ASC Podcast

In this podcast, the host explores her family's history during the 1970s and 80s and how it reflects the broader narrative of the American family in crisis. She interviews her grandmother and father about their experiences in Evanston, Illinois. They discuss topics such as feminism, women's issues, and the challenges of divorce and single parenting. The grandmother shares her journey of becoming financially independent and starting her own business. They also talk about the isolation and struggles faced by divorced parents and the societal shift towards divorce during that time. Welcome to my podcast, which looks into my family's recent history and uncovering some of the major economic, cultural, and political trends that shaped American life and the conception of living in crisis during the 1970s and 80s. I'm your host, Lily Aaron, and today we'll listen to interviews I've conducted with my grandma and my dad, whom she raised along with my aunt in Evanston, Illinois, during these decades. Although seemingly subtle, their lives in this picturesque suburb of Chicago were a microcosm for the broader national narrative of the American family in crisis. Against the backdrop of divorce, economic changes, shifting social norms, and burgeoning youth culture, my dad's family navigated the changing tides of what it meant to pursue the American dream. In our time together, I'll explore how these challenges and transformations within Evanston and my own family mirrored the seismic shifts happening across the United States. Before we jump in, I'll give some insight as to how this will go. Between topics such as divorce and alcohol slash marijuana consumption, I will switch between the answers of my almost 85-year-old grandma, Susan Lardell, and my 53-year-old dad, Todd Aaron. We started on the topic of feminism. I'll let my grandma get into it. When I moved to Chicago after college, I married a man and married into a very, very conservative family. And I remember when I went to meet his two widow grandmothers, I was told that I couldn't wear slacks. And my future mother-in-law never wore slacks. So it was a changing dynamic. And I got a job at Marshall Fields. And I was the first Jewish person that they ever hired for their management training program. And I was very out there about that. But I was the first. And when I was sent to New York, I had to wear a hat and gloves. And to go to all my meetings, I had to wear a hat down to work in the morning. And it was a very strict, conservative kind of atmosphere. So when Betty for Dan came on the scene, we all kind of took an emotional gasp and didn't quite know what to make of her. Were you in community with a lot of other women in Edison when raising Dad and Aunt Debbie? Like, did you discuss, say, like Betty for Dan and other sort of liberatory things like that? No, we never discussed those things. But Erica John's book, Fear of Flying, came out. And that was a real wow. And we all ran out to buy that. And we were just kind of astounded by the language used and by the topics that she discussed. But truthfully, we were so busy raising our children, our babies, making sure they got to school and that they had lunches and things like that, that there wasn't a lot of discussion about that at the time. I think the thing that was discussed the most is that, among my friends, we had people that we knew who were running for aldermen or some political positions. And we were involved in that. But the women's issues, really, we all had decent lives. And that wasn't too much a part of my life. Among, say, yourself and other suburban women, was there an understanding of women, like an understanding of discrimination against women in terms of entrance to the workforce or just general economic status and the inability to handle their own finances? Was that discussed within the broader scheme of women generally outside of your community of, I'm assuming, predominantly white centers there? It may have been, but not in my circle. In my circle, we were all middle class, and we had been raised fairly liberally, but conservatively. So we were still in the area where we more or less deferred to our husbands, and the husbands were in charge of the finances. And we may have had jobs, but I didn't know anyone at that time who was a big money earner. And it wasn't until much later in my life, when I became single at age 40, that I had to take control of my own finances and become an important money earner. To provide some context thus far, Evanston is a city carved by redlining and racial covenants. Although my family moved to Evanston shortly after the last racial covenants were struck discriminatory real estate agencies and loan agencies largely limited Evanston's community of color to the 5th and 8th wards. This rendered many neighborhoods, like my own family's, almost entirely white. To draw on no one home to answer the phone, the lack of diversity within these informal consciousness-raising groups my grandmother participated in also created barriers to forging alliances with people of different races, socioeconomic classes, places of residence, and more. Thus, these groups provide a microcosm of many of the strengths and limits of this movement as a whole. Now, back to my grandma. Did you stay with your job in Marshallfield? Uh, for, I stayed there until I got pregnant. Um, and then only after you got divorced did you get another job? Correct. What was your job after? Uh, after I got divorced, I had a friend who, or an acquaintance, who had a part-time interviewing service, on-premise interviewing service, which was quite popular, particularly among divorced women. It was a great job where you would place down the paper, go to the company's, it was called on-premise interviewing, you'd go to the company's offices, business site, and you would interview for two or three days, and send them the candidates, and then they would, from what you winnowed down, they would usually select someone. So, it was a three to four day a week job, and it didn't pay very well. They wanted us to bring in new business, and after we replaced the candidate, we only got 20% of their fee. And so, after a while, I decided that 20% wasn't