32 pages • 1 hour read
The Enormous Radio
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Background
Socio-Historical Context: The 1940s
The 1940s was a time of great upheaval. Across the globe, world populations were dealing with a shift in calamities as the widespread economic depression of the 1930s was replaced by a half decade of world war. The United States, at first a nation of people reluctant to enter into World War II, was forced into action with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The war machine that was mobilized to defeat Axis powers in the first half of the 1940s was the same manufacturing powerhouse needed to upend the deprivation felt by so many during the Great Depression. By the closing years of the decade, an American middle-class grew and prospered as the nation quickly became one of the world’s leading powers.
Women’s roles in and out of domestic spaces were also in great upheaval during this time. During the war years, as men went off to battle, women were tasked with replacing them in various areas. Some women served in the military in noncombat support roles. Women who remained in the States maintained their duties as homemakers while also taking up roles in the workforce. As the country increasingly mobilized wartime production, great numbers of workers were needed in factories, as well as other areas of commerce and business across the nation. Women were beginning to take on roles that had, for much of the early 20th century, been the domain of men. Then the war ended and those opportunities that had provided women with an entrance into the workforce were quickly stripped away. Men returning from war needed gainful employment. This return to normalcy meant relegating women back to their former, domestic duties.
In the time the Westcotts’ story unfolds, everything had returned to that sought-after normalcy. The nation moved toward greater prosperity and the delineation of gendered roles returned to the status quo present before those unwelcome wartime years. Women primarily served as homemakers once more, and the rising economy allowed those with greater wealth to employ domestic servants in their homes. This luxury offered wealthier women extended periods of leisure. One reading of Irene’s character is to see her serving as a warning to such women: Those who might shirk their responsibilities by obsessing with leisurely pursuits might find themselves disillusioned with their place in the world.
Social Context: Second-Wave Feminism
To read this story through a feminist lens, one must first locate its historical place amid various waves of the socio-political movement vying for equality of the sexes. Written in 1947, “The Enormous Radio” appears in print nearly 100 years after the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped author “Declaration of Sentiments,” a treatise that propelled the women’s suffrage movement for the next century. The 19th Amendment, granting American women the right to vote, was not yet 30 years old when this story was first published, while French counterparts weren’t able to take part in elections until 1945. Four years later, the French Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir published a seminal work of feminist philosophy with her book The Second Sex.
Cheever’s short story appears roughly 20 years before the second wave of feminism was christened with that distinctive label. With this wave, the focus broadened from suffrage to fight for women’s equality in numerous social settings, including those related to the workplace and to domestic duties. Even though the story predates this extended fight for gender equality, it contains elements of displeasure toward the culture of domesticity. When the radio first demonstrates its capability to amplify sounds from outside the Westcott home, it is the unwelcome noise of home appliances and domestic work that Irene hears most clearly through the speakers. This “sensitivity to discord” (34) that Irene is becoming attuned to is connected to a journey of self-discovery that unfolds throughout the rest of the story. It isn’t just the appliances she comes to hear, but the trials and tribulations that women face in a world where inequality of the sexes is very much clearly still set in place. This is most evident when Irene hears the violence a wife must endure from a physically abusive husband, as well as the knowledge that Irene must shoulder when her own husband will do nothing to stop another man from hitting his wife. Such violence against women was acceptable in the 1940s. In fact, it took another half century of fighting for equality to codify any substantial laws protecting women against acts of domestic violence. In the midst of a third wave of feminism, President Bill Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994. Seen this way, Cheever’s story can be understood as a narrative that depicts the troubling norms of its time while also foreshadowing the work still needed to guarantee gender equality for all.
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By John Cheever
