Book Review: Ms Goose

Title: Ms Goose: A Lib-retta

Author: Tamar Hoffs

Date: 1973

Publisher: Avondale

ISBN: none

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: two-color (blue and yellow) cartoons by the author

Quote: “Rapping her new freedom, / Crying that it’s lewd / Cause his wife’s not safe in bed, / When he’s in the mood.”

In 1973 a lot of people thought a married woman should not have a job outside the home. Their main concern was that if married women stayed in the workforce there wouldn’t be enough jobs for men. This was true, actually, and the problem of underemployment has only grown worse ever since. Women who thought they should have a fair chance to do the jobs that were available taunted the opposition with suggestions that they really wanted to behave badly toward their wives and daughters. Since most of them did not actually want that the 1970s feminist movement spent a lot of time arguing something that most Americans now accept as axiomatic.

Hoffs set her feminist barbs to the tunes of “Mother Goose” nursery rhymes.

“Mrs. Beau Peep just could not sleep,
No one could diagnose this;
Doctors were glib, but Women’s Lib.
Gave her a new prognosis!”

In 1973 active feminists had not yet turned against the breezy expressions “Women’s Lib” and “male chauvinism.” Hoffs used both in this short book.

Though she was a wife and mother herself, and her vision for other couples was that financial equality would help them be “loving-partners,” Hoffs also liked the idea that young women who slept around with “fair-weather friends” would have a free “choice to have or have not” the resulting babies, and unhappy wives would be able to use instructions from library books to get themselves divorced. Anti-feminists were free to taunt women like Hoffs with the claim that they were the ones telling or wanting women to leave their husbands.

Er. Um. Was there ever a women’s shelter somewhere that took in a woman whose story was “I just wanted to leave my husband and children because some obscure writer in California wrote a jingle that made it sound like fun”? Didn’t women who left for unworthy reasons run off with their other men, or go directly to jails or drug treatment clinics? Leaving a spouse and children for unworthy reasons was far more often something husbands did. Feminists argued successfully that more financial independence would help women who’d been abandoned by Deadbeat Dads. While the media stereotyped men in the 1970s bellowing that they wanted to be the sole breadwinners in their families, the reality was that a lot of men felt overwhelmed and gave up trying to be breadwinners at all.

Anyway this litle book contains a few dozen excellent examples of Bad Poetry, by which I mean the art of playing with patterns of word sounds without any pretense that the result rises higher, on the scale of Great Art, than “fun.” Good Bad Poetry is not painful to read in the way that poetry that aspires to be something more than fun often is. Good Bad Poetry can include stretches of the rules of poetry, like rhyming “Modern Ms Muffet / Reads and gets tough-it ,” that make some readers scream “You can’t do that in poetry,” but it’s not pretentious want-to-be-profound, it’s not humorless, and it’s not prose. It’s not written to be declaimed on formal occasions. It’s usually written to be sung.

Ms Goose didn’t make Hoffs rich and famous, nor did it make most of the population endorse the idea of the time to make a choice about motherhood coming after a woman is noticeably pregnant, nor are these ditties the feminist songs pop singers recorded and baby-boomer women remember...but it’s an appealing sample of the style of its period, and it’s still good for a chortle.

Also, even on the acrimonious baby-choice issue, Hoffs does spell out the more liberating choice: “Early to wed, we don’t advise...” and “There was a young woman who knew what to do. / She had two little children, spaced just like she wanted to.”