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.) 

ON KINDLY UNCLES AND BREAKING GLASS CEILINGS

Ok, I'll admit it.  Biden wasn't my first choice.  And yet I have spent the last 24 hours awash with joy and relief.  Here's the thing.  I have come to believe that Joe Biden is just the kindly uncle we need right now. Sure, he knows his way around the White House and has lots of experience working across the aisle and, sure, he will work on the issues that matter to me - addressing climate change, striving to make  the American dream available to those who have been left out and left behind, getting everyone health care, conquering the virus.  But, really, the best thing about him might just be his avuncular manner.  

Yes, that comes with him telling long-winded stories about his youth and, well, being old.  But, so what?  He isn't unhinged.  He won't be throwing tantrums in the White House.  He won't be calling women pigs.  He won't be calling Mexicans rapists.  He won't be whining and poor-me-ing when he doesn't get his way.  

We all have a crazy uncle or grandfather or friend.  The one who comes to Thanksgiving dinner and won't shut up about every divisive or embarrassing topic he can come up with.  Or the one that comes to the White House and stays for four years.  

We have traded in that crazy uncle for a sane one, one who will at least try to calm things down and bring us together.  And that would have been enough for me today.

But there's more.  He has invited a woman, a Black and Asian woman, for Thanksgiving dinner.  And to the White House.  

People - I am a nearly-71-year-old woman who did not think she would live to see this day.  Women's suffrage was not quite 30 years old the year I was born.  The idea of a woman in the White House was not even on my radar during my childhood.  Men were Presidents.  Women were homemakers.

It took second-wave feminism to make the idea seem plausible, although it soon became clear that there would be many obstacles thrown in the path of female candidates.  I watched Shirley Chisholm run in 1970 and cheered for Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.  But, after Hillary's defeat in 2016, and listening to Trump and Pence express their troglodyte views of women in front of cheering crowds, I figured we wouldn't be seeing a woman in the White House any time soon.  

So, today, I celebrate not just the repudiation of mean-spiritedness and purposeful divisiveness, I celebrate the first female Vice President. The first woman of color to serve in that role. 

Last night, I had tears in eyes as I listened to Kamala Harris.  Women my age have waited a very long time for this day.  Today, my daughters and granddaughters have a role model. And little black and brown girls can look at the White House and see someone who looks like them.  

The 1950s called and we said, uh uh, we aren't going back.

So, tomorrow we can resume the hard work of making this an America for all Americans.  Today, let's pause to rejoice. 

                        Gif by Kaho Yoshida

IT IS A BIG DEAL: Some Thoughts on the First Nomination of a Woman for President by a Major Political Party

         Three days ago Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.  I am not here to tell you why you should vote for her (although I think there are many good reasons, even if she wasn’t your first choice) or how it terrifies me to think of her opponent in the Situation Room.  And let me make clear that I am not suggesting that anyone vote for Hillary because she is a woman.  (You wouldn’t, after all, catch me voting for Sarah Palin because she is a woman.)  I just want to spend a few minutes celebrating how far we have come in my lifetime so that those of you under, say, 40 will understand why this is a moment that brings tears to the eyes of women of my generation.        

         I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that for many millennials the nomination of a woman as a major-party candidate for President is apparently not viewed as a big deal.  I guess this means that we did a good job of raising them with a wider view of their options than my generation grew up with.  My daughters, now 31 and 28, grew up believing that they could do with their lives whatever their talents and hard work would allow.  But it is important to remember that it was not always so – important to remember how recently this belief was nurtured in little girls, both by their parents and by society at large.  The women of my generation did not grow up imagining that we might be President one day.  The dream that a woman might one day be in the White House did not take hold until the women’s movement of our young adulthood, and we have waited until we were senior citizens to see this day.  So, yes, for us, it is a very big deal.    

         Let’s go way back for a moment to the 1950s when I was a child.  I didn’t know any mothers who worked outside of the home.  All of the moms stayed home, both in my neighborhood and on TV.  This wasn’t a choice, as it is now.  This was what you were expected to do.  My mother, who was born in 1920, quit working outside the home when she got married.  Women born a few years later quit their jobs when they had their first child.    

