In 1979, when feminism was thriving and the Equal Rights Amendment was only three states shy of ratification, Terry Martin Hekker published “Ever Since Adam and Eve.”
Based on an essay she had written for The New York Times, the book was a witty but sincere testimonial — anachronistic in its moment — to how fulfilling Mrs. Hekker found housewifery and stay-at-home motherhood. She dedicated it to her role models for domesticity: her mother and grandmother.
“I considered dedicating this to my husband,” she added, “until I noticed how many women dedicated first books to their supportive and understanding husbands, who subsequently decided to support and understand a younger woman. Why tempt the fates?”
More than 10 years later, after the couple had raised five children, Jack Hekker did indeed leave her for a younger woman. (A career woman, no less.) He served Mrs. Hekker with divorce papers in 1996 — on their 40th anniversary.
In 2009, she published a vinegary but tongue-in-cheek reappraisal, “Disregard First Book,” that winkingly seethed with the fury of a devoted wife scorned. She dedicated the sequel memoir to her children and grandchildren — but this time she also included her ex-husband, who, she wrote, “turned my life around … twice!”
Mrs. Hekker died on Oct. 20 at her home in Nyack, N.Y. She was 92. Her daughter, Annie Hekker Weiss, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
After her divorce, Mrs. Hekker drafted a book about her unexpected fall from very public married bliss. But it was rejected by editor after editor, by her account, until she had a Modern Love essay published in The Times in 2006.
“No jilted bride,” she wrote in the essay, “could feel as embarrassed and humiliated as a woman in her 60s discarded by her husband.”
She was all too aware of the irony of having gone on record — and toured around the country — celebrating her reliance on her husband when, nearing traditional retirement age, she was suddenly dependent on the paltry amount she was awarded from him: $18,000 annually for four years. She found herself eligible for food stamps and discomfited by a divorce court judge’s suggestion that she seek job training when her alimony ended.
“He got to take his girlfriend to Cancun,” Mrs. Hekker wrote, “while I got to sell my engagement ring to pay the roofer.”
In the end, though, she proved herself a quick study in survival skills, and transformed herself from a full-time parent and spouse into a public citizen in Nyack, a riverfront village in the Hudson Valley. Having served on village boards and the local Chamber of Commerce and as a village trustee, Mrs. Hekker was elected mayor of Nyack in 1994, becoming the first woman to hold that office.
She was re-elected twice, serving six years in all, and was credited with building affordable housing, revitalizing the downtown business district and establishing a community center in a renovated historic church.
Marie Therese Martin was born on Nov. 16, 1932, in Brooklyn. Her mother, Marie (O’Donohue) Martin, was a homemaker. (Terry gave herself a diminutive of her middle name to differentiate herself from her mother.)
Her father, John S. Martin, ran a diner in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan and a hot dog wagon near the Hudson docks, from which he offered sweltering passers-by free water in the summer. Robert Moses, then the city’s parks commissioner, was said to have been so impressed by Mr. Martin’s magnanimity that he granted him several public restaurant concessions.
The family moved upstate in 1941 when Mr. Martin became manager of the Bear Mountain Inn, in Rockland County. After graduating from Ladycliff Academy, near West Point, Terry earned a degree from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1953.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Jack, Peter, Michael and Tommy Hekker; 12 grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; two brothers, Michael and John S. Martin Jr., a former U.S. District Court judge; and her sister, Susie Martin. Her former husband, John M. Hekker, a lawyer known as Jack, whom she married in 1956, died in 2004.
The Hekkers settled in Nyack two years into their marriage. There, in 1977, she wrote the Times essay that became “Ever Since Adam and Eve.”
In the essay, Mrs. Hekker celebrated the line of women from which she had emerged, “most of them more Edith Bunker than Betty Friedan, who never knew they were unfulfilled.”
“They took pride in a clean, comfortable home,” she added, “and satisfaction in serving a good meal because no one had explained to them that the only work worth doing is that for which you get paid.”
“I’m one of the last of the dying breed of human females designated ‘Occupation: Housewife,’” she wrote.
The resulting book, subtitled “The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in the Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing,” took Mrs. Hekker on a national tour, to the “Today” show and “Good Morning America,” and to interviews with Dinah Shore, Charlie Rose and Oprah Winfrey, back when Ms. Winfrey was still the host of a local TV show in Baltimore. Mrs. Hekker’s husband came along for part of the tour.
She later said that some readers, electrified by the progress of the women’s liberation movement, denounced her and women like her as “parasites and little more than legalized prostitutes.”
But in her 2006 Times essay, she looked back on her earlier work and wrote, “I wasn’t advocating that mothers forgo careers to stay home with their children; I was simply defending my choice as a valid one.”
Recalling the 1970s, she added, “The mantra of the age may have been ‘Do your own thing,’ but as a full-time homemaker, that didn’t seem to mean me.”
Still, she added, “If I had it to do over again, I’d still marry the man I married and have my children.”
“But I would have used the years after my youngest started school to further my education,” she wrote. “I could have amassed two doctorates using the time and energy I gave to charitable and community causes and been better able to support myself.”
Her second book, like the first, was promoted in national magazines and on television programs — including the “Today” show, where, when Mrs. Hekker returned to discuss her sequel, she laughed on camera as video of her original interview promoting stay-at-home moms was rerun.
“Sadly,” she wrote in The Times in 2006, her first book “now has little relevance for modern women, except perhaps as a cautionary tale.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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