very much. If I was going to bring in business, I might as well bring it in for myself. So, I left and started my own business, and I was quite successful. Wait, this is the first time I've ever heard of this. What was your own business? My own business was on-premise interviewing, but I rented an office, and the office is still there. It's on Davis Street, and it's now surrounded by two large buildings, but it's this little historic building, and they still have the front of it, and it's on Davis and Sherman, and just this little small space, and I had an office with a window facing the street on the second floor, and I had a man that I was dating at the moment, he set it up and gave me a chair, and there was a desk there, and I did very well. To everyone's surprise. Did you find yourself struggling between working and raising Dad and Debbie? It was horrible. Really? Yes. I was very, very torn, because Debbie and Todd, your dad, were very young at the time, and there were times I had to be at the office, I either had to go, or times that I would be there, and I might not be home after school, and they needed supervision, and it was very difficult, but it was difficult to be a divorced mom, couldn't afford household help, and I had no choice, but I had to make a living. Did you rely at all on, like, I don't know, any other suburban community network, like any of your friends, or family to help out? Well, I didn't have any family here. Yeah. So, and my friends were all, they had young children themselves, so, I mean, I wasn't gone for, you know, days at a time, but I was gone for hours. Yeah. And I stayed in close contact, and I wasn't that far from where I lived, it was only about a mile. But they did have to be on their own for a period of time. I'm sorry. My grandma's isolation was really striking to me. As the Time article, Behavior, the American Family, Future Uncertain, pointed out, in less complicated, less urbanized days, the average U.S. family was an extended or kinship family. This meant simply that the parents and their children were surrounded by relatives, in-laws, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. But my grandma left all of this behind in Traverse City, Michigan. As she and other Americans became more mobile, their kinfolk were gradually left behind. As a result, the typical family had evolved into an isolated nuclear family. Having gone through divorce, this isolation grew even more stark. To set the stage, here are a few crucial statistics about the topic of divorce. According to the same Time Magazine article written in 1970, the divorce rate had doubled in the last ten years. Likewise, the number of households headed by women had increased by more than a third in a single generation. In this vein, my grandparents got divorced in 1981, when my dad was 13. I'll let them tell it. Would you say they were quote-unquote, like, latchkey kids? Well, they were, but not for long periods of time. I mean, I wasn't gone, like, all day, you know. And if somebody was sick, then I wouldn't go to work. I was able to make my own schedule. But there were times that I had to be out. Plus, they had a father who lived nearby. So, but he was at work, but certainly he shared the, he shared the, the bedroom. He's not a father. And they were two very high-energy, energetic young people. Both had minds of their own and were very determined. So, that part wouldn't have been easy in a two-parent family. No. On a similar note, I think branching a little bit more into what divorce was like in the 70s and 80s, you know, divorce rates really soared during this period because it was all around just a more socially viable solution to marital conflict. Like, like, there's the introduction of, like, divorce where, like, no one was at fault. Like, originally, you had to determine who was at fault for separation, whereas that didn't have to happen anymore. So, it was legally easier to divorce. And, of course, like, with what we've talked about with the women's liberation movement and further economic independence, like, say, with your job, and more cultural shifts towards individualism and personal fulfillment, there was certainly a societal shift towards divorce during this time. And I wondered if you have any thoughts on that. I would say that there was a shift. That it certainly became more accepted. And there were more people doing it. And it became an answer to unhappiness. I think right in that area where I was there, there definitely was a shift. And I think that that was with women's liberation. And women knew that they could get jobs and support themselves and, you know, maybe find a happier life for themselves. Would you say that this was a shift from when your parents were married? Like, would they have ever considered, like, was divorce considered an option if a couple was facing difficulty prior to this time period? Well, actually, my parents had a very unhappy marriage. And we, as children, had talked to my mother at times about that subject. But she was not college educated. And she felt that she was trapped, that there was no way that she could get a job that would sustain her, where at least I was college educated. And I was in an era where women were going into the workforce. And I felt, hoped, that I would be able to support myself. And if I hadn't been able to, my choices might have been different. Do you think that the entrance of, like, I don't know, feminist liberatory talk or anything else like that had played a role in your divorce? No. No? No. It was something that, I think looking back on it, this is my thing, looking back on it, I think we think that it was more important than it was in certainly my friends' everyday lives. I mean, we may have discussed something that was in the newspaper or something that was said on TV, but, or I think most of all we picked up a book, like, Erica John's book, or maybe some of us read Betty Friedan's book. But we were really, among my friends and the people that I knew, we were so busy living our lives and raising our children that I don't think it brought about any kind of a change or a shift in our own personal lives. I think it was so subtle and so slow that we could