From the late 1800s to early 1920s, “marriage bars” were commonplace in the United States. This practice restricted married women from working in particular professions, or sometimes from working at all. Massachusetts, despite its growing number of women activists and suffragettes, didn’t support married women as schoolteachers, and local school boards usually shunned any who applied for employment.20 This meant all of the education and training that Gladys had so proudly earned was useless in Milton. In the early twentieth century, teaching positions were given to young, single women without children. A married woman’s job was to tend to her husband and kids, while the man of the house dutifully provided for his family. And Lawrence did just that. He found a steady government job as a clerk. By 1935, he had made enough money to move his family from Granite Place into their own house, ten minutes away, on Emerson Road. As a government employee, he was spared unemployment during the Great Depression and was even able to help those less fortunate in his community.

“They didn’t lose anything, as a matter of fact,” said Hope Taylor, a Powell grandchild. “They helped take care of a lot of neighbors in terms of sharing food and that kind of thing.”21

Lawrence and Gladys had all of the attributes of the perfect American family: three beautiful and healthy children, their own home, and even a dog. Gladys, who would resent not being able to continue her work as a schoolteacher, delved into motherhood, chronicling her children’s progress from the start. In Elinor’s baby book, she wrote, “Elinor has begun to move about. She is sitting up on her own. She seems to laugh at Gladys. And she doesn’t like strawberry.”22

Just like William and Ella, the next generation, Lawrence and Gladys, were living a life that reflected a high level of stability, an attribute not typically associated with black households in the early twentieth century and certainly not during the throes of the Great Depression. There were two factions of blacks in Boston: the small group of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, intellectual elites, and other professionals; and the majority who lived in overcrowded, tenement squalor.23

The Powells, shielded from urban blight, had been lucky to set up roots in Milton. Family photos show Gladys sitting in her white-picket-fenced backyard with flowers in full bloom, surrounded by her three daughters all wearing summer dresses with floral motifs, patent-leather shoes, and ribbons and decorative clips adorning their hair. Home ownership among the black population was still very rare, but if there was any resentment from white neighbors about the Powells’ success, it wasn’t expressed, at least not in a significant way. Other photos show Elinor, in a polka-dot dress, sitting in the parlor with two of her white friends reading Life magazine.