Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley was born March 21, 1905, in Ontario, Oregon, the daughter of Daniel and Julia Kiesel McGinley.[2] Her father was a land speculator and her mother a pianist. McGinley's family moved to a ranch near Iliff, Colorado, when she was only three months old. She didn't enjoy her early childhood on the ranch, where she and her brother felt isolated and friendless. At the age of 12, her father died and the family moved again, to Utah to live with a widowed aunt. She studied at the University of Southern California and musical theater at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where she was a Kappa Kappa Gamma, graduating in 1927. After selling some of her poems, she decided to move to New York in 1929. McGinley held an assortment of jobs there, including copywriter for an advertising agency, teacher in a junior high school in New Rochelle, and staff writer for Town and Country.[2]

In 1934, she met Charles L. Hayden, who worked for the Bell Telephone Company during the day and played jazz piano in the evening. They married on June 25, 1937, and moved to Larchmont, New York. The suburban landscape and culture of her new home was to provide the subject matter of much of McGinley's work. McGinley had two daughters.[2] Daughter Julie Hayden was the author of a favorably reviewed collection of short stories entitled The Lists of the Past.[3]

In 1956, McGinley published a rhymed children's story called "The Year Without a Santa Claus" in Good Housekeeping magazine, and the piece generated enough positive interest to facilitate its being printed in book form the following year. In 1968 actor Boris Karloff recorded a narrated version of the story for a promotional Capitol Records LP which also featured various Christmas songs from the label's catalog on the flip side. Karloff's reading is warm, vibrant and perfectly nuanced, and very similar to the feel he brought to his classic narration of the How the Grinch Stole Christmas television classic. It was also one of Karloff's last performances—he died a few months later in February 1969.[4]

Phyllis McGinley died in New York City in 1978.

The Phyllis McGinley Papers can be found at the Special Collections Research Center of Syracuse University. The collection comprises personal and business correspondence, writings, and memorabilia. Spanning 1897 to 1978, the collection reflects not only the professional career of the American humorist and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet but also the wide scope of her audience. Writings include, for any given title, any combination of work sheets, manuscripts, production records, and published versions for McGinley's books, essays, interviews, lyrics, poetry, reviews, scripts, speeches and stories. Memorabilia consists primarily of financial, legal, and printed materials, photographs and scrapbooks.[5]

Marriage and stability were extremely important to her after a childhood of frequent moves and "never having a real home."[2] Having married happily at 32, she loved domesticity the way a woman can only when it has come late to find her. McGinley's life with her husband, Charles Hayden, was, her daughter Patsy Blake stated, "a sanguine, benign, adorable version of 'Mad Men.' " The couple entertained avidly: the regular guest list included Bennett Cerf, the drama critic Walter Kerr and leading advertising executives of the day.[6]

An ardent Roman Catholic, she embraced domesticity in the wake of second-wave feminism, wrote light verse in the wake of the rise of modern avant-garde and confessional poetry, and filled the gap between the housewife and the feminist intellectual who rejected the domestic life. McGinley would spend most of her professional writing career fending off criticism that tended to diminish her image of a suburban housewife poet—an image that was meant to dismiss any depth in her writing. McGinley actually labeled herself a "housewife poet," and unlike Anne Sexton, who used the term to be ironic and self-deprecating, McGinley used it as an honorable and purposefully crafted identity.

Phyllis McGinley felt that the capability to foster familial relationships was what gave women their power, and she fought to defend their rights to do so. Despite her admiration for the housewife and her duties, she fully recognized the monotony and drudgery that went along with this role. Most of all however, Phyllis McGinley felt that, no matter what path a woman chose to follow, the most important thing was for a woman to recognize and acknowledge her unique and honorable place in life. McGinley's point, an eternally divisive one, was clear: a woman who enjoyed herself as a wife and mother should not submit to imposed ambitions[6] nor feel constrained to demand change in the institution of the Church which she so cherished. "The Betty Friedan philosophy, that "committed" women will not need the regard of any man to feel alive, is rationally and effectively refuted by Miss McGinley."[7]

The Plain Princess by Phyllis McGinley is the coming-of-age story of Esmeralda, who learns to shed her elitist disposition and becomes a humble and caring princess. Published in 1945, it is a modern take on the conventional fairy tale. McGinley accomplishes this through the reversals of gender roles, cultural perceptions of Suburbia, and fairy tale expectations of beauty. While it contains many elements of a classic fairy tale, there are also elements of a feminist fairy tale. There is a complete nonreliance on men to resolve the complications that arise. Unlike in many other traditional fairy tales with a female protagonist, the Prince or the Father does not have any impact on the outcome of the protagonist's fate. One character that does have a strong effect on Esmeralda's fate is Dame Goodwit. However, her role is reversed in this story as she uses her intelligence and wisdom in order to help Esmeralda achieve her goals. In traditional fairy tales, a strong and powerful woman character like Dame Goodwit would either have been evil or have possessed magical powers. Instead, McGinley offers the reader a portrayal of a completely independent human woman.[8]

