Of course, the contempt of the allegedly open-minded Left hardly surprised McGinley, who wrote in her poem The Angry Man: The other day I chanced to meet / An angry man upon the street / A man of wrath, a man of war / A man who truculently bore / Over his shoulder, like a lance / A banner labeled “Tolerance.”
No, what consigned McGinley to the dustbin of literary history was her politics. And in the un-personing of McGinley, we can get a glimpse of the Left’s simultaneous ruthlessness and cultural hegemony. Simply put, McGinley’s thought crime was that she was a happy, Christian, suburban mother and housewife who extolled both her life in the suburbs and traditional roles for women. For the Left, her failure to be miserable and angry at her situation was an unforgivable sin. The erasure of her voice and what it represented is a sobering thought for conservatives on this Mother’s Day. As with much else in our culture, absent voices like McGinley’s, we look at motherhood, even, through a left-wing lens.
One of her daughters noted approvingly as an adult that McGinley’s home life with her husband, a telephone-company executive, was “a sanguine, benign, adorable version of Mad Men.” Even in more traditional 1950s literary circles, this was enough to make her persona non grata. In a 1959 review of her collection of essays, the Province of the Heart, one reviewer commented on her work being a summary of “the joys of being all the things modern fiction deplores: married, feminine, suburban, maternal.”
McGinley saw women’s maternal role as absolutely central to their being. She wrote: Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia . . . the wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.
Needless to say, this sort of maternally focused thinking couldn’t be allowed in modern feminism. As a Christian, her views on morality were similarly unappealing to the literary smart set. “Sin has always been an ugly word,” McGinley wrote, “but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly but passé. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.”
Yet McGinley was not simply some reactionary fossil preaching a revanchist view of American motherhood or womanhood. Rather, like any sensible traditionalist, she sought a balance. Her goal was not the destruction of the working woman, but the elevation of the homemaker and mother. At the heart of this vision was her advocacy of “casual motherhood,” one that respects a mother’s identity not just as a nurturer but as a person with her own life goals: “Love with a casual touch never says, ‘My children are my life.’ That mother makes a life of her own which is full enough and rewarding enough to sustain her. And she permits her young to let their lives be individual accomplishments.”
We celebrate this Mother’s Day at a time when American motherhood is under siege, with fertility at record lows and the traditional family often the subject of pop-culture mockery. At a time when dysfunctionality and despair are considered by many an essential part of the artistic temperament, McGinley is a reminder that great art can celebrate joy and health and that the maternal can stand on its own as an eternal human value and measure of worth.