sometimes the letters get returned there. I went to the campus post office, explained the situation and waited while they looked through the returned mail.
“David Bedford? Here it is! It came back.”
They handed me the envelope with the all-important registration permit in it. It was marked return to sender: insufficient postage. They had put domestic postage on a letter bound for Argentina. When I pointed it out to them, they shrugged and said that it happened sometimes. It was all done by machine. From then on until I graduated, I made the yearly fall pilgrimage to the returned mail section of the campus post office to get my registration permit.
Now I can resume my story. I returned to my room somewhat stung by the attitude of the woman in the registrar’s office, but I was to encounter the same attitude again, and repeatedly. On visiting the office of Admissions, as it was called then, to find out the procedures to follow to prove in-state residence, I encountered the same problem. The woman behind the desk insisted that since I had come from another country, I would clearly have to pay out-of-state tuition. When I argued, in a manner quite acceptable where I came from, that my situation was unusual and that Americans residing overseas were required to maintain an official address in the US, and that therefore I was in fact a resident of Texas, she dressed me down for being impertinent. She clearly felt that she was in an unassailable position of superiority and was not to be contradicted.
I was used to being treated nicely when I had to buy anything in Argentina (Sí, señor, ¿Qué desea? – Yes, sir, what might be your pleasure?), or less nicely but still politely in government offices, even while laying out my case when there was a difference of opinion. In my country of birth, the middle-aged women seemed to resent being questioned on anything. Of course, the university is a large bureaucracy, not unlike government offices, where people can be surly regardless of country, but there was something more there. Many of the adult women I encountered after coming to college were unhappy. Why? It was several years before I fully understood what was going on.
It is my firm conviction that one cannot understand persons, institutions, or nations without knowing their history. My family is a case in point. Both my grandmothers were intelligent and resourceful people. When their families were intact, they were an important element in the economy of the household. They prepared food, made clothes, salted meat, canned fruits and vegetables and performed numerous other tasks without which there would be no income into the family nor food for the winter. At certain times of the year, they joined the men and children in harvesting the crops. They cared for the cows and pigs, which provided sustenance, and for the horses, which provided work and transportation. Everyone in the family had chores and together they kept themselves fed, clothed, relatively healthy, and educated (the children, that is) during the depths of the Great Depression. When my grandfathers died, both in the year 1935, my grandmothers took charge. My mother’s mother kept a farm going in Roosevelt and Floyd counties, New Mexico and my father’s mother helped the family finish out their contracted rent of a farm in West Texas and then moved the family to Clovis, a small town in the county just north of where my mother lived.
In this the women were typical of the traditional American rural and small-town experience. In the recent past they had enjoyed a respected place as a productive member of the family unit. Their resourcefulness and grit were valued. This sort of family had predominated since the earliest times of British colonization of North America. The first British colony, Virginia, was a publicly traded corporation which had been granted a charter by the crown in the early seventeenth century. Many people bought shares and although many shareholders remained in Great Britain, some traveled to the colony. Other settlers were indentured servants: people who agreed to work for the company for a certain time, seven years in most cases, in exchange for passage to North America and a share in the company and some land at the end of their period of servitude. The Virginia colony was primarily commercial. It sold crops raised in the colony for a profit. The second colony, Massachusetts, was also granted a charter and sold shares as any modern corporation did and as do current postmodern corporations. A large group of British Separatists, one of the groups that left the Church of England during the Reformation, had taken refuge from persecution in the Netherlands. There they discovered that they owned nearly half of the stock in what was then known as the Second Virginia Company, so they bought up enough more to ensure control and moved the company, headquarters and all, to North America. We have all heard how they got blown off course and wound up in what is now Massachusetts. The new colonists were all free men and women and all belonged to the Congregationalist Christian Church. They established towns and cities, created a vibrant economy, provided education for all their children, and practiced their religion (Blum 20-21).
Both colonies became prosperous and soon others came into being. People began moving west beyond the Alleghenies, where they established farms. Over time the family-owned and run farm became the predominant social pattern, where slavery was not practiced, as the booming colonies continuously expanded. By the mid eighteenth century, North America had established universities, seminaries, and thriving businesses, rivaling the United Kingdom in economic power. The family-operated farms and ranches moved into the lands taken from Mexico after the war in the mid-nineteenth century and into the southern states after the Civil War, which took place not long after that.
The family-run concerns which drove the economy required, as we have seen, the cooperation of every member of the family. The work was hard but it provided livelihood, sometimes prosperity, and always a true sense of freedom, not just from a petulant king or a violent task master, but from the hierarchical relationships established in the Middle Ages which continued to affect Europe until World War I. In such a social structure, women felt, and in fact were, usually as strong, independent, and valued as the men.
When I arrived in college, just over half of Americans still lived on family farms or ranches or in the small towns which were built to serve the agriculture and cattle raising that surrounded them. The situation was changing rapidly at the time, however. During my years as an undergraduate the balance of people living in rural areas dropped to slightly below one half. Now most Americans lived in cities or their suburbs. On the farm or ranch the women worked primarily, but not exclusively, in the house while the men worked the fields or tended to the cattle. Women often participated in the latter activities as well. When families moved to the cities and suburbs, the culture (learned ways of doing things based on shared assumptions) of course remained firmly ensconced in people’s subconscious and behavior. These people did not have experience in city living. So they divided the work as they had on the farm: the men outside the house at a job earning money and the women taking care of the children and household chores. Now, however, what the women worked at did not produce income although the work was just as intense. Families felt the weight of the problem but reacted in different ways.
Some women joined the work force. After all, during World War II, when so many of the men were conscripted to fight, the women left behind were needed in industrial jobs making armaments, in clerical jobs in the offices that managed the factories, and in many other jobs that had been vacated by the men. These women had a taste of independence and worth that they had lost when they moved from the farm or ranch to the city. Of course there were still many women running the farm or ranch single-handedly and there was a fairly large population who had always lived in the great cities. At this point, the latter did not typify the experience of the majority of Americans. When the war was over, the women were expected to leave the job and let a returning soldier take it.
From the mid-1940s and into the 1950s, many of the women who had worked jobs during the war and those who had moved from the farm to the city felt that their worth had been taken away from them. In a culture which values only those who make money, they were considered, and considered themselves, worthless, although everyone concerned would deny it. It strikes me as a convincing explanation of why so many middle-aged women in clerical jobs seemed resentful and unhappy when I started college and for many years thereafter.
One of my mother’s brothers was named Dallas Maurice. The family regularly made the pilgrimage to the State Fair, to this day still held in Dallas, and my grandfather loved the city, which accounts for my uncle’s name. At the fair people sold some of their produce but were drawn primarily by what they could buy there that was not available any closer. Farm and ranch people have always, for obvious geographical reasons,