the seismic quakes happened without my ever being conscious of them and without any memory of the slippage. The war radically altered expectations among the working classes of Cleveland, and I grew up--we all grew up--on the other side of a tectonic shift. Even though women have always worked in my family--as women always do in preindustrial cultures, in peasant cultures, in farming cultures, in poor cultures--a middle-class American ideal had seeped into their consciousnesses in the 1930s, the ideal of women being supported by their husbands and staying home like ladies to keep the house and kids. That's what the young women of my family were earnestly heading toward, but during the war they learned the pleasures of paid work, pleasures never abandoned afterwards.
It happened because the men were at war. Rosie the Riveter has become a sort of national icon, especially in the women's movement, but we forget people like my mother, Annie the Pharmacist's Helper. One day Grandma came home with news from the clinic where she had been (and later was again) a charwoman, having given up that job for a better-paid position on the munitions assembly lines during the war. One of the doctors had approached her to say, "I need your eldest daughter to come work for me. My pharmacist has been drafted, they're taking every able-bodied man. I need someone to count out the pills and give the people the medicines they need. She's a smart girl and she doesn't have any children to take care of. We need her." Aunt Mary talked it over with her husband, but they came to the conclusion that she shouldn't go to work--he was man enough to support her, and it would be more patriotic for her to continue volunteer war work than take a paid position that someone else might need. But my 19-year-old mother said, "I want to do it."
So Mother became the acting pharmacist and never looked back. She worked her whole life in the medical profession, finally taking exams to become certified as a physician's assistant in the 1970s (along with a lot of Vietnam War vets), and work became one of the most satisfying parts of her life. Many of us have mothers who during the war took over for men at some sort of work, running their husbands' businesses, or driving buses, or working in factories, or being union stewards, like my father's mother. When we were infants, before our conscious memories, we grew up seeing women in the world, at work, managing civilian life. And those women who did so in our own families entered into a sense of self-possession, a sense of entitlement, that lies there at the threshold of our awareness. This public presence of women at work faded out gradually during our childhoods, especially during the 1950s when there was a campaign to get women back in the kitchen, but I'll never forget how much I liked it when the bus driver was a woman and how much I missed those women drivers as they were gradually replaced by men.
Another tectonic shift also predates my conscious memories or my conscious understanding of the order of things: the class shift that happened after the war to working families such as my own as a result of the GI Bill. Many if not most of my classmates have a long family tradition of higher education, some for generations at Harvard itself. For a few of us, however, the entitlement to higher education can be traced directly to the GI Bill, and women who come from such backgrounds, like me, may be conscious of being the first women of their families to have a college education.
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The men in my family who returned from the war all went to college on the GI Bill. They were the direct beneficiaries of that amazing democratization of education that happened in the United States in the late 1940s, that opened up the lives of people who didn't grow up with privilege, and that shifted their careers and class irrevocably. Uncle Jack, the marine, became a civil engineer. Uncle Paul became a math teacher. My father headed himself toward teaching history. And their influence spread to the younger members of the family as well. My mother's twin siblings, too young to be in the war, were sent to college when the time came, and they, too, became teachers. College and university educations opened people up in all sorts of other ways as well, and, as a consequence of the war and its aftermath, my cousins and siblings and I inhabit a much larger world than did our parents and grandparents.
I can remember my father being in college. His oak desk and typewriter had pride of place in our small public-housing living room. His books were everywhere. He bought a gooseneck lamp and a set of Britannicas, on time payments, no doubt. Sometimes when he was writing a paper, I'd wake up at night to the pleasant, steady sound of the typewriter keys striking paper, an even rhythm, like a train over railroad tracks, that sent me back to sleep again. He worked that way in the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep, and he slept in the morning, and then we had to be very quiet. And if I got up in the night to go to the bathroom, there he'd be, a young man, 25 years old, dark-haired, under a cone of light from his desk lamp, hunched just a little as he typed, with the full ashtray by his left wrist, blue-gray smoke hazing the scene. He worked, too, and my mother also worked to help put him through school. I was seven and a half when he graduated, and by then his education had become a kind of family enterprise. We knew his classmates from picnics, where many of the students were veterans, many his age or even considerably older, many with children. Working-class war babies have such memories of our fathers educating themselves, emigrating from their class as their parents and grandparents had emigrated from their native lands. My own trajectory through Harvard and through a Ph. D. has always seemed simple by contrast.
My father turned out to love reading and studying, learning and thinking. And when he graduated from college, with all that learning fresh in his mind, he practiced it on me. One time when I was enrolled in a summer-school course at Western Reserve University, a course designed to teach French to very small children, I came across my father at the tennis court near my classroom building during recess. What a revelation to realize that he might have sat in the very room where I was taking French lessons. He watched my education, thought about what I was being taught, and became part of the process. I remember when I was learning about Thomas Jefferson and he asked me, "What does it mean 'All men are created equal'?" And then the stream of Socratic questions: "Do they all have the same color hair and eyes and skin? Are they all the same size? Are they all equally smart? So, what does it mean?" I think I was eight at the time. Thus it went through the years, setting a foundation for my own love of learning and my own teaching career.
