There is a longstanding wrong that needs to be righted and I think UNH alumni, along with America's sweetheart Sandra Bullock, can get the job done. I am referring to the unfairly harsh and hateful maligning of New Hampshire author Grace Metalious. She not only did not deserve to be vilified the way she was, she deserves accolades for her writing and the profound positive impact it made toward social change over the last 50 years.

Metalious (1924-1964) became famous for her rather infamous novel Peyton Place, which was published in 1956. Metalious wrote her novels, especially Peyton Place, her first, in response to what she saw while growing up in New Hampshire. The rest of her life was heavily influenced by the world's reaction to it—a reaction that was so big it can be compared to few other novels. Uncle Tom's Cabin comes the closest. The book reaped either intense outrage or empathy, and was followed by substantial commercial exploitation that included strange film and television adaptations that were also quite popular. But Metalious was not treated with the respect that Harriet Beecher Stowe was. The reaction to her and her book was intensely critical and punitive, from the central lakes region of New Hampshire, rippling out across the country and beyond.

It is perplexing that the very thing she sought to expose, the harsh dismissal of people perceived as different (what sociologists call marginalization), especially while posing as pious, the harmful effects of a prejudiced and patriarchal society, was in turn the force that snubbed her work and sullied her reputation as a writer, and as a person.

Metalious was born Marie Grace de Repentigny in Manchester, N.H., of first-generation Franco-American parents. She lived in many different apartments throughout the city as her mother tried to pass for another ethnicity. Her parents divorced when she was 11. She also lived with her French-speaking grandmother and a sister. Coming from a "broken home," especially in a Catholic enclave, was rather scandalous in those days. By the age of 17 she was pregnant and married a neighborhood boy. Again scandalous, but not particularly uncommon in the '40s. What was uncommon, and beyond scandalous, was that she lived with her boyfriend before marriage. Consent to marry was withheld for a while because the marriage crossed both religious and ethnic lines. Her boyfriend was Greek. As benign as this sounds now, in working-class Manchester it was considered ruinous.

Controversial writing must have been in her bones, for Metalious began writing in the fourth grade and received a reprimand for her very first story for writing about a brother who didn't exist. Another controversy came in high school for a play she wrote that was not appreciated. At the very least, she had an inherently rebellious nature because she simply didn't conform to the expectations imposed on her by society. She was keenly cognizant and observant of the subtle social hypocrisies and taboos of her childhood and early adulthood that were accepted by others as normal and necessary, if considered at all. This was more than unusual for a female, who felt a powerful pressure from every direction-- home, school, church--to behave in very specific ways. From her teenage years on Metalious lived, dressed and wrote the way she wanted to, which was often in stark contrast to expected norms.

She began writing seriously after moving to Durham. She and George '51 moved here with their first baby so that he could earn a degree in education on the GI Bill. Though three more babies would follow, she concentrated her time and energy on her writing when to do so was very negatively reinforced. She was often accused of being a bad housewife and mother, and certainly by the standards of the day, she was. Perhaps even by today's standards. It has been reported that the only clean spot in her Gilmanton home, which itself was a rundown old house that didn't always have running water, was where she kept her typewriter. In the age of pumps and pearls for everyday housewifery, she was well known for wearing men's flannel shirts and was nicknamed "Pandora in Blue Jeans" when she became famous. She was a heavy smoker and drinker, and was said to swear like a sailor. It is impossible to accuse her of being guilty of the social hypocrisy that her books would expose.

And it was social hypocrisy that she wrote of. As writers are told to do still, she wrote what she knew. Many of the plot lines in her books were taken from true accounts of New England life, and all of the "back story" reflected the time and place where she had lived. She wrote about the terrible side to mill work, a life she knew well, growing up in a major textile town among the working class who were trying to succeed there. She wrote of women, of all ages, but especially adolescent and young married women, and their triumphs and traumas, naturally including their sexual and reproductive lives. She wrote of what they thought, how they felt and what they wanted out of life. She showed how they did and did not have power, and how power was used against them. And she wrote of community. How it functions well and how it harms. How it takes a village to raise a child, well and not so well. She called the village out, and held the village accountable, and the villagers got angry, very angry.

