1950s gender-role norms

1950s gender-role norms govern more than manners in the novel: they determine who is trusted with freedom, whose education is encouraged, and how an unmarried pregnant girl is treated. Through Maribeth Robertson’s conflict with her father and her later effort to build a life on her own terms, the rules appear not as neutral custom but as an unequal system that shapes choices and their costs.

Family Rules and Unequal Freedom

When sixteen-year-old Maribeth wants to attend her spring dance in a borrowed peacock-blue dress, her father, Bert Robertson, orders her to change. He objects to the dress’s low neckline and makeup, and treats her appearance as a threat to her respectability. Maribeth promises to keep on the jacket, but Bert still says she must wear something else or stay home. Her mother, Margaret Robertson, helps her find a navy dress with a white collar and long sleeves—the kind Bert will approve. Maribeth goes to the dance with David feeling that the outfit makes her look unlike herself.

The decision reflects a wider family double standard. Bert allows his son, Ryan Robertson, considerable latitude, while expecting Maribeth and her younger sister, Noelle Robertson, to avoid behavior that might damage their reputations. He is especially anxious that his daughters not become pregnant, a fear he connects to two of his sisters having been forced to marry. He takes pride in the family’s standing in Onawa and in his successful car-repair business; his concern for reputation reinforces his control over his daughters’ conduct. Margaret feels sympathy for Maribeth but does not challenge Bert’s decision, and Maribeth has learned to be cautious about defying him.

Education and the Limits of a Conventional Future

Bert’s expectations extend from dress to work and education. He considers a little schooling useful if Maribeth studies bookkeeping and eventually helps with his business, but rejects her ambitions to become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, or even a nurse. In his view, a girl’s proper future is marriage, children, and care of the home. He regards college as unnecessary for that life and sees Maribeth’s broader ambitions as a source of trouble. His outlook is sharpened by his own history: an orphan from Buffalo who left school after sixth grade, he treats his own success as evidence that further education is not essential.

Maribeth has a different sense of what her future might hold. At the dance, she already feels separate from her classmates: she is a high-achieving student, but some peers resent her and others ignore her. Later, she tells Tommy that she wants to continue studying and might become a teacher, lawyer, or writer; she does not want to marry straight out of high school and have children before making something of herself. She has rarely been able to speak so openly at home. Tommy recognizes her ambitions rather than dismissing them, and tells her about his mother’s college education and teaching career. Their conversation shows how different family beliefs can make the same possibility—education—seem either ordinary or out of reach.

Pregnancy, Separation, and the Cost of the Rules

The contrast between the two teenagers’ circumstances is stark. Tommy and Maribeth are both sixteen, but after Maribeth becomes pregnant, she has no home or family support to rely on in the way Tommy does. Bert tells her to leave and orders her not to tell Noelle the truth, saying she will be away for six months. He gives her money for the arrangements and plans to take her to the convent the following morning. Maribeth experiences the order as banishment from her family at a moment when she needs support.

At the convent of the Sisters of Charity, Maribeth sees other pregnant teenagers separated from their babies under tightly controlled conditions. One girl’s newborn is taken to waiting adoptive parents before she sees the child. Maribeth finds the process demeaning and oppressive, and decides she cannot spend the months before birth in confinement. She leaves at dawn with her money and a small bag, buys an open-ended ticket to Chicago, and writes to her mother and Noelle from the bus station, promising to send an address when she has one. Her departure is a practical bid for independence, but it also makes clear how little room the prevailing response to unwed pregnancy leaves for a young woman to remain at home and direct her own life.

Support, Adoption, and a Different Possibility

In Chicago, Maribeth works while maintaining her education. When Tommy returns to school in September, he copies the curriculum for her and lends her his books, so she can complete assignments alongside him and keep pace with her studies. Their arrangement is concrete support for an ambition her own family had treated as impractical. Maribeth proves to be an exceptionally strong student, and the effort gives her a way to keep preparing for a future beyond the narrow options Bert had prescribed.

The birth and adoption decision also reveal a different understanding of responsibility. After Maribeth’s coworkers give her baby clothes, a blanket, toys, diapers, and a high chair, these gifts make the coming separation immediate: she understands more fully what it means to give up a child she will not raise. She eventually asks Liz and John Whittaker to adopt the baby. Three days after Kate’s birth, Maribeth signs the adoption papers with a shaking hand and asks not to see the baby that day, taking time to mourn. At home, she deliberately keeps her distance when Kate cries because she knows Liz will be the child’s mother. The arrangement respects Maribeth’s decision while acknowledging its emotional cost.

The Whittakers then offer Maribeth a future that Bert’s rules had constrained. John explains that she can return home, finish school, and use the money they had set aside for Annie’s education to attend college; she may return to stay with them or apply elsewhere. The family agrees that Kate will initially know Maribeth as a friend, not as her birth mother. Maribeth still fears going home, and the agreement does not erase the pressures awaiting her there. But the support gives her a real choice about education and where to go next. The novel sets Bert’s narrow account of what a girl should become against the possibility of a young woman pursuing study and shaping her own future, even after family judgment and pregnancy have sharply limited her options.