Over the last several years I have made a specific effort to read about the lives of real women from the past, trying to appreciate their lived experiences and acknowledge the sacrifices their lives often required. When I saw this book at the thrift store I was very intrigued. Instead of a personal memoir, which I usually read, this book is is compilation of oral histories of women who spent their early adulthood in the years just after WWII. Their stories are told in sections based on a theme - sex, marriage, employment, parenthood etc, so you can give an interesting overview of several different experiences with common threads.
This generation of women includes my own grandmothers - two VERY different women who had VERY different lives but who both ended up giving up their careers to stay home and raise children. Throughout the book it is clear that if you were of marriage-able age during this time period, the expectation was absolute: you find a man and you get married and have kids. That is how you be a good citizen and a good human being. If you don't do those things - AND feel happy and satisfied by it - then YOU are the problem.
The book is sometimes a little dry and the focus is for sure on anglo-American women, almost exclusively, but it definitely gave me what I was looking for. It's well researched and all the actual personal experiences are fleshed out with history and context. Not everyone is going to be excited to read a book like this, but for me, it kept my interest up until the last chapter on McCarthy, which got a little boring.
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