Burning of the Marriage Hat

Frequently Asked Questions

The following are questions frequently asked of Margaret Benshoof-Holler, author of Burning of the Marriage Hat, A Novel of High Plains Women:

Q: What does the title of your book Burning of the Marriage Hat mean?

A: It has both literal and symbolic meanings.

Literally, it's the hat that the narrator's grandmother is forced by her husband to burn after, symbolically speaking, all love and romance has died in their marriage. It's related to the physical abuse that existed in Katherine's grandmother Naomi's marriage. So, the title Burning of the Marriage Hat is about physical abuse and a woman's ability or inability to walk away from a marriage where physical abuse governs her life.

The symbol of the Burning of the Marriage Hat relates to the cleaning up of unresolved issues and denial within a family.

In a more profound sense, Burning of the Marriage Hat has to do with cleansing or being tried by fire like metal when it is shaped and molded. A jewelry maker begins with a raw piece of metal, puts it to the flame and ends up with something entirely different, something very beautiful. Something like a catharsis. A healing.

It is also something like the road less traveled, choosing one route over another. In the case of Katherine, the narrator in the book Burning of the Marriage Hat, it would mean leaving one route behind or rejecting a role that was set up for her and following something different as a single woman. She, though, is not the typical spinster but an adventurous, courageous, and experienced and sensual woman who has a strong yet cautious attraction to men.

Q: What is a marriage hat?

A: Literally, it means something like the marriage veil. In another way, it is something more symbolic. In life one finds oneself wearing different hats for different occasions. American women wore many different hats during the 20th century -- the "housewife hat", the "wife and mother hat," the "working woman" hat, "the liberated woman hat," "the marriage hat" and so on.

Q: Is Burning of the Marriage Hat: A Novel of High Plains Women just a book about high plains women?

A: This is a story about a modern-day woman, a world-traveled woman who returns to her roots to resolve conflicting family accounts about her grandmother's death. This is also a book about the lives of girls and women across the 20th century in Wyoming and these are seen through the narrator's flashbacks through time. The book also focuses on the conditions of unwed pregnant women and girls in the 60s. The setting is Wyoming because that's were the author came of age and where her roots are. The conditions of unwed pregnant women during the 1960s were not unique to Wyoming. They affected women throughout the U.S. Since leaving Wyoming over 30 years ago, the author has lived throughout the world and now lives in San Francisco. She has a broad perspective honed not just from one geographical area but from many different places. The author's Wyoming roots, though, are what give the story flavor and a different perspective. Similar to an Australian family saga or Irish or Italian, this one is set in Wyoming.

Q: What has been the main response to the book Burning of the Marriage Hat?

A: Commendations for the author's support of women. The family dynamics and family history brought out in the book makes it interesting to many people, especially among the babyboomer population now digging into family roots wanting to know who their ancestors were. Also, "the reality of this story makes it credibile. It's a book that should be included in Women's Studies courses. Young women could learn a lot from reading the book." Messages keep coming in about how courageous the author is.

Q: The book is set in Wyoming. Did you write it in Wyoming?

A: A good part of the book was written on the road. I made several road trips back and forth across Wyoming, where I grew up in the 50s and 60s, with miles and miles of open space around me. The ideas came to me on the road. The fleshing out of characters came when I returned to the City, San Francisco. I brought it together on my computer when I came back home to San Francisco.

Another part of the book was written from my dreams. Several years ago while I was studying poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute in Boulder, he told me one night as feedback to a description of a dream that I had written that "You should write down all of your dreams." So, I followed his advice and have been doing that off and on since. So part of this book came from dreams I have had at different times. It was a dream, in fact, that gave me direction when I first started writing the book. And other dreams came to me along the way as if to guide me. The dreams came at unexpected moments when I was needing a voice for a character. The dreams and the voices I heard in them helped me get the book written.

Ginsberg's words and actions and feedback still speak to me. He actually showed up in one of my dreams early in the writing of my book and prodded me to lay all of my cards out on the table just like he did when he wrote "Howl" and "Kaddish." That dream stayed with me through the writing of the book to prod me on.

Q: Why did you write about this particular class of women?

