Word: cushwa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...whose arrival skews life into a grotesque caricature of its former civility. When Bombeck was several months pregnant with Andrew, the family moved to a tract development a few miles from Dayton that she was to satirize as "Suburbian Gems." Its real name is Centerville. The Bombecks lived on Cushwa Drive ("probably named for some dentist") in a house like all the others except for one prized interior feature, a $1,500 "two-way" fireplace, and on the outside, a front door they painted red so that Mother Erma and Tom Harris could find them when they visited...
...this time the women of Bomburbia were changing. The housewives of Cushwa Drive had divorced or taken jobs, and Bombeck, somewhat ironically, was almost the last stay-at-home mom left on the block. The winds of feminism had swept through town, ruffling feathers. One evening, Bombeck recalls, she drove into town with some other women to hear a lecture by Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. "She started talking about yellow wax buildup and all that, and all of us started laughing." Friedan shook her finger and scolded them; these were supposed to be demeaning concerns, not funny...