The Egg and I

By Betty MacDonald

A fictionalized version of Betty's life on a chicken farm in western Washington state in the late 1920s.
Newlyweds Betty and  Bob pooled their money and bought a rural acreage, intending to get in the chicken egg business. The property did have a house and few outbuildings and an orchard of mixed fruit trees. The house, while sturdy, had no modern comforts, no electricity, no bathroom, no furnace, no indoor plumbing. All their water had to be hauled in and heated in a stove in the kitchen, said stove being their main source of heat for the house. (Betty never mentions a fireplace or other wood burning stove, so I assume there was only the kitchen stove.) Laundry had to be done by hand. All the hot water had to be heated on the kitchen stove. In the winter, all the laundry had to be dried inside, as winter there was mostly rainy. Plus Betty had to help Bob with his work on the acreage, building chicken houses, pens for livestock, clearing the land for crops and gardens and clearing the orchard of unwanted trees and brush. They got up at 4 AM and worked all day and Betty had all the housework and food preparation too. And it wasn't too much longer before there was a little baby to take care of also.
So it was a hard life, very demanding, but Betty tells her story with humor and self-deprecation. Unfortunately, some of her humor comes across as looking down on the locals, whom she describes as ignorant, unenlightened, and, in some cases, lazy and dirty. She especially singles out her next door neighbors, the Kettles. And she has harsh words for the local native peoples, about whom she says:

"...the more I saw of them the more I thought what an excellent thing it was to take that beautiful country away from them."

Oddly though, she goes on to comment about the devastation to the land caused by logging:

"On the way we passed barren ugly hills which had once been beautiful green mountains and saw mile after mile of slashings [logging areas], ugly, dry as tinder and inexcusable." 

Never seems to occur to her that if the native peoples she despised were still in charge of the land, the mountains would be pristine and green instead of stripped bare.

The book, which was written in the early 1940s, has an interesting passage about abortion:

"One day when Bob and I were driving to Town, a man hailed us. We stopped and he climbed on the running board and leaned into the car confidentially. 'Say,' he said, 'heard you was that way.' 'Yes,' I said, 'I am.' The man leaned in farther so his face was uncomfortably close to mine. 'Just say the word and I'll fix you up. Drop by some evening with six dollars and I'll fix you good as new. Not a thing to it,' he said winking at Bob. 'Took care of Mrs. Smith when she was six months along and got rid of three for my own wife at three months. Just a plain old-fashioned buttonhook. Nothing to it.'

'Oh, him!' said the girl in the doctor's office in town. 'His wife's in the hospital right now recovering from her last abortion. We get his work in here all the time,' and she laughed heartily. I didn't think it was funny. 'Why don't they stop him? Why don't they arrest him?'

The girl sighed and looked out the window. 'If it wasn't him it would be someone else. If they can't find someone else to do it they abort themselves. The hospital's full of 'em all the time. Buttonhooks, bailing wire, hatpins. God, they're dumb.'

Just a little reminder of what abortion was like back before it was a woman's right to choose.

Literay Ladies' Guide review: http://www.literaryladiesguide.com/book-reviews/the-egg-and-i-by-betty-macdonald-1946-a-review/.