Monochrome Dreams-The Story (3 of 4)

Despite its limited visibility her career was still nothing but promising. But somewhere along the line Edna met and began dating Robert Miller, a mechanical engineer. They were married July 21, 1951, just four days before her salt bath was patented. One year later, Edna abruptly resigned from Cyanamid and moved to rural Bethlehem, Connecticut with her husband.

A letter from Cyanamid to Wm. S. Merrell Company (a similar research facility) from around that time reads,

I am answering your letter of June 27 to Mrs. Edna S. Miller. Mrs. Miller has recently left our employ to take up the profession of keeping house and raising a family.

Why would a successful, career-driven young woman sacrifice the very future that she had built for herself? According to Susan, her mother was very conflicted on the issue. She wanted to be an independent woman and to define herself outside of gender, yet she also valued her ability to participate in the unique experiences of bearing and nurturing children. “I honestly believe she was brilliant and could have had an amazing career if she had devoted her life to it, but I’m not sure she would have been very happy. I think she would have felt that she had missed out on an important part of life.” Susan pointed out tensions more pervasive than even Edna may have realized, which are the very terms upon which “motherhood” can be achieved.

When asked if socio-historical context affected Edna’s decision to become a domestic housewife, Susan stated, “I honestly don’t know if 20 years would have made that much difference. What really would have made a difference would have been a husband who supported her in her career and didn’t expect her to make a choice between a career and a family, but let her have both.”

While Edna may have been able to violate the blind face of professional and educational gender roles, she was still confined to her husband’s notion of ‘family’ and ‘mother’. The fact that her husband could get married and change virtually nothing about his professional life whereas Edna had to completely relinquish hers demonstrates the extent to which gender and marital roles, then and now, weigh so much more heavily on women and their identities.

Edna and Robert raised three daughters, two of whom were approached about this story, and both testified that the occupational shift to rural Connecticut housewife had resounding effects on their mother. After having demonstrated her strength, worldliness and independence, Edna was thrust into a highly gendered environment that was in many ways a degeneration of the life she had worked so hard to achieve for herself. According to her eldest daughter, Laurel,

Making the adjustment from work to family life, I think she did her best but I don’t think she was happy with it. She had always been a cosmopolitan kind of a person…I think she was happy to start a family, but I think once they moved up to Bethlehem it was ]really[ difficult for her. She wasn’t the kind of person that fit in well with the women who were there. They were, for the most part, uneducated, gossipy, just not her type of people. And she’s shy, she doesn’t make friends easily.

This new lifestyle remorselessly denied Edna the career that she had attained through her determined will and gritty, if subtle, character. Despite being a wonderful, loving mother, the awareness of what she had given up left her extremely isolated and stifled. Laurel went on to say, “I guess I never realized how out of place she was as a young wife until I was older…it was because she really wasn’t their type of person. She was just…she was more unique, she was more her own person…those people needed to be together, she didn’t need people as much, but still I think she was lonely.”

Top image: robert blowing on coals to start a fire (taken by Edna). Above: Bethlehem (taken by Edna)