A letter from the Publisher

THE writer of this week's cover story on Suburbia is about as expert as a man can be on the subject of the suburban wife: he is married to one. TIME Associate Editor Jesse Birnbaum, his wife Elizabeth and their two children--David. 9. and Daniel 4--live in a well-mortgaged, brick and shingle split-level in the seven-year-old Lakeville Estates development in East Meadow, L.I., 30 miles east of Manhattan. There. Mrs. Birnbaum who holds an M.A. from the Eastman School of Music, and was once a member of the music faculty at Baylor University, is an active professional violist and music instructor, the chief gardener of the null 60-ft. by 105-ft. plot, sometime block captain for charity drives and Sunday-school music teacher.

While Writer Birnbaum had the advantage of this firsthand source, he was also provided with the extensive research of 21 TIME correspondents, who roamed the suburbs encircling 21 U.S. metropolitan centers from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Portland, Me. to Dallas. Interviewing hundreds of commuting doctors, lawyers and P.T.A. chiefs, not to mention their wives, the reporters produced more than 400 pages of the rich lore of Suburbia.

Still, perhaps the most vividly revealing tableau of suburban housewife-in-action came right at home while Jesse Birnbaum was writing the cover story. Wife Beth was waiting for admission to a Manhattan hospital for a minor operation. In the last hours before she took to a hospital bed, while running a fever from a throat infection, she went through a schedule that would have exhausted a Pilgrim's wife. She gave two music lessons, did a week's marketing, and decorated the den for an evening recital of one of her viola students.* The recital was topped off with ice-cream sodas for the eight concert guests, and it was after midnight before the Birnbaums got to bed.

The next morning Beth dropped Jesse at the Merrick. L.I. railroad station, returned home to chauffeur the children to a cub-scout jamboree at nearby Mitchell Air Force Base. On her way back, she stopped to pick up one of her students, arrived home in time to answer the phone. It was the hospital: her bed was ready. She proceeded to give the music lesson, sped back to the base, which she had to cover from end to end in the rain before she could locate the children. She took them home, fed and dressed them, packed, loaded them in the station wagon and drove the 30 miles to Manhattan where she was met by her husband and her suburban-New Jersey sister-in-law, who took command of the children. Then, having made sure that she could take the time, Beth checked into the hospital.

This week Mrs. Birnbaum was happily back at home in East Meadow, ready to cast a knowing eye at what her husband had written about the suburban wife.

*As a musician, Beth has much in common with the woman who was the model for this week's cover. Artist James Chapin based his symbolic portrait of the suburban wife on a painting he did several years ago of Mrs.

Jean Goberman of Scarsdale, X.Y., a professional cellist and also an Eastman alumna.

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