The basic plot of Peyton Place is the story of the lives of two girls as they mature in a small New Hampshire town. They are best friends as children but can't remain so into adulthood, mostly because they are from different sides of town. Allison is the child of a single mother who covers for her daughter's illegitimacy by feigning widowhood. Her mother is middle class with aspirations to become a writer. Selena is the daughter of Allison's mother's maid. She is a beautiful child from a poor two-parent home that today would be called highly dysfunctional. Her mother is both mentally and physically unwell (her husband abuses her) and is unable to protect her daughter, whom he eventually rapes. She becomes pregnant, has an abortion, and a couple of years later, she murders him when he tries to attack her again. Both girls attempt to make their way in the world with very little support from that world. Along the way the reader becomes familiar with the families and neighbors of both girls and how their families operate for better and worse within the small puritanical town that was a composite of many towns, and stood for any town. It is so well written as to never be dull, and at times is poetic in its prose. It is intelligent and accurate in its portrayal of the townspeople. It is also fair. Though its social criticism is clear, Metalious isn't heavy-handed in her condemnation. She shows all sides, the often competing and conflicting sides of issues, as she did with the illegal abortion.

I am also a child of this village. Metalious and I went to the same high school. I can attest to the unflinching honesty in her book.

There is another important point to be made about Peyton Place, and that is that it is not the novel Metalious wrote. There are three ways that her manuscript was changed. The title was chosen by the publisher, probably to link it to Kings Row. She had titled it The Tree and the Blossom, indicating what she wanted to talk about.

While there are plenty of sex scenes in the book, there is one that she didn't write in her original version of the book. It's a scene the publisher required her to add that isn't pertinent to the plot. Metalious was furious.

In her story the rape is by the girl's father. Metalious took this story almost exactly from an actual 1947 New Hampshire patricide. It was, in fact, the impetus for her novel. But the publisher refused to sign the book contract unless the rapist was changed to a stepfather so that there would be no actual blood relationship. She agreed, because she also didn't really have a choice but was very unhappy with the change, saying that it changed her book from "tragedy to trash." She also knew it disturbed her introduction of the topic of abortion, because it was the blood relation that convinced the town doctor to uncharacteristically perform the illegal procedure. She was, of course, right.

Metalious wrote four novels, all of which were published, and all of which reached best-seller status. It isn't likely that a no-talent hack could have done that, but such is the claim often levied against her. There has always been a dismissal of that which is popular as not being worthy of scholarly attention, and Peyton Place, the first book to ever achieve actual blockbuster status. It joined the best-seller list before it came out and stayed there for 59 weeks, blowing away the previous No. 1 title, Gone With The Wind). It was more popular than almost any book had ever been. Even though most Americans read at least parts of it (the wide demographics alone of who read it are remarkable) it was considered low-brow pulp fiction because of its shocking content and its second release in paperback, even though it was written to protest reality, not to titillate. Without the backing of academia, Metalious was thrown under the bus as a writer, and the publishing industry, which she and her book would transform forever, was happy to run her over again and again to sell even more books. I would argue the dismissal of her book as low-brow was just another type of the marginalization that she was protesting.

Metalious could not help herself on this count either. She did not have an education beyond high school (although she was very well read), and she had doubts about herself as a serious writer, which the negative feedback of course, fueled. Naturally, the evidence on this issue is the writing itself, and it's telling that most of her worst reviews were from New England residents who were most offended by her work. While many called the book perverted trash, few serious reviewers dismissed her talent completely, saying that her writing style was in fact gifted, but that her choice of subject matter was where she erred, or some similar paternalistic pandering. Many reviews were more scathing than anything I've ever heard of for a writer save Salman Rushdie. William Loeb, the conservative New Hampshire newspaper publisher who virtually controlled the printed media in the state for decades, called her a filth monger and in capital letters wrote in an editorial:

"THERE ALWAYS ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE PREOCCUPIED WITH THE BARNYARD ASPECTS OF EXISTENCE THAN WITH THE BRIGHT LIGHT THAT SHINES FROM ABOVE AND DISTINGUISHES MAN FROM BEAST." Manchester Union Leader, 1957

When all else failed, and her critics--a vast bevy of book banners and burners-- made sure (Peyton Place was banned in many libraries, some states and several countries. including Canada. for being obscene. Measures were taken in some places to criminalize its sale. Since the critics couldn't find any real fault with the writing, they claimed she hadn't actually written it herself, sometimes attributing the work to her husband, an educated college graduate who could be accepted as the author of impolite topics. Or the author, they claimed, was a female friend who was better educated and an experienced writer, or her publisher. All such claims have been proven false. It isn't hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for a struggling young female writer to process the unprecedented firestorm of criticism that her work created.

She would never receive any awards or recognition from the literary world beyond the wild commercial success of Peyton Place. Still, the writing should speak for itself, even today. And though of course this was and always will be an ultimately subjective evaluation, I do not see how her talent can be questioned after just reading the opening sentences of Peyton Place:

"Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while."

As a writer she was often compared to Sinclair Lewis, and less frequently, William Faulkner. Metalious herself has often been quoted as saying, "If my writing is lousy, then a hell of a lot of people have lousy taste." She was, of course, right again.

There are few subjects that Metalious' work did not examine. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about her work is how far-reaching and inclusive of our societal shortcomings it was. There isn't much that she didn't cover, with the exception of drug use, and that was because it wasn't much of a problem in New England at that time. Alcoholism, which was, is well covered. I believe that it is the plethora of issues that prove her book was a work of social protest. It was not intended to be a racy book but one that pointed out all the ways that so many people were barred from the much-touted American dream. Many of the barriers had nothing to do with gross family income, although poverty and all of its negative side effects were integral to the whole story. Much like Steinbeck's work, Peyton Place is a page-turning polemic.

Issues that are explored in the book include abortion, incest, illegitimacy, female sexuality, teenage sexuality, bias based on class, gender, ethnicity, race and religion, domestic violence, suicide, physical disability and poverty. The majority of these topics were not commonly written about or even discussed, and this sealed-lip sentiment literally came from the top and trickled down to even the farthest corners of the country, which was at the time in a strange sexual and political panic that compounded the situation. It took not just talent but courage to tell this story. By today's standards it isn't a shocking tale at all, and Grace never understood the wild reaction to her discussions of sexual matters. It was the sexually repressed society that she had written about that really overreacted, and just as the powers that were couldn't stop Elvis from gyrating, they couldn't stop many from reading the "dirty book" that everyone was talking about.

And it wasn't just sexually related topics that caused an uproar. Metalious had much to say about the way of life in New England, and probably many other parts of the country, starting with the rocky foundations that the towns were built on.

It's particularly telling that she chose to include a racist backdrop to the novel, when, set in an almost all-white state, she could have omitted it. Instead, Metalious has the town named for an escaped slave who moved north, married a white woman and built a castle high above the growing town that was named for him, so he would never have to see white people again. The town would forever live in the shadow of his legacy. She mentions "that lady from Massachusetts named Stowe" when one of the town elders is explaining about the "friggin' nigger." Dr. David Watters, UNH professor of English and director of the Center for New England Culture, explains that these passages "undermine the abolitionist credentials of earlier New Englanders in order to historicize the contemporary intolerance towards outsiders."

Metalious's staunchest defender has been scholar Ardis Cameron of the University of Southern Maine, who was instrumental in getting the 1999 edition of Peyton Place released, for which she wrote a forward. She makes copious pitches for Peyton Place as an important precursor to feminist literature, but also concedes that the protest was broader than that, stating that "In ways that would foreshadow the modern feminist movement, Peyton Place turned the "private" into the political. By reinterpreting incest, wife beating, and poverty as signs of social as well as individual failure, Metalious turned "trash" into a powerful political commentary on gender relations and class privilege. In addition to calling attention to the subject of female reproductive rights, Metalious was groundbreaking in showing women as sexual beings, apparently to the great surprise of many.

And Metalious made it clear that it wasn't just income but class that could work against a child, saying how a girl could be considered "a born whore," her fate prescribed to her. Or how punitive illegitimacy was to a child, and how schools, parents' choices, accidents, reputations or even just gossip could make or break a kid in an overly rigid social structure. The book repeatedly shines a light on class bias, the us/ them mentality, as when the town doctor condemns the poor as parasites who live in "cesspools" and "produce kids by the dozen."

Analysis of her work as intentional protest is difficult because, wary of the public's abuse of her, she made few comments about her work. But it is evident in her writing. With just the abortion issue alone she was illustrating the unfairness of illegal abortion, especially in cases of rape, incest or the age of the mother, in an extremely convincing scenario. The idea that this type of an expose could be unintentional is itself not credible. In my favorite comment about her work, Vanity Fair writer Michael Callahan wrote in 2006 that the book was, "… what Grace intended it to be: a cultural bitch slap at the duplicitous notions of proper conduct in the age of Eisenhower." He also wrote that "Peyton Place is a hybrid of the literary and the sordid, Upton Sinclair by way of Forever Amber. … at its heart it is a manifesto, a blistering indictment of small town values, classism and racism--one that got lost in the titillating pages that Americans dog-eared and read behind closed blinds."

The book is historically significant for its shock value. It was filled with taboo topics that were not supposed to be discussed in polite society. That was the point. The public largely missed the point. The story itself, while not being overly sentimental, was attempting to elicit empathy. This is an area where Metalious was absolutely masterful. She elicits empathy for characters that society routinely ignored because of their unlikable or undesirable traits. For example, in the scene of the men locking themselves into a cellar on a hard cider drinking binge, she manages to elicit your sympathy and understanding, not your disgust, for who and what they are. She does this repeatedly; you root for the young lady of "loose morals," the girl who wants a career, another girl whose arm is torn off in an accident, the demented, syphilis-ridden abused wife who takes her own life, and Selena, even as she is bashing her father's head in with a fire poker. In fact, it was not just sexy passages, but these empathy-inducing episodes, that people were shocked by. But when the book didn't elicit empathy, it elicited rage. There was even an I "Hate Grace" group formed in her home town. (Metalious once said "You get angrier about the truth than you do about lies.")

It's important to note that the movie and television shows which followed (which made Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neil stars) were not representative of the novel. What was done to Peyton Place in the film and television versions, insisting that the reality was the white picket fence façade which Metalious had kicked down, was a truly strange note in the history of American entertainment. (Perhaps actress Sandra Bullock, who in 2006 was reported to have an interest in starring in, and co-producing, a movie based on Emily Toth's biography, Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious, will hew closer to the truth.)

Unfortunately for Metalious and her family, critics went after her in addition to sanitizing her story. And her Hemingway-esque lifestyle set her up for the most vicious of personal attacks. So critics were able to shoot the messenger, and in denigrating the author were able to denigrate the book. Denigrating the book, and the white-washed movie and TV shows that followed, made real social change unlikely. And still she succeeded.

Cameron has made a strong case for Peyton Place as an important feminist text that preceded The Feminine Mystique by seven years. I think it is highly probable that it allowed for The Feminine Mystique to be written at all. Metalious was writing and talking about the very same issue, sexual and domestic containment and its harmful effects, years before The Feminine Mystique. Peyton Place is riddled with it, and in the Vanity Fair article, she is quoted as saying "I did not like being regarded as a freak because I spent time in front of a typewriter instead of a sink, and George did not like my not liking the things I was supposed to like." And in 1956 when defending her work said she did not go along "… with the popular notion that because a woman happens to be a teacher's wife, she must automatically give up seeing, hearing and thinking," writes Emily Toth, author of Inside Peyton Place: The Biography of Grace Metalious.

I bet Friedan studied Metalious. While Metalious has been given credit for paving the way for chick-lit authors to come after her such as Jacqueline Susann, she has rarely been given credit for a real contribution to the Women's Movement. Yet, it was her book that broke the barrier for American women. She started the dialogue. Granted, it was a rough and raging dialogue at first, but that too was progress over no dialogue at all. The female characters in Peyton Place were given all kinds of agency. Relying on men was shown to be rather unreliable. There is no question but that this was an empowering book.

She has never been given credit for contributing to the reproductive freedom of American women, yet her book opened that dialogue too. Many readers, of all ages, said they knew little or nothing about abortion before reading the novel. In the age before the pill, knowledge was critical. Knowledge is always power. The landmark case of Roe v Wade came in 1973, years after Peyton Place, with many of the same points about age, incest and rape that Metalious had highlighted as part of the dialogue.

She has never received any recognition whatsoever for advancing the rights of children, yet here I contend that her accomplishment was nothing less than heroic. Before this book, child abuse was not considered a social problem, but a rare (and sometimes justifiable) aberration that was best overlooked. The subject of incest was simply not acknowledged at all. Even in the revolutionary Kinsey reports that preceded Peyton Place by eight years, it was barely mentioned, defined only as sex between siblings, and was listed as being extremely rare. Child abuse, like spousal abuse, was tolerated in all segments of society. Victims were expected to tolerate it, too. The New Hampshire girl who shot her father-rapist in 1947 was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Metalious changed all of that. Child advocacy in America started after Peyton Place, from simple material aid, to the training of doctors, nurses and social workers in intervention, to the recognition of incest as an all-too-common occurrence. Now even children are taught what their rights are. Credit for the start of that massive social reform is given to a man, Dr. C. Henry Kempe, who coined the phrase "battered child" in 1961 (five years after Peyton Place was published) regarding physical abuse. Later he would expand it to a syndrome that encompasses all forms of maltreatment including assault, malnutrition, medical neglect and sexual and emotional abuse. All of these were touched on in Peyton Place. All were sordid secrets that were ignored at every level of society before her book brought them out in the open. Once his work was accepted, Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act in 1974. It is impossible, even unimaginable, to know how many young lives were saved by this development. Very few writers have left such an enduring legacy.

In turning to the people who knew her best there is additional endorsement. The man she twice married and whom she knew her all of her life, George Metalious '51, told The Boston Globe writer Sarah Schweitzer in 2007 that "Grace failed to receive credit for the role Peyton Place played in loosening the social strictures of the 1950s. There's much more to the feminist movement now … She was instrumental in that."

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