Word: mcginley
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Rising Chorus. The strength of Phyllis McGinley's appeal can best be measured by the fact that today, almost by inadvertence, she finds herself the sturdiest exponent of the glory of housewifery, standing almost alone against a rising chorus of voices summoning women away from the hearth. The loudest of the new emancipators is Betty Friedan, another suburban housewife and mother. Mrs. Friedan maintains in her bestselling broadside, The Feminine Mystique, that the college-educated woman who seeks fulfillment in domesticity will never find it, that the clever girl will either go mad in the kitchen or go forth...
...Phyllis McGinley did not ask to get into the argument. But since she has been praising domesticity all along, in both essay and verse, her publisher prodded her into assembling her thoughts as rebuttal to all those, like Betty Friedan, who deprecate the very role that Housewife McGinley prefers to fill. The result was Sixpence in Her Shoe, in which she restates the proposition for which her own life has been the best evidence: that even today's educated woman can fit happily into the framework of the home. Sixpence sold slowly at first. But after housewives began...
...Phyllis McGinley makes a compelling exponent of the housewife's role not just because she presents the case so well in prose and verse. She also happens to be a woman who set an exceptionally high value on the role long before she herself attained it, and, once enclosed by her own four walls, has never stopped marveling at her good luck...
Giddy Going. At the University of Utah, Phyllis McGinley suppressed a natural appetite for scholarship-"I knew I was bright, but I also knew that in that period and in that environment, brainy women were not appreciated. I made myself over into a giddy prom trotter. I wasn't all that pretty- my teeth stuck out-and so I had to try harder. I didn't learn very much at Ogden, but I had what I always wanted all my life: the society of people, friends, beaux...
...From then on," says Phyllis McGinley, "it never occurred to me that I wasn't going to be a poet." The conviction spurred her to enter a university competition offering cash prizes for the best poetry, short stories and essays. For two years running, Contestant McGinley, submitting pseudonymous compositions in all three categories, won all the honors-and all the money. She also began sending poetry to New York magazines, and in 1929, after some of them were bought, she invaded this receptive market in person...