While I realize this is a rebroadcast it should be noted that Ruth Reichl is losing her job and that Gourmet magazine is closing up shop.

I’m sure she will do alright, but this is yet another sign of the both the economy and demise of newspapers and magazines.

There are contradictions that must have permanently boggled the minds of women born in the ’20s. The only way to hold it together is to totally deep-six what you are, what you have done. You throttle yourself, you throttle your daughters (don’t be a self); at the same time you demand achievement that transcends the ordinary. “Recognition” or selfhood exists in a “real world” that these stay-at-home moms never get to really get their footing within, so they have no clue.
So they think they have to remain un-wired, disconnected. Connected to the spouse and only that.
The blow-ups some boys had with parents in terms of opposing Vietnam, opposing Nixon, growing long hair, doing drugs — the girls might escape those conflicts but instead be confronted with a blank slate, no way to connect, and therefore no way to disconnect.
Mournful thoughts.

What an excellect coup in counter programing – elsewhere on the radio, I honestly believe – there are authors being interviewed on topics such as … well … 17th century Jamestown, the pilgrams in Mass Bay Colony, the evolution of Thanksgiving in America – you know – topics that an audience might find interesting. But at WBUR – we get an author of a certain age flogging a book about coming to terms with her mother … and its a taped show! Tom – sit down with the staff and consider how you select programing for certain American holidays, the only ones listening today are vegans obsessed with all the sturm and drang of their mothers. Most women seem to get over this by about age twenty – five!

Hello,

thanks for the great show. My Mom was brilliant, but She basically sat on the sofa and needlepointed. Too bad, since she was a better leader and business person than my dad – she was a crisp thinker, good judgment, great decision maker but depressed and insecure throughout her adult life.

As far as we have come, I want to remind everyone that the fight is not finished. Women make 70% of what men make for equal jobs…and they are still not offered the opportunities that men are – just look at how many Fortune 500 companies have women CEO’s, despite a large cohort of female MBA’s. Also, count how many women are on boards of major companies.

Thanks. And let’s keep up the good fight.

Becky

I am enjoying this interview. Find it so interesting that Ruth’s mother also made a promise to “not become” her very own mother, making sure that Ruth always felt beautiful. This demonstrates the powerful generational patterns we consciously or subconciously take on throughout our lives. The struggle to separate from mother continues far beyond the adolescent years and it is touching to hear that on her mother’s 100th birthday, that Ruth comes to accept her mother with compassion.
As a daughter who guides her life by the “not becoming my mother” mantra, acceptance is the biggest challenge. Congratulations ruth.

In addition, in “not becoming” my mother, I absolutely refuse to eat tongue, liver, brains, intestines and any other organs from an animal…yuck!

Kidneys would be another treat from the 1950s. Fried with a little vinegar. Yuck. But by the way, the house was paid for without mortgage after five years of that menu.

It’s not a sex thing. I’m a guy & I became my mom.

I was born in a 2 house slum; but I went on to become a scientist from Harvard (first in my family to go to college).

She was a depression, world 1 & 2 wife (dad was a soldier in both, worked up to major with less than a highschool education) who hid $100 bills in paper bags in the attic lest they be impoverished.

I grew up to become a computer scientist specializing in Software Quality Assurance, she became the best proof-reader in Connetticut.

I grew to be my mother.

For those interested, comments posted at the time of the original broadcast can be read here:

http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/05/ruth-reichl

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Tom- Your programming is great- how many women were in the kitchen cooking this morning, listening to the radio while we cook? What a great topic to be hearing!(Certainly beats Macy’s parade again, and missing the big floats, because I have to stir something!)

I will email both sisters to download this show too- we’ve read and enjoyed Ms. Reichl’s earlier books,& look forward to reading about her mother. Periodically we discuss how we differ from our mother. She graduated from high school in 38 and became a scientist & pharmacist ahead of her time in many ways thanks to 2 parents who worked in the mills for years. She then married & was a near full time mom until we went to school, then a science teacher, balancing work and family in the 50′ & 60’s. Despite this, she assured us that the most important thing was finding someone you love & having a family. When my father proposed, she threw away her nearly completed application to medical school, and had no regrets that she has ever admitted (I’m sure my great Dad played a part in that). She found other things to fill her life. Mother was clear on what she thought was preferable, but her history left her daughters in many ways more free to pursue what we wanted, though we might not be very good at deciphering what that was. I hope that as a result, my son has felt free to figure out what was right for him.

I’m listening to this rebroadcast with equal parts delight and horror.

Maybe coming from homes of (relative) wealth and privilege wasn’t an unmixed blessing. The need to work helped my mom avoid the drugs and despair the more affluent women in the neighborhood wrestled with.

I just wonder if you have any idea how much class plays into this experience and in the way of looking at it as a daughter who shared in the benefits, if not so much the curses, of that place in the world. To me, it sounds like Tom and the Upper (Middle) Class Ladies Get a Clue.

I think the Depression scared a lot of Americans into a sense of true disparity which I see reflected in some Republicans’ view that there are some who, with lower taxes (the uber echelon, the rich) can somehow float all boats for the rest of us. The idea is if you get into the land of privilege, you can preempt, you can claim a kind of entitlement, proven and validated by some hocus-pocus of blood and rearing. But what if someone is not there yet, is nouveau riche, as they say Sarah Palin is? Well, reach for the gin bottle.
I read somewhere that this sense of “us” and “them” came from England, from the House of Commons versus the House of Lords, and in the Age of Reason, New Englanders were drinking tea and buying fine china in the hopes of establishing a New Aristocracy on this side of the Atlantic.
It’s fairly clear what a man needs to do to remain on top, succeed as a provider, but for a woman based in the home, how does she succeed? Ask Martha Stewart. If by taking a husband, a woman gives up her own connection to the world, it is a tragedy. If you read the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson from this era, you’ll see women’s identity, the late adolescent step on the stairway to full life, depends on her mate, whereas for a man, his identity is his own.
The “bird in a golden cage” (as some old song, before my time, used to go) was maybe an objective for the women building families in the Depression era, but for the women building families aftermath of World War II, that song was sung with great sarcasm, a song about a curse. It is also a curse to society, I think, for people to be trapped in a sense of entitlement, needing to protect themselves from the Sturm and Drang of, say, union workers in the streets.
Ruth Reichl’s mother might be seen by most upstanding mothers of that mold/ethos as having caved in some way, but consider the rigidity of those who never cave.

Hello, Tom and NPR,

First of all I apologize to you for “RA”’s negative comment to you about your programming on T-giving Day. Whoever that is, they are without compassion or feeling for others’ experience in this world.

As for me, I LOVED your show on Thanksgiving and am sincerely grateful that you aired a program that I really needed to hear. I felt it gave me “absolution” in my lifelong feelings and thoughts about my own mother. In fact, so much so that I am going to order a copy of Ms. Reichl’s book for myself and another woman whom I know has experienced similar angst over the messages and “inheritance” left her by her mother. To RA I would just like to say that many women do not get over family-of-origin situations by age 25–for many of us it takes much longer than that!

Thank you for your overall excellent programming…My own affiliate NPR station has just recently switched from classical music programming to the GREAT news and talk shows that NPR has to offer, and I am loving them for it! Wow! NPR is a real Godsend to the media world these days. Too bad a few other networks don’t recognize that at least SOME Americans are intelligent beings!