A: I began writing this book on a journey back to Wyoming to dig into family roots and to uncover some past mysteries. On one trip back, I also wrote a journalism piece about Matthew Shepherd, the gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten and tied to a fence post and left to die in sub-zero temperatures in 1998 near Laramie, Wyoming (entitled "Love and Hate in the Equality State" and published in the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner). Not being gay myself, but a woman who grew up in Wyoming during an era when conditions for women were not the best in any location in the U.S. (this was before the 1964 Civil Rights Act had a chance to settle in to prevent discrimination against anyone on the basis of sex, race or religion and before the 1972 passage of Roe v. Wade), I had a feel for the Matthew Shepherd story. And wrote it. But, in the process of writing that piece and developing the narrator Katherine in my book, I knew there was something more that I should be writing about Wyoming--a story that had been buried.

In the process of fleshing out the narrator Katherine, I began fleshing out myself as a mother and coming to terms with many things that I hadn't faced exactly. This is the story of the narrator Katherine. It is also the story of the large group of women who gave their children up for adoption in the U.S. in the 1960s."

The denial of a murder in a family and the denial of the problem of a pregnant teen link four generations of Wyoming women. The symbol of the Burning of the Marriage Hat relates to the cleaning up of unresolved issues and denial within a family.

Burning of the Marriage Hat is a story about a middle-class family in a small prairie town in Wyoming and the coming of age of a young woman during the post-McCarthy era of the 1960s. It's the story of a woman who returns to her roots to release the ghosts of her past. Set in Wyoming, known as the "Equality State" because that's where women first gained the right to vote in the U.S. and also where I came of age on the cusp of the 1960s sexual revolution, the book is also about a place.

Q: : Denial of the existence of a pregnant teen in the 1960s is one of the focuses of your book. Do you think it's an issue today?

A: I think denial is still an issue today and I think there are still stigmas in the United States about anything related to sex such as a woman being pregnant out of wedlock. We've come a way. But I believe we have a way to go.

Also, I think there are still problems with the adoption system. I have listened to and talked to many adoptive parents, birthparents, adoptees and adoption workers on this issue and have also read a great deal in addition to having experienced the loss of a child through closed adoption in the 1960s. I think the possibilities of an open adoption are far better than the closed adoption system in place 30 to 40 years ago in this country, an era when a very large number of women gave children up through a closed adoption system. I have heard both success stories from adoptive parents who have adopted children and from birthmothers who have relinquished children through open adoptions. I have heard many more stories that were not so successful. I've heard from birthmothers who relinquished children before they were ready and then open adoption agreements weren't held to after the adoption was in place. I have also heard stories from adoptive parents who have faced problems with adoptive children and didn't know where to turn. Concerning adoptive parents--I think a successful open adoption requires good education as to the issues of the adopted child. Concerning the birthmother--I think a successful open adoption would require a birthmother who has been given plenty of time and space to make the decision about relinqusihment without interference from adoptive parents, attorneys and adoption workers and laws set up to rush her along. She needs a good support system in place to help her weigh her options. Money should not be made a governing factor in such a decision. Open adoption requires mature, secure individuals and very good communication and agreements. These are my observations.

Q: Is the experience of giving up a child for adoption the same for women who have relinquished children through open adoptions as those who relinquished through closed ones?

A: The experience is very different. The emotional experience can be the same, I believe, if a woman has relinquished a child before she is ready--when she wasn't given enough time to make the decision. At the same time, women who have relinquished through open adoptions may have little or no understanding of the closed adoption experience. I believe it is important to know history. I also think it crucial for lawmakers to know something about how other nations deal with adoption in order to weigh options and improve the process.

Q: Can you please share with me how you were selected to write a chapter in Vietnam: A Reader?

A: Several years ago as a journalist, I wrote < a href="http://www.burningofthemarriagehat.com/ptsd.html">an article on post-traumatic stress disorder which was published in Vietnam magazine. The chapter in the Reader would be the article I wrote and published there.

I researched and wrote the article "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" (PTSD) to try to understand my stepfather, a World War II veteran. In the writing and research of that article, I came to understand PTSD very well and was able to see its effects among many different populations of people who hadn't even been in a war zone. PTSD is associated with loss and trauma. War causes a great loss of lives and it's a traumatic event. Loss, in general, is not dealt with well in the U.S. culture. And ungrieved loss takes its toll on many different segments of the population. Anything incomplete in one generation gets passed on to the next. With each new war, it continues to have the same effects. The cost of war is great for all involved.

Q: Where can I buy the book?

A: You can buy the book online here at this secure site or at Barnesandnoble.com or at Amazon.com. Also ask for it at your favorite bookstore. Orders can be faxed to the publisher.

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