But that was later, after the war. For those of us born in the war, the time during World War II itself gave many of us a rather different psychosexual foundation from those of our older or younger siblings and, indeed, an orientation different from the standard presumed in Western culture and psychology. When our fathers went off to war, many of our mothers moved back into their own mothers' homes, bringing their young children along, even giving birth to new children in those homes. As a result, we the children grew up in multigenerational families. In some cases more than one daughter came home, so the family grouping was extended and complex. Sometimes the head of the clan was a grandfather, beloved or tyrannical or both, but often these complex families had female heads of household. This is what happened to me.
My parents were living in Rhode Island when I was born, so I started life in a conventional nuclear family. When I was three months old, my father enlisted in the army and my mother packed up and took me on the train from Providence back to her family in Cleveland. My grandmother had decided this was what should be done and she paid for the train ticket.
My grandmother lived in the central part of Cleveland in a Slovak-Italian neighborhood on a tiny property that had two houses on it. The "big" house had four small rooms and an unheated attic where the young people slept. Mother and I lived there with Grandma, the young twins Emily and John, and Aunt Bessie, who was just a little older than Mother. There was no central heating, just a kerosene stove in the living room and another stove in the kitchen. The running water in the bathroom was cold, unless you lit the tiny gas heater mounted on the wall. In the little house on the property (three rooms, located four feet behind Grandma's house on the same lot), lived Aunt Mary and Uncle Joe.
Grandma gave up her bedroom so that my mother and I had a place to live. Aunt Emily says she can't remember her mother lying down to sleep for a long time during those years; she'd just rest on the couch. We ate most suppers together, all pell-mell around my grandmother's wooden kitchen table. When I was big enough to graduate from a high chair, I sat squeezed in on the bench behind the table with my teenaged Auntie Emily and Uncle Johnny, and sometimes with my mother as well. Everyone was in charge of me, everyone took turns taking care of me, especially while my mother was sick. (She was quite ill with a thyroid problem that kept her bedridden for weeks after we arrived in Cleveland, a problem that ultimately required surgery and then more bed rest.) I felt loved by everyone, even my young aunt and uncle who were themselves displaced as the babies of the family by me. We were all crowded together under the rule of my matriarchal grandmother, whom everyone but me called "Mama," living as one household complete with cats and African violets in a space that probably was little bigger than the dining room of my present house.
In many ways it was a very difficult time for us all, with my mother sick, and difficulty getting various kinds of food and other commodities, and anxiety about the safety of the young men of the family who were soldiers. From 1942, when Uncle Paul was shipped to the Pacific theater, he was not seen again until after the war, and for nine of those months he was missing in action, separated from his battalion, hiding behind enemy lines in the jungles of Luzon.
Yet in other ways the war created a wonderful environment for a baby's first two years, in many ways better than the isolated nuclear-family environments of the suburbs that babies born in the 1950s grew up in. It was an environment more typical of an earlier era, when extended families lived together in villages or on multigenerational farms. My family lived in a real neighborhood, where people knew each other and visited together, where people from "the old country" gathered together, speaking their native languages, even as the young were becoming American. I became the baby of more than just a family, recognized and indulged by various friends and neighbors as well. Like many others born in the war, because of my nuclear family's displacement, I was raised by a village, so to speak: in our case, a village within a city. For my own life, this was infinitely better and more stable than a childhood spent alone with two teenaged parents. Those years when Mother was 18 to 20 and I grew from infant to two-and-a-half-year-old toddler were critical for us. Many years later my mother acknowledged that by taking us in during the war, Grandma had "saved both our lives."
I trace many of my personal strengths to that formative period of living with my extended family, full of loving caretakers and multiple role models. My earliest memories took shape with Mother working and me being watched part of most days by someone else--Auntie Mary, or Grandma, or the twins. There was almost always someone to meet my needs willingly, something interesting going on to watch and listen to, and someone to keep me in line. There was a surfeit of love and words--stories, debates, arguments, quarrels, reading aloud, praying, or singing--in at least three languages, the English and Slovak spoken in our house and the Italian I could hear spoken by our noisy and voluble neighbors, the Costellis, just 15 feet away.
It was an anomalous period when our domestic world--almost devoid of men--was utterly ruled by a hierarchy of women: first Grandma, then Aunt Mary as oldest married sister, then Mother as the one with the child, then Aunt Bessie, then Aunt Emily as the dominant twin. Although any of them could lose her temper and shout, and although my grandmother was strict and straitlaced and uncompromising, I don't ever remember being frightened or terrorized in those early years. I was safe in my grandmother's house. And when my father came back from the war and I began to live for the first time in my remembered life with my parents alone, I was desolate. I felt I had been torn from my real family and sent away for fosterage, away from most of my mothers. Over the years I've wondered whether my feminism--and perhaps the feminism of other women my age--is anchored in the experiences of those formative and preconscious years, when our psyches were being shaped in a woman's world, where women's love enveloped us, where women worked and ruled, where women felt good about themselves, where women held power by right, where women's ways and bodies were the norm.
