My Mother. The Car

Thanks to transportation writer Angie Schmitt for calling this quote to my attention:

By the end of the 1930s, the general notion that businesses could offer lower prices by cutting back on services [such as delivery or home visits] to customers was ingrained in the pattern of business relations. The growth of suburban communities in the postwar years did little to alter that pattern: as more and more businesses converted to the "self-service" concept, more and more households became dependent upon "herself" to provide that service.

By midcentury the time that housewives had once spent in preserving strawberries and stitching petticoats was being spent in driving to stores, shopping, and waiting in line; and the energy that had once gone into bedside care of the sick was now diverted into driving a feverish child to the doctor, or racing to the railroad station to pick up a relative, or taking the baseball team to the next town for a game. The automobile had become, to the American housewife of the middle classes, what the cast-iron stove in the kitchen would have been to her counterpart of 1850—the vehicle through which she did much of her most significant work, and the work locale where she could most often be found.

It was written by Ruth Schwartz Cowan in her 1983 book More Work for Mother, which I have (or had) a copy of from my grad school days. I'm not sure I ever read it, but if I did, I don't remember this idea.

Today it makes me think of my own mother's experience of motherhood, which was very much packaged inside an automobile, exactly as described in that quote. She was constantly hauling us to doctors, going to stores for groceries (a meat store separate from the several regular grocery stores, separate from the drug store and the liquor store), and as we got older, doing Girl Scouts and then taking us to band practices, parades and concerts, and play practices. We four daughters, pre-Title IX, weren't in sports (thank goodness, so no baseball team going to the next town) but we attended a lot of the boys' games in high school, and as band members we played at some of the games.

We lived five miles outside the town where we went to high school, eight miles from most of the primary stores we shopped at, and 10 miles from the nearest department store or movie theater. Church, at two and a half miles away, was the closest thing we went to. The school bus did a lot of our weekday transportation work, but Mom did everything else. 

I know I didn't grow up in a suburb, so it's not a perfect fit with what's described in the book's quote. But we were essentially living a suburban life in a rural area, and it was my parents' choice, because that was a choice you could make at that point in time in this country, if you were the "right" kind of people. It was a ridiculous choice, in hindsight, and I realize now I have no idea what motivated my parents — two people who grew up in a small city/big small town where you could walk to most of what you needed or take a bus if you had to — to strand themselves, and especially my mother, in the middle of nowhere. They were dependent on cars for everything, when that was not at all the way they had grown up.

American culture in the mid-20th century was a helluva drug. Or maybe I should just say culture is a helluva drug.