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You may be wondering why I didn’t go back to my job in the Cleveland school district. Well, at the end of the war, women had achieved the suffrage, but the Nineteenth Amendment didn’t carry with it the right to make a living. There were so many demobilized soldiers needing work that we ladies were often summarily dismissed from employment. With plenty of money and no family of my own to support, I could not bring myself to protest when I was replaced by a returning veteran. Even so, I missed my students and my colleagues.
Rosie was not my sole companion in those days, although she was the only one of flesh and blood. In the years after the Great War and the Great Influenza, many of us were visited by apparitions, and I saw—or, rather, heard—my share of spirits. There was no one alive to find fault with my dress or hairstyle or habits, but Mumma seemed to look over my shoulder whenever I stood before a mirror to brush my hair or put on a battered hat. Of course, in those days, I didn’t believe in superstitious nonsense like ghosts and ghouls or hauntings, but I could hear Mumma’s voice so clearly! What will people think? Land sake, Agnes! I never let a daughter of mine leave the house looking as slovenly as you do now.
In all times and in all places, a teacher’s salary has required fiscal discipline. When I was working, my tastes had inclined toward books, not clothing. I could have afforded more now, but for me the acquisition of a new dress had always been less an amusing indulgence than a depressing chore. When I began teaching, women’s clothing was made to measure, tightly fitted around unbending corsets that wordlessly proclaimed: This is decidedly not a loose woman. The styles of that era celebrated an ampleness I did not possess, though Mumma did her best for me. “Oh, Agnes,” she’d sigh, gathering ankle-length skirts into high fabric waistbands to hint at shapely hips I did not have. “What am I going to do with you?” she’d mutter as she created abundantly pleated bodices to enhance what nature had begrudged. It was unrewarding work for her, and I hated every moment.
Then the war came on, and suddenly it was patriotic to conserve fabric more nobly used to clothe our boys in uniform. Skirts crept toward the knees. Pleats disappeared. Hats became smaller, with none of the elaborate wire structure that earlier millinery had required and armament factories now requisitioned. Mumma was scandalized by the new styles and would have none of them. I simply waited the war out, wearing what I had, but Lillie enjoyed the changes. She had a real knack for fashion. A professor’s wife couldn’t be extravagant, but my sister could toss an old piano shawl around her shoulders and look chic. When I tried that, I looked like a pile of rough-dried laundry pulled straight off the clothesline, and …
Well, to be honest? I just gave up.
By 1920, even without Mumma’s otherworldly disapproval of my shabbiness, I knew I needed clothes. The trouble was, I dreaded becoming the object of a dressmaker’s pitiless assessment but I had also forbidden myself the alternative. The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.
And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry.
President Wilson had been reelected on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but it wasn’t long before he’d organized the Committee on Public Information. Its brief was to provide citizens with facts that would persuade them that entering the war was a good idea after all. To the administration’s dismay, its facts did not convince; rather than reconsider his own conclusions, Mr. Wilson decided that what our country really needed was a new slogan. Thus, the C.P.I. launched its memorable motto: “Make the world safe for democracy!”
Soon Americans were surrounded by posters with childish, frightening images like giant spiders wearing German helmets and crouching over Cleveland. Street boys were paid to hand out flyers with maps that had UNITED STATED crossed out and NEW PRUSSIA scrawled across the nation. Newspapers printed bogus pro-war letters to their editors, planting them next to articles that vilified anti-war dissenters in the crudest terms possible. In theaters, paid “spokesmen” gave four-minute patriotic speeches during intermission. Even at school, we teachers sat through pro-war slide shows with the children, who were sent home to shame their parents into supporting what the facts had not.
“The war taught us the power of propaganda,” one of the C.P.I. men said after the armistice. “Now, by God, when we have something to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”
A few moments, it seemed, after the end of the war, “the nation” became “the marketplace” and the exalted word “citizen” was promptly replaced with the loathsome, bovine “consumer.” Women had achieved the vote just as civic discourse shifted from political rights to the “freedom” to buy ready-made dresses and lipstick and jewelry, or the “liberty” to drink and smoke and dance. With the world rendered safe for democracy, our civic duty was redefined: buy the cake and biscuit mixes, the ca
If the ad men had learned from the war that a good slogan could sway the masses, they learned from Dr. Sigmund Freud that people are governed less by reason than by unconscious sexual desires. “Critical eyes are sizing you up,” the advertisements warned, but Aqua Velva aftershave would make a man’s face “fresh, fit and firm!” All women were naturally homely and ordinary, but Elizabeth Arden and Coco Chanel could make us beautiful—for a price. Inattention to external appearance was no longer high-mindedness, a Vogue editorial warned; rather, it destroyed “those potential personalities that psychologists tell us are lurking behind our ordinary selves.”
It was insulting and demeaning, but if you hear something often enough and long enough? Your resistance gets ground down. Absurdities start to make sense. Yes, you start to think. How true …
Not even I could be oblivious forever to frayed cuffs, run-down shoes, and a threadbare antebellum overcoat. One dark day in late December, with nothing to look forward to as 19 21 approached, I came upon a newspaper ad for Halle’s Department Store. “When a woman begins to regard her appearance as a fixed, unalterable quality, that same moment some vital, shining part of her is extinguished forever.”
Agnes, I told myself, some work for immigrants is better than none at all. And if you try to repair this waistband again, you risk public catastrophe. But you don’t want to go to Halle’s, I could hear Mumma’s “ghost” add. It’s much too expensive! Sears and Roebuck’s is entirely good enough for you.
I dithered another hour before telephoning the mechanic who valiantly kept Douglas’s obsolete electric ru
I drove as little as possible in those days, not because I was afraid, you understand, but because each outing required me to withstand another lecture on the technical and economic superiority of gasoline engines. Holding the telephone’s earpiece away from my head, I pretended to listen as Brian swore that he couldn’t keep that old rattletrap wired together much longer. It wasn’t safe for me to drive it into town. It might break down, and then where would I be? On the side of the road, freezing in this weather. Now listen here, I was instructed, just come on down to the garage and take a look. He had a used flivver that would do fine for my use. Just take a look, that’s all he asked, but he asked relentlessly, and I hated being nagged. Only Rosie’s exultation made the ordeal worthwhile. I can’t imagine anything in the wolf lineage to account for a dog’s delight in automotive travel, but Rosie loved to ride in cars.