ended my marriage of almost 12 years. It wasn’t one big betrayal. No one was a villain, not really. What happened was the oppressive weight of being a wife and mother and the burden of heterosexual marriage broke me. Three years later, in 2020, I realized I wasn’t alone. That the cultural weight of society keeps slipping onto the shoulders of mothers and wives. We are breaking.
We weren’t allowed to listen to other secular music, even though we did, hiding in the closet, around my sister’s clock radio, or taping Alanis Morissette songs off the Top 40 countdown. But country was deemed safe, along with Christian contemporary. On its surface, country music reinforced tradition rather than upended it. It wasn’t Madonna with her overt sexuality and embrace of queer culture. There was no riot grrrl writing “SLUT” on her stomach or singing about girl power.
The American women of 1952 were the women Betty Friedan would write about a decade later: polished, thin waisted, professional wives and mothers, forced back into the home after the brief liberation of WWII and the jobs the war machine had provided. They weren’t oversexed; they were undersexed, educated, and overworked, cleaning and cooking and raising children for men who never seemed to come home. And they weren’t happy about it.
Country music journalist and historian Marissa R. Moss explained to me in an interview that songs like these represented a personal rebellion, not a political one, which is why they were allowed on the airwaves. And even then, only tentatively so. Women artists still weren’t played equally with male artists. “It was a delicate balance,” Moss said. “Venting a personal frustration without upending the system.
It’s depressing to look at those charts, to see the numbers on women’s progress going up and up, only to fizzle out. America, once a leader in gender equality, now ranks 41st among developed countries for equal pay. The backlash to the Chicks felt so acute and personal. It was the first time my generation would smash our heads into the glass ceiling. It wouldn’t be the last.
In her song “One’s on the Way,” Loretta Lynn sings about how all the girls in New York City are marching for women’s lib, but in Topeka, the faucet is leaking, the wash needs a’ hanging, one kid’s crawling, one’s bawling, and one’s on the way. It’s a catchy and wry song. Maybe society was changing, but not for all women. And while Jackie O was out dancing, Loretta was in Kansas, just trying to survive.
Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)
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