May 17, 2007
Cheaper by the Dozen Cheap Shot Posted by Ellen Feldman at 05:10 PM EST I am addicted to the Turner Classic Movies channel, both for the gems it revives and for the lesser movies that nonetheless tell us who we were and what we espoused, or what the people who made the movies thought we ought to espouse. I recently caught a snippet of the original Cheaper by the Dozen, with Clifton Webb. The movie is based on the best-selling book about Frank Gilbreth, a renowned efficiency expert, his wife, and their 12 children. Though Gilbreth died in 1924, the book, written by his son and daughter, was not published until 1948, and the movie didn’t come out until 1950. The dates are important for what they tell us about postwar America. It is no secret that as the country demobilized militarily it mobilized to get women out of the workplace and back into the home. An army of pink slips gave the orders. Long full skirts ensured that their wearers were not going to set foot in a factory, cinched waists constricted breathing, and heaven only knows what purpose pointy bras served, beyond feeding male fantasies. During the war, women’s magazines ran features on how to whip up a nutritious dinner in 15 minutes. After it, they printed recipes for Americanized versions of French cuisine that were designed to keep a woman in the kitchen for hours if not the entire day. Despite my knowledge of this backward march, forced in some cases, voluntary in others, the scene in Cheaper by the Dozen, which also appears in the book, still shocked me. A woman played by Mildred Natwick turns up to ask Mrs. Gilbreth, a ravishing, flat-stomached Myrna Loy, to head the Montclair chapter of Planned Parenthood. Mrs. Gilbreth calls her husband, who pretends to support the cause. (There is a considerable amount of mean-spirited elbowing in the ribs in the scene.) Then Mr. Gilbreth blows his whistle, and 12 children come streaking in from every corner of the house and property. The woman leaves in a huff, and Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth, and presumably the audience, get a good laugh at outwitting this wrongheaded reformer. Four decades after Margaret Sanger went to jail for trying to give birth-control information to poor women, who did not have the same access to worldly private doctors as their more fortunate sisters, birth control had become not a flaming controversy but a bad joke. After all, what better way to bar women from the work place than by keeping them pregnant? Margaret Sanger knew this, but her crusade sought more than self-realization for women. She was fighting for the lives and health of children and their mothers. On a countrywide speaking tour after her arrest, she quoted statistics showing that the likelihood of infant death increased not only as the father’s income went down but also as the time between births shrank. The relative position in the family also affected mortality rates. Thirty-two percent of second children died annually. The rate progressed with each child born to the family, until for the twelfth child, that mystical number Mr. Gilbreth had set his heart on, sixty out of a hundred died each year. Sanger also spoke of the horror of self-induced and back-alley abortions, not by “girls in trouble” but by poor women who could not afford to feed another mouth. And the toll was not only on poor women. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that for the first decade of her marriage she was either always having a child or just getting over having had a child. Perhaps I am a curmudgeon. I did not watch the entire movie. Work called. I’m sure much of it is amusing. But more than half a century later, this mindless glorification of large families as somehow intrinsically virtuous still offends. The ridicule and dismissal of the work of generations who struggled to better the lives of women and children and men infuriates. The fact that the movie has been remade twice in the twenty-first century simply puzzles.
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