look back on it now and say that that was responsible for a shift. But I don't think at the time we were really even aware of it. We were just trying to raise our kids and live our lives. And I just have always told myself that if my parents are happier apart, and it's more fulfilling, as hard as it may be for me for lacking, you know, the conveniences of having an intact nuclear, you know, family, it was worth it. Now, to that point, each of my parents premarried, and that was a challenge, an adjustment challenge, in that I, you know, I could easily accept my parents, or relatively easily accept my parents being divorced, and being apart from one another, but then when they each recoupled with people that obviously were not my biological parents, you know, that was challenging. How did this affect your day-to-day movement? Yeah, that's a good question. So, both of my parents, you know, my mom and dad lived in a condominium building. My father got an apartment that was literally at the other end of the block, so they didn't run into each other unless by intention. Later, my father went on to get two other apartments, you know, live in two other apartments across my hometown, which is quite small, or relatively small, I should say. And so, my sister and I, and your Aunt Debbie, she and I would split our time on allotment of days with my mom and then allotment of days with my dad, and on the days that we would be with my father, you know, he would step up and make sure that we had lunches, and that, you know, our homework was done, and all of our daily chores and responsibilities were getting fulfilled, and he was prepping for those same things, you know, in the way that, you know, my mother historically always had. Here at Vivid, to talk more about youth culture and substance use. Were you ever worried about, I don't know, any substance abuse issues, like, growing up, like, were you at, like, before college, like, what was sort of the vibe concerning consumption? Yes, I was very worried. I was very worried. And this was all new, and they were in a very large environment, and, you know, school-wise, there was a lot going on, and as a parent, you can only exert so much control. Now, let's hear from my dad on growing up in this household. Since you just touched on it, what was sort of that culture around drinking and weed consumption, if any? Like, I guess, also touching on, like, the unsupervised component of it, and, like, where you would go to partake in such activities, whether or not you were being, I don't know, supervised in that sense, like, if none other than Papa Laurie was aware of your own consumption. They really weren't aware of my consumption, with the exception of when they were aware of it, and they took away my car for over-consuming. So you had a car? I did have a car. Did that afford you a lot of mobility in going and getting alcohol and going to people's places to get drunk? Well, I never went, well, I never got the alcohol. I went with people when we would get the alcohol, and it was just good, wholesome fun, or that's how I thought of it at the time, given that, you know, nobody got hurt beyond maybe throwing up from alcohol sickness, but, you know, it was a time where we played a lot of drinking games, and we had a friend's house, and, you know, my parents weren't aware of it, but at the friend's house, we could drink as long as we didn't drive, and we did drive when we were drinking, but we would go out and, you know, it certainly would lead to, you know, the events would lead to drinking back at the house, and we would drive around the city and steal street signs and other forms of delinquency. You know, once I left their house, they weren't monitoring what I was doing or who I was with or anything like that. Right. So it was pretty much a, you know, like the free hand of capitalism allowed us to drink because we weren't getting caught, we weren't getting punished, nobody was getting hurt, and so the market forces promoted it or indulged us in it, and we took advantage of it, and fortunately, you know, by the grace of God, we were very lucky, and you know from your upbringing that I was much more strict and concerned, and I never wanted anybody drinking or smoking or using substances with any kind at our house because times changed. Yeah. I've cut him short before he got into anything too delinquent, but what my dad is describing is exactly what Matt Lassiter attributed teen delinquency to decades prior. Parents too busy with working, cars and empty homes enabling unsupervised consumption of marijuana and alcohol, leading to exposure to other, more nefarious activities. And it was always just a lot of fun. It was only later, you know, once I got to college that I realized that, well, that novelty to me, I discovered that some people that it led to alcohol, you know, becoming an alcoholic and to an addiction that people fight for me. It was just a casual thing, a neat way to kind of have fun with my friends, but nothing really more than that. That concludes the scope of my interviews. Although I wish to cover more on affordable housing efforts and busing in Evanston, my grandma and dad's comments on feminism, divorce, substance use, and teen culture address a vast range of some of the cultural nuances of this period. From my own family's perspective, the American family wasn't in crisis. They were just evolving. The increased capacity of middle-class white women to obtain higher education, enter the workforce, and have autonomy in finance and marital settings helped flip traditional gender roles on their head, contributing much to the notion of panic. Through all of this, young kids navigated a suburban reality even their parents didn't quite understand. Increased mobility, absence of supervision, and access to drugs and alcohol not only bolstered somewhat rebellious and reckless culture, but challenged parents who were themselves adapting to new societal roles and expectations. Overall, the American family, whether whole, divided, blended, or anything else, navigated these times of change, resiliently mirroring the shifting societal norms in nearly every aspect. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.