The way it was

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

I come from a line of fierce women. 

My maternal grandmother left Silesia in southern Poland at age 16. She and a cousin traveled alone to America and she never went back. I never heard her speak about it. When her husband, my grandfather, talked nostalgically about his home village in southern Italy (which he did increasingly as he got older), my grandmother would say, “You like it so much? Go back,” while looking straight at him with her clear blue eyes.

I guess if you’re strong enough at 16 to leave everything you ever knew to sail across the world to a new country, you maybe haven’t much patience with wistful sentiment. My mother was the same; her feelings ran very deep, but she was not maudlin. And both my mother and her mother chafed against a life ruled by a man; both stood up with their husbands, and could stand up to them if needed.

Many of us my age were raised by bright, strong women who had few opportunities open to them. If a woman was very wealthy and wanted to be a doctor or executive or sculptor, she’d be labeled eccentric and most probably not marriageable. But she had access to money, so not having a husband was not the sentence to poverty, genteel or otherwise, that it would have been for most women.

Most of the women in America and the women I knew -- my mother and aunts, my mother-in-law and her sisters, mothers of my friends -- did not have the luxury of opportunities. They were expected to marry and become mothers. If they wanted or had to work, the jobs open to them were limited -- nurses, teachers (almost exclusively in elementary school), librarians, for those with more schooling; secretaries, seamstresses, file clerks, waitresses, for the rest.

What if you were brilliantly creative or organized or innovative, as so many of these women were, and you really could only be a homemaker -- or be a homemaker first and sit in a low-paying service job second? Wouldn’t you be frustrated? What would you do with that frustration?

I knew a woman who, in the 1950s, organized the women on her street into a neighborhood cooperative babysitting pool. She had a college degree, had trained as a phlebotomist (but I don’t think ever worked as one). She could have been the top administrator in a hospital; she had the skills, the temperament, the talent. But such jobs were not open to her.

My mother was a superb needleworker; there was no craft with thread or yarn that she couldn’t do, and do beautifully. But of all, her sewing was amazing and she had a flair for clothes, fabrics, colors and style. She could have been a fashion designer, but she would not even have been allowed to enroll in a professional fashion program.

My mother-in-law was her high school class valedictorian, graduated from nursing school with awards, and never worked as a nurse. She could have been a doctor, and a good one. But she got married, had six children plus three miscarriages, in the midst of which she took care of an ailing father-in-law and her husband’s younger brother. She was the model of a selfless woman. And she nearly never did a thing for herself. 

That word “selfless” troubles me. Being unselfish is good, even rewarding, but fully using your talents and skills is also rewarding -- and that reward was denied to my mother’s generation and generations of women before them.

The advances women have made in opening up opportunities are impressive, but not guaranteed. Our daughters are sitting in jobs their grandmothers could not have imagined. It took struggle to get to this point, struggle that I fear our younger women are forgetting. I want to say, “You may have gotten your job on your merits, but it was only open to you because, before you were born, women fought for it.”

We can’t afford to forget.