In the story, Esmeralda is thrust from her royal life into a suburban setting. The socialization of the princess within her new environment has a "magical" effect on her and rids her of her negative qualities. The transformation occurs when she becomes an independent female, both in knowledge and utility. This coincides with McGinley's view that a woman's role is not limited by suburbia but in fact is enhanced by it. While she admits that at times the day-to-day life can be monotonous, McGinley maintains that her suburban lifestyle is both fulfilling and liberating.[8]

The many manuscript drafts of McGinley's writings reveal her method of composition for various works. Perhaps most interesting are her essays, for which she often composed a "serious" version before producing her characteristically humorous final manuscript. Suburbia and sainthood are the prominent topics of McGinley's writing, together with occasional pieces produced for various holidays, especially Christmas.[5]

Besides her popular reputation, she earned the admiration of a number of critics and poets, including W.H. Auden, who praised her imagination and technical skill in his foreword for Times Three.[9] Auden praised her dexterous, unostentatious rhyming and found in her familial sensibility a likeness to Austen and Woolf, yet also a singular, accessible voice.[6]

McGinley has been criticized for providing readers with transient humor but not actually effecting any change. Betty Friedan has said that McGinley was a good craftsman but did nothing to improve or change the lives of housewives. To Friedan, domesticity cripplingly confined women and did not allow them a chance to pursue their own interests or careers. This was a reoccurring opinion amongst many of the second wave feminists who were McGinley's contemporaries. As a result, her poetry was largely ignored by feminist critics.

In 1964 she was honored with the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre Dame, which describes it as "An honor to a man or woman who has 'enriched the heritage of humanity.'"

Another criticism was McGinley's use of light verse poetry. Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal, "Phyllis McGinley is out – light verse: she's sold herself" (Leroy 14–15). Her use of light verse in the midst of the rise of modern avant-garde and confessional poetry made McGinley's poetry seem dated in form, as well as in ideology.

Phyllis McGinley was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her book Times Three. She was the first to be awarded the poetry prize for a collection of light verse.

Light verse poetry is poetry that attempts to be humorous and was the style of choice for Phyllis McGinley. She chose to write in this manner for multiple reasons, one of which being its practicality. The New Yorker, for which she very often wrote, paid more for "light" poetry than it did for "serious" poetry. McGinley, in the book The Writer Observed, describes the difference between her so-called light verse and the poems with more weighty material. In the book, she states that she has arrived at a distinction between the two: "the appeal of light verse is to the intellect and the appeal of serious verse is to the emotions."

Her ability to target this audience and make humorous routine responsibilities made her very popular. "In times of unrest and fear, it is perhaps the writer's duty to celebrate, to single out some values we can cherish, to talk about some of the few warm things we know in a cold world."[10]

Perhaps the main reason for her utilization of light verse though, was that the skills needed for writing this style were similar to the skills of mastering familial life. "Like writing light verse, housewifery took seemingly effortless skill, nuance, and balance; it, too, required a balancing act of mother/housekeeper/hostess where wit and humor were employed just as much as in McGinley's poetry. Delicacy in awkward situations not only was the role of the hostess housewife, but also could be said of McGinley's verse as well. Both professions benefit from perfect form and the ability to be light with one's feet." (Leroy 16).

McGinley's skill in crafting perfect verses of poetry not only produced brilliant poems poking fun at the everyday happenings of life but also, like all great poets, provided a medium in which she could espouse her views on society.

McGinley was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. She received a number of honorary Doctor of Letters degrees (Boston College, Dartmouth College, Marquette University, St. John's University, Smith College, Wheaton College, Wilson College) as well as the Catholic Book Club's Campion Award (1967), the Catholic Institute of the Press Award (1960), and the Laetare Medal, conferred by the University of Notre Dame in 1964. She won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for her light verse collection, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades with Seventy New Poems (1960).[5]

Walker, Nancy. "Humor and Gender Roles: The Funny "Feminism" of the Post-World War II Suburbs." American Quarterly Vol. 37. No. 1, Special Issue: American Humor (Spring, 1985), pp. 98–113. JSTOR. Web. Feb 8, 2012.

Beuka, Robert. Suburbianation, reading suburban landscape in twentieth-century american fiction and film. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.

Donaldson, Scott. The Suburban Myth. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2002. Print.

Leroy, Megan Anne. Writing the Mean: Phyllis McGinley and American Domesticity. University of Florida, 2007. Feb 2, 2012.

Bellafonte, Ginia. "Suburban Rapture". New York Times 2008. (December 24). Feb 2, 2012.

• Ono,Shaun; Anderson, Jessica; Sands, Mary; Jeske, Marshall, "A Modern Princess: Reversal of Cultural and Fairy Tale Norms in The Plain Princess", Children's Literature Archive, Ryerson University
• The Gloria Skurzynski papers