STILL SHE PERSISTED: A Paean to My Younger Self

A while back, during a conversation with a ten-year-old granddaughter, I mentioned that my earliest job had been as a secretary, that I had, in fact, gone to secretarial school after high school.  

My granddaughter turned a puzzled face to me, and asked, "What's a secretary?" 

This word was completely unfamiliar to a girl who (at that moment, anyway) aspired to be an architect.  I explained that a secretary would now be called an assistant. 

Across this stretch of years, it is hard to bring that secretary, that girl-- for girl I was, into clear focus, but I will try.   

In September of 1967, 17-years-old and fresh out of high school, my best friend and I got on a bus near our suburban New Jersey homes and headed into Manhattan for our first day at The Latin American Institute,** a secretarial school located on Madison Avenue, where we would learn to type and take shorthand (taquígrafia) in English and Spanish.  

We would take that bus every weekday for a year, immersing ourselves in Spanish and learning how to behave in an office.  (Of course, we would make coffee for our bosses.  And, of course, they would all be men.) Looking back, I am astounded by how very young we were.  (Needless to say, we believed ourselves to be entirely grown up.) No one accompanied us into the city that first day.  There were no helicopter parents back then. It was just, "Have a good day," as we walked out our doors.  I vividly remember stopping an ancient businessman (he was probably 40) as we left The Port Authority Bus Terminal, and asking him, "Which way is uptown?"  

Oh, yes, we were young.  And we swam in the water that surrounded us.  What else did we know?  This will be a stretch for those of you who grew up believing the sky was the limit, who grew up taking for granted that you could get a credit card or a loan in your own name, that you could aspire to be a politician or a doctor.  But try to imagine what life was like for a young girl just a few decades ago.  Imagine a childhood in the 1950s when every voice around you screamed boys are important--girls not so much.  Sure, your daddy might have doted on you, told you that you were pretty, but imagine a world where “pretty” was your only passport to a good life, a world where the Miss America Pageant was a highlight of the year and where the local store displayed a row of photos of young women in tight curls and pointy bras, accompanied by the invitation to "vote for Miss Rheingold.”   (For those of you too young to remember, Rheingold was a beer.)

 

Imagine a world where girls wore dresses to school--were, in fact, forbidden to wear pants, where pre-schoolers wore ruffled dresses that discouraged rough and tumble play.  A world of stiff party dresses and patent leather shoes.  If it was cold out, we wore leggings (not the ones you are thinking of – these were bulky affairs that matched our winter coats) under our dresses.  

Imagine internalizing the message that girls grow up and get married and have babies and stay at home.  That was, after all, what most of our moms were doing. Imagine the message that you might have a job in the interim between leaving school and getting married, or maybe, if your husband were really enlightened, you would keep working until you had a child. Imagine that in this decade a college degree for a woman was sometimes called an MRS. degree.  Imagine, further, that well into the ‘60s, at least one women’s college taught classes in deportment – how to pour tea and step gracefully in and out of a sports car. Imagine that the only jobs suggested to you by society are store clerk, bank teller, secretary, nurse, or teacher. (There’s nothing wrong with any of these jobs--I have friends who have happily made careers of them; what is wrong is that so many jobs were considered to be for men only, that it would not occur to you that you could be, say, a research scientist, a doctor, an accountant, a college professor.  And, of course, men were not expected to be, say, nurses or secretaries.)

 

Yes, there were little girls like RBG, but I didn’t know them. And, yes, I did have female friends who went off to college, and I expect that there were girls who were encouraged to seek a "nontraditional" job, but this was not my experience.  My immigrant parents, playing against type, did not encourage me to go to college.  The idea was never discussed in my house.  And so, off to secretarial school I went.

I did not excel.  I did not want to be there.  I liked the Spanish immersion, but my typing and shorthand skills were mediocre.  I was envious of my boyfriend, who was attending college.

 

After a year at secretarial school, I continued to take that bus to a job at an advertising agency, where I warded off attentions from my much-older boss. (Remember, please, I was still only 18 when I started that job.)  I was not happy and I was not good at my job. This was the era of manual typewriters and multiple pieces of carbon paper between the multiple copies of whatever one was typing.  It was so easy to make a mistake and have to rip all those pages out of the typewriter and begin anew.  Ugh. 

When I wasn't busy being frustrated by my ineptness, I was bored. After a year at my job, and after reading every book assigned to my college-attending boyfriend, I figured out that if I lived at home, I could afford to go to the nearest state college.  I'm not sure where I got the gumption to make this happen.  At this point in my life, I did not have much confidence in my intelligence. 

But, oh, I loved being a student.  I loved being an English major.  I had terrific professors.  I never had a TA.  I was hungry and I soaked it all up.  Living at home was challenging, but my time on campus was magical.   I had left the job for which I was not suited and headed off to college just in time for the beginning of feminism's second wave.  I loved my expanding world, a world that I hadn't, until then, realized had been so very circumscribed by our culture's limited expectations for women.  

Now that I was in the right place for me, I excelled.  I read and read and wrote and wrote.  I discovered that I was intelligent, that I was a good writer.  I began to imagine new career possibilities.  After college, I worked for a year as a journalist, then went on to law school--something that would never have occurred to my younger self as an option. (And may I add that I never stopped appreciating the secretary/assistants with whom I worked.  They were so much better at their job than I had been. It hadn't been the right job for me, but these assistants were whip-smart and kept the offices where I worked from falling into chaos.)

From my perspective in retirement, I am not sure that I would choose the law again. It was the first previously male-dominated career that came to my attention. There are other career paths that look more attractive to me now that I can see the full range of possibilities. I am, nonetheless, proud to be one of the women who stepped into roles forbidden to us in our childhood. I am happy to have a much fuller life than that allowed to my mother. I am delighted that my daughters grew up without the restraints I felt as a girl.

So, today I look back in gratitude on the girl and young woman I once was. Everything I am today began with her. I stand on her skinny shoulders. I am grateful for her courage.       

She would be surprised by this praise. It was decades in the coming.  May I never forget. And may all young people of every gender have the opportunity to do the work that is just right for them.  


Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash

** Diligent Google searches have turned up no trace of this school.  I have no idea when it it ceased to be. 

(This is my story. I acknowledge that there are many who have faced far greater and graver challenges.  I will leave it to them to tell their stories.)