Women's Autonomy and Gender Roles

Women’s independence and gender roles are a central conflict in the novel: Bert Robertson imagines a woman’s life as obedience, marriage, and care for a household, while Maribeth Robertson insists on a future shaped by education, work, and her own judgment. Her circumstances make that independence more than an abstract ideal. At sixteen, she must decide how to navigate an unwanted pregnancy and a family that has sent her away, while finding ways to keep her education and future possibilities alive.

Bert Robertson’s prescribed roles

Bert’s understanding of gender is bound to his view of respectability and family order. He is proud that Margaret Robertson has never worked and regards her as a good wife in part because she has not challenged him. He sees his son Ryan Robertson’s place in the family business as natural, but holds his daughters to a stricter standard of appearance and behavior. In his view, Maribeth’s attractive appearance makes it especially important to keep her from acting, as he sees it, too freely.

His expectations extend well beyond a daughter’s conduct at a dance. Bert considers a limited education useful if Maribeth might help with the business’s bookkeeping, but rejects the idea that women should become doctors, engineers, lawyers, or even pursue nursing. He reduces the point of schooling to practical preparation for domestic life, arguing that a girl does not need college to change a diaper. The future he prescribes is to behave, marry, have children according to her husband’s means or wishes, and care for husband, children, and home without causing trouble.

Bert’s rules are not applied evenly across his children. He tells Ryan not to marry someone he considers wild and not to get a woman pregnant unless he is prepared to marry her; for his daughters, the corresponding demand is that they protect the family’s reputation and stay within the domestic role he has set. His tolerance of Ryan’s disrupted schooling contrasts with his resistance to Maribeth’s academic ambition. The difference exposes a family order in which sons’ choices can lead outward, while daughters are expected to preserve respectability through restraint.

Maribeth’s ambition and isolation

Maribeth’s aspirations take shape against that household model. A strong student, she dreams of college, a career, and a more interesting place to live. She wants a job that engages her and, eventually, a husband she loves and respects. Her parents’ marriage offers no model she wants to repeat: she sees her mother as unheard and her father as a man who dismisses women’s ideas and the value of education.

At school, achievement sets Maribeth apart rather than bringing her companionship. Some classmates resent her success and others ignore her; she has no one with whom to discuss the future she imagines. Writing papers offers a brief exception: her teachers praise her ideas, and they recognize both her ability and the importance of education to her independence. Their encouragement gives her a place where her ambitions are taken seriously, even when she cannot speak about them freely at home.

That contrast is especially clear when Maribeth is sixteen. She wants to go to Chicago or New York, attend college, and make something of herself, but her father’s views limit what she can expect from her family. Her difference from his ideals is not a rejection of family life in itself: she can imagine marriage and children in the future, but wants a life in which those choices follow education, work, and a relationship grounded in respect.

Pregnancy, departure, and material choices

When Maribeth tells her family about the pregnancy, Bert decides that she must leave for the Sisters of Charity and orders her to keep the truth from her younger sister, Noelle Robertson. He tells her to say that she is going away to school and sets her departure for the following morning. The instruction makes the family’s concern with reputation concrete: Maribeth is removed from the household, while the circumstances are to remain concealed from her sister.

The convent sharpens Maribeth’s sense of what is at stake. She sees other pregnant girls separated from their newborns and experiences the institution as a place where their situations are hidden. After several weeks, she leaves with her remaining money and a small bag, buys an open-ended bus ticket to Chicago via Omaha, and sends postcards to her mother and Noelle promising to provide an address. Her departure is a practical attempt to reclaim control: she cannot return home, but she can seek work and decide where to spend the months before the birth.

In her new town, paid work gives that resolve a daily form. At Jimmy D’s, Maribeth begins by bussing tables and then takes orders; she finds a room and keeps working because she needs the money. She also intends to borrow books from the library and continue studying. The job is tiring, and its security depends on other people’s willingness to employ and house her, but it gives her income and a measure of independence from the family that sent her away.

