I was raised and educated in the America of the fifties and
sixties, started my own family and began my career in the late sixties and early seventies. I retired
in 2007. This year, eight days after the coronation of our first ever openly
misogynistic and racially prejudiced authoritarian leader, I will turn
seventy-two. At my age, this could be my last go-round with an election as I face losing Social Security and Medicare which are crucial to my retirement budget.
I told you in an earlier blog about my being raised as
the product of a religiously mixed marriage; but I was also raised in a
culturally mixed marriage.
My father was the descendant of the families who founded America
between 1620 and 1640; more than one of whom believed strongly in educating
their daughters as well as their sons. Specifically, the descendants of Edmund
Hobart (1573 - 1648) married educated women, and provided educated wives for their sons-in-law.
And their women weren’t restricted to becoming teachers and nurses. No. Their men
were needed to labor at and run the family businesses, the women managed the
offices and kept the books and records – and bore a dozen or more children, and
managed the family home as well. At least from just prior to the American
Revolution (early 1700's) there are public records to support those facts. At sea, the women managed
everything but the crew of the ship – and some even did that (which you know if
you’ve read my book).
My mother was a descendant of poverty-stricken mill-worker immigrant Irishmen.
She was second-and-third-generation Irish-American, the product of a culture where grown women
were kept almost literally barefoot, bare-ass, and pregnant – and in the
kitchen. Those families didn’t begin to educate their daughters until, well,
until the nineteen sixties when my girl-cousins and I went off to college,
about a hundred years after our Irish families first came to America. Of course, early
on in Irish immigrant families, if a girl was physically ugly or had had her virginity
compromised, thus being ineligible for marriage and motherhood – she would be
educated just enough to become a nun, or a teacher, or a nurse – because she
would need some means to support herself in her disgrace.
My father’s family knew no bias toward people from other
countries, other races, other faiths. They were mariners and tradesmen. They
accepted everyone who would sail with them, work with them, or do business with
them. My father never felt or acted superior to anyone. Or inferior. He treated everyone as his equal, from the wealthy to the poor. His great-uncle (also an Edmund Hobart descendant), fought for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment – unable
to conceive why it was a contentious issue at all. The family simply felt that
everyone who wanted an education must have one, and that any adult should have a vote. Not one person was singularly
any different from another, regardless of gender.
My mother’s family were Irish, and Catholic, as you know from the first blog. Her
people were the objects of deep social and economic discrimination because of
their heritage and their faith. My mother fought every day of her life, from
the eighth grade on, to prove she was as worthy and equal as any other woman, all the non-Irish, non-Catholic women. That