         (And, yes, I know that there were mothers working outside the home because they had to, but this was not the “ideal.”  I am talking about the white, middle class world that I knew.  The one depicted in magazines and advertisements and on TV.  I will leave it to someone else to describe the world from which I was sheltered.)

         I wish that I could re-create this world for you in a few words, but it would take more than the length of this post.  The best I can do is to direct you to TV shows, movies, and magazines from that period.  For now, I will simply say that if you were to peruse print and TV advertisements from the 1950s and most of the 1960s, you would find that women were (or were supposed to be) freakishly preoccupied with the whiteness of their husbands’ shirts and with which cleaner would result in the most sparkling floors.  And if you were a little girl during this period, you would have learned from observing the world around you that men had power and that women’s only access to that power was through their feminine wiles or through clever tricks to build their husband’s egos by causing them to believe they were making decisions actually made by their wives. 

         And, in retrospect, the most unbelievable thing is that all of this seemed normal.  Because, unless you are a visionary, normal is bounded by what you know.  It took the civil rights movement for a few women to start noticing that while they were fighting for the rights of the people we then called Negroes, they didn’t have an equal place at the table either.  And I have to admit that when these women started talking about equal rights for our gender in the late ’60s, it took me a while to figure out what they were talking about.  It didn’t take too long, though, for me to start understanding that what I had accepted as “normal” wasn’t fair.

         It wasn’t fair that only a few careers were open to women, and when women were allowed to work beside men, the men were paid more. It wasn’t fair that when women did go to work outside the home, most men still didn’t cook or change diapers or do dishes.  It wasn’t fair that a woman could get fired for being pregnant, and had to choose between having a family and pursuing a career.  It wasn’t fair that we couldn’t get credit cards in our own name.  It wasn’t fair that we couldn’t borrow money without our husbands’ permission.  It wasn’t fair that female college students had a curfew and male college students did not. It wasn’t fair that women were expected to accept being “girls” our whole lives in the same way that black men were supposed to accept being “boys.” And it wasn’t OK that being “taken care of” by a man was supposed to make up for not being allowed to use our brains or pursue our talents. 

 

         And so much more that it is hard to remember now in light of the changes that were wrought as the result of the courageous women (and men) who fought for women’s rights in the face of what, at times, felt like insurmountable resistance. 

         The women’s movement changed my life.  I ultimately went to law school after it occurred to me sometime during my college years that this was something that a woman might actually do.  This certainly was not a career I could have imagined during my childhood or early teen years.  So, my daughters had a mother who worked.  They also had a mother who made the choice to work part-time while they were growing up.  The operative word here is “choice.”  I had choices not available to my mother and her generation.  And my daughters have had choices that were not available to me when I was growing up. 

         So, if so much has changed, why does it matter that a woman may be the next President of the United States?  It matters because it is such a short time since a woman in the White House was unimaginable, and, make no mistake about it, there are still those who would turn back the clock on women’s rights.  It matters because the work isn’t done, and seeing how far we have come gives me hope for a brighter future for our children. 

         And it matters because little girls, like little boys, need role models. I will leave you with this conversation that I had with an African American girl in a third-grade classroom where I was a reading volunteer last year: 

            

         Me: Oh. You're reading about the underground railroad. Did you 
know that Harriet Tubman is going to be on the twenty dollar bill?

         Girl: (Smiling) No. That's cool. She will be the first girl on money?

         Me: Yes. She's going to be there instead of Andrew Jackson.

         Girl: Didn't he own slaves?

         Me: Yes. I believe he did.

         Girl: Then it's good they're taking him off the money and putting a girl on. Will there be more girls on the money soon?

         Me: (Not wanting to mention that Jackson will now be on the "back" of the twenty, whatever that means) - Yes, I am sure there will be by the time you are a grown up.

         Girl: (Grinning from ear to ear) Yay!!!!