One of the darkest sides of being born in the war was that reunion with the men who straggled back from the fighting in '45 and '46 and '47 to shatter our civilian peace. So many of those young soldiers came home damaged, some physically, but more mentally. They came home strangers to their children, strangers to their wives and parents, and strangers to themselves. This was the insight most striking to my women's political group and to others I've talked with who were born in the war: how aware our generation is that many of our own men were damaged in one way or another by the Vietnam War--either by being soldiers in the war or by not being soldiers in it--and how the damage done to the men of our own generation was preceded by the damage done to our fathers and uncles and family friends during World War II. What is different in the two cases, however, is that our own generation can talk about the trauma of the Vietnam War, setting the personal in the context of a political analysis, admitting doubts about war itself. Perhaps we learned to speak from the silence of our fathers, who so often could talk of nothing about the war, could only hold it in, repress the experiences, as they tried to protect their women and children, and themselves.
As I look at these things from the vantage point of 50 years gone, it seems to me that the only man in my family who came through World War II psychically whole was, paradoxically, Uncle Jack, the marine who was raked by a machine gunner in a clearing of a tropical jungle on a Pacific island. Jack was lucky to live--lucky to have been pulled away, lucky to have survived the bullets that slashed through his legs. He was flown by stages to a military hospital in Chicago, where--many skin grafts and many months later--he was declared healed and released. Thirty years later his grafts were peeling off and his immune system was turning against him, yet of all of the men who had been soldiers in my family, he was the one most whole, and he is the only one still alive.
The others came back war-wounded in their minds and hearts, full of rage and guilt and death, volatile and violent, erratic and dangerous. Uncle Paul in some ways never recovered from the nine months lost in the jungle. When he was found by American troops he was desperately ill with jungle rot, gangrene, and malaria, traumatized from being left for dead by the enemy troops who had pinned him to the ground with bayonets through his arms. The Americans rescued him in the nick of time, cured his wounds, and put him back to work, but he returned to us in 1946 wild and terrified and terrifying. He had nightmares, shouting and screaming in the dark. The family was told never to try to wake him at such moments or he might turn on the person who touched him. In contrast to Paul, it was perhaps the visibility of Jack's wounds and his heroism, known to all, able to be talked about, that helped him recover, where the invisibility of the others' psychic wounds left them isolated, alienated, and silent.
My father never fulfilled that early promise of being a history teacher. He had a breakdown in his early thirties and was permanently disabled. In 1961 I was one of two students at Radcliffe College on a full scholarship, one of four National Merit Scholars that year to list for father's occupation "unemployed." How the ghosts and skeletons of World War II figured in his breakdown I don't know, but I do know that there was guilt and shame at his own cowardice and fear while he was a soldier, a fear strong enough to make him inhale talcum powder so as to damage his lungs, rather than face the possibility of combat duty. Throughout the rest of his 49 short years of life, he never breathed right and he never slept right again.
Looking back, I see our fathers caught in silence. They had won the war. They were heroes. Yet their own experience of themselves was so often one of failure, of having feelings that heroes should not speak about in our culture: terror, cowardice, shirking, disgust, disillusionment, indifference, loathing, nausea, torment. Between the women and the men a terrible gulf grew, the gulf of the unspoken war. I can hear my mother's voice even now, impatient, when my father spoke of the army, spoke of the hardships of being in the army. "It's over, Bob," she seems to repeat in my memory. "The war is done." I can still hear the contempt in her voice when she told me years later how he confessed to her about the talcum powder. Those nightmares of war, and the alienation from civilian life that they spawned, were in some cases named and acknowledged for the first time when the fiftieth anniversaries of World War II brought the experiences alive again. Even those men who did not serve in the military fared scarcely better than the soldiers. Old enough to serve, but kept at home for industry, they often remained curiously embryonic, failing to realize their manhood. Although many, perhaps most, of the women of my world came out of World War II stronger, going from strength to strength later in their lives, the men came out battered, further widening that gulf between the sexes in the 1950s. It's hardly a wonder that those of us born in the war--who as "terrible twos" met and first lived with our alienated fathers at the war's end--were not at all happy to find our own generation called to a battlefield that did not even seem just or worthy of sacrifice.
The changes of the United States in the last 50 years are the changes of my family writ large. It is in part from the evolution of countless lower-class families such as my own that we write the palimpsest of the history of America in the last half century. And it is experiences such as those that formed me that separate our younger siblings, the baby boomers, from those of us who were born in the war.
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