Word: mcginleys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Phyllis McGinley's paean to the American housewife is absurd [Oct. 9]. Housewifery is not a profession. Does one need an education to do a good job making beds? And is it any more "noble" to bake a cake than to teach a child to read? Not all members of the profession have the intellectual sanctuary of a typewriter and a poetic mind to retire to when the emotional strain of being mentally unemployed becomes too much...
...trouble with housewives .is that they spend too much time bemoaning their lot without stopping to realize that housewifery is a respectable and satisfying career. At least that is what Pulitzer Poetess Phyllis McGinley thinks, and her just-published Sixpence in Her Shoe is loaded with such woman-to-woman advice as how not to kill a husband (resort to flattery; don't compete; share mutual bad habits), how to make chicken hearts palatable (braise them and serve with a sour-cream sauce), and how to understand baby talk (let one of the older siblings translate...
...Miss McGinley challenges the thesis of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which stridently proclaims that American women have been stunted and twisted in their development by accepting passively the limiting role of housewife. Author McGinley has found time to become a poet of note, but she insists that this is an accident and that her role as a housewife is more satisfying...
...Nobody," writes Miss McGinley, "has so far received a Pulitzer Prize for contriving a poetic boiled custard, in spite of the fact (which I know from experience) that it is a feat far less easy to perform than writing a ballade." Her own recipe for boiled custard appears on page 269. Some other hints for the elegant execution of housewifery...
...McGinley Sixpence in Her Shoe...