Word: valeria
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Dr. Valeria Hopkins Parker, 80, longtime social hygiene specialist and marriage counselor, whose crusades made her a pioneer suffragette, Connecticut's first woman probation officer, later its first state policewoman; in Greenwich, Conn...
...dreams guiltily of "leaving the dishes in the sink, the laundry unwashed, the beds unmade." or when she tries on a new lace slip for her husband and he says, "It's pretty; how much was it?" a great many modern American woman readers will recognize themselves in Valeria...
...Valeria Cossati, the turning point came, she thought, when her husband jokingly began calling her Mamma. Somehow it made her feel that she had lost her youth and was also beginning to lose her identity...
Hardly aware of it herself, she is deeply resentful of her submissive role. It is not until she begins to keep a secret diary that resentment turns to revolt, for as Valeria looks at herself, she also begins to see others. She discovers her husband's failure as man and lover, her son's weakness. She secretly despises her son's pretty and docile fiancee, is candid enough to guess that she is actually jealous of her independent daughter. As life at home becomes unbearable, Valeria's office job begins to seem like a kindly refuge...
...status of the housewife; she only asks that Mamma or Mom stand on her dignity and true worth, and above all, that she reject the martyr pose. The Secret expresses poignantly the mood of wanting "to start living afresh" and the discovery that it is too late. One day Valeria has an impulse to telephone her boss from home and say, "Let's go out." But " 'I'm mad.' I murmured, shaking my head. 'Quite mad,' I repeated, forming his number in the air, without dialing. 'I have masses of ironing...