The example of Julie, a waitress raising two children without reliable child support, makes the economic demands of caregiving visible to Maribeth. Julie describes the costs of shoes and medical care, the strain of having responsibility rest on one person, and the importance of coworkers who help with childcare. Her experience complicates any simple equation between independence and doing everything alone: women’s choices depend not only on resolve, but also on money and a network of practical support.

Education as a continuing claim

Tommy Whittaker becomes one of the people who helps turn Maribeth’s educational ambitions into action. After he returns to school, he copies the curriculum for her and lends her books so she can complete the assignments she is missing. They work together in the evenings, sometimes at the restaurant, where she brings him food, and sometimes at her room, where they study subjects including chemistry, algebra, and trigonometry. Their shared work lets her continue her studies while holding down her job; Tommy soon recognizes that she is an even stronger student than he is.

The arrangement is significant because it does not treat Maribeth’s education as a vague promise for some distant future. She keeps the papers she completes, follows the school assignments, and plans to take exams so that she will not lose the semester. Later, Elizabeth Whittaker arranges exams for mid-December and urges her to stop working before the birth if possible, both to rest and to give herself time to prepare. Education remains part of Maribeth’s present, even as pregnancy and paid work press upon her time and energy.

Maribeth’s thoughts about having and raising the baby also reflect the limits of her resources, not just her ambitions. She says she is sixteen, cannot support a child, and wants to find a family that genuinely wants to adopt. She does not believe her parents will help her, and worries that keeping the baby would prevent her from returning to school while leaving her unable to provide for the child. The novel presents her decision through the conditions surrounding it: age, income, family rejection, and the future she has struggled to imagine for herself.

The gifts at the restaurant’s small baby shower make the consequences of that decision newly tangible. The staff give her knitted clothes, a blanket with ducks, a teddy bear, toys, diapers, and a high chair. Their generosity moves Maribeth, but the objects also make her realize that she will not see her child use them. Faced with that recognition, she calls Avery MacLean to ask about adoptive parents. Her choice is emotionally difficult; the practical question of finding a suitable family cannot erase what giving the baby up will mean to her.

Support and an enlarged future

The Whittakers’ response offers a marked contrast to Bert’s restriction of Maribeth’s prospects. Elizabeth becomes attached to her and recognizes how much she values education. She wants to be with Maribeth after the birth, knowing that the separation from the baby will be painful. This support does not presume that Maribeth’s independence means being left alone; it meets her vulnerability with care while continuing to take her intellectual ambitions seriously.

John Whittaker and Elizabeth give Maribeth the money they had set aside for Annie Whittaker’s education, making college financially possible. They tell her she can return to her family, finish school in the spring, and then attend college wherever she chooses; she can also return to live with them. Their plan broadens her options beyond the restricted future Bert has imagined. It does not guarantee that returning home will be easy, and the Whittakers acknowledge that her father may still resent her choices, but it gives her a concrete route forward rather than merely encouragement.

The family also agrees that Maribeth will be presented to Kate as a friend, not as her biological mother, with the possibility that the truth may be told when Kate is older. That arrangement establishes a difficult boundary between Maribeth’s life as the child’s birth mother and the Whittakers’ role as adoptive parents. It sits beside the novel’s affirmation of her future: she must live with a consequential separation, while receiving the education and support that make a life beyond her father’s prescribed role possible.

Significance

The novel treats women’s independence as both an argument about who gets to decide and a question of material possibility. Bert’s ideals depend on women’s unpaid domestic labor and on men retaining authority over education, work, and family respectability. Maribeth’s plans require access to schooling and wages, but also a room, a job, help with coursework, medical arrangements, and people willing to support her through pregnancy and its aftermath.

Maribeth’s trajectory therefore neither equates agency with self-sufficiency nor suggests that ambition alone removes constraint. She is forced away from home, works to support herself, continues school through Tommy’s help, and makes an adoption plan under conditions she did not choose. The contrast between Bert’s narrow allowance for female education and the Whittakers’ college fund makes the novel’s central alternative concrete: a woman’s future can be treated as a life of her own, but realizing that future depends on whether others open or close the paths to it.