Apple pie moms watch out

From apple pie to humble pie

Part one: why I was wrong

Part three: sex and the married woman

Part four: the evolution of the family

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Why women should work

Terry Hekker found fame in her native US as an icon of stay-at-home family values. But then her husband left her after 40 years and she now has a very different message

Hekker is back in the headlines because with considerable courage, and that same old feisty spirit, she published a second article in the New York Times earlier this year.

“In the continuing case of Full-Time Homemaker vs Working Mother, I offer myself as Exhibit A,” she wrote.

The lesson learnt? Even if you can afford to stay at home to nurture your children when they need you most, keep a foot in the market-place. Maintain professional qualifications, prepare to return to work, and never, ever assume that an old-world 'division of labour' will see the 'provider' paying the bills till you don your widow’s weeds.

“I cringe,” she wrote, “when I think of that sentence from my original article about the long line of women I’d come from and belonged to, who were able to find fulfilment as homemakers ‘because no one had explained to us that the only work worth doing is that for which you get paid’. For a divorced mother, the harsh reality is that the work for which you do get paid is the only work that will keep you afloat.”

By the time she came to write her second piece, she had reached a conclusion that seems obvious to most people today: “It becomes evident that where traditional marriage through the centuries had been a partnership based on mutual dependency, modern marriage demands greater self-sufficiency.”

Hekker’s recantation has marked another milestone on gender roles for the times. She has been back in front of the television cameras and aired on many radio broadcasts. She is writing another book – and the working title is Disregard First Book.

After one interview on National Public Radio, a serious-minded equivalent to the BBC, Hekker found the transcript posted on the station’s website and read what her young, female interviewers had really thought of her.

“‘Boy, was she out to lunch!’ they were saying as soon as I was off the air,” says Hekker. “‘What did she expect? How come she didn’t see it coming?'”

That was a question that had plagued her for years after her husband, Jack, had the singular gall to mark their 40th wedding anniversary by presenting her with divorce papers.

Part of the answer, Hekker realises, is that she was born at a time and place – Brooklyn, amid the New York Irish, in 1932 – when the vast majority of young women still grew up with exactly the same expectations as their mothers.

“There was not a girl in school or college who planned a career – we thought of getting qualifications to work only in case we got a lemon in love,” she says.

“No one worked once they had the first baby. Not even the poorest people. My own mother didn’t work a single day after she got married.

“This is my theme now. I truly believe that in eight centuries’ time, when someone sits down to write the history of the world, they will note that women’s lives changed irrevocably in the second half of the 20th century. It happened on my watch. I married in 1956, and had hardly started when all the rules changed.”

Written by Charles Laurence

Read page 3 of From apple pie to humble pie

This article was created: 6 October 2006.
This article was last edited: 14 February 2007.

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