OCR Text |
Show 236 Has Milford backed off from this uniquely patriarchal function of counsel and admonition so that she feels she must pick it up? Is she, in her strong matriarchal perceptions, trying to compensate her children for what she herself lacked in the early loss (at age 14) of her own mother? Is she subsituting her children for her husband in a role she might have preferred to have him fill? Some wives, lacking what they seek in a spousal situation, do employ that sort of substitution. Another puzzling feature, becoming more apparent through the next twenty years, well into her eighties, is that Ellis drives and drives herself professionally, far beyond the point in time when it would seem reasonable to turn to other pursuits. There did not exist, in the western communities after the first part of the twentieth century, the crying need for medical care which was present in 1878 when Ellis first started her practice. She seemed to have "cracked the code" for medical preparation so that, thereafter, there were droves of doctors in Utah. Why did she then have to carry on-for twenty years beyond retirement time-this "beating of the bushes" to generate income? One obvious answer is that there was no social security then. But her five grateful children, upon whom she had bestowed excellent educations, would likely feel sufficient gratitude to their self-sacrificing mother to extend some kind of support. Could she not have given herself the opportunity to develop her writing gifts, do genealogy and temple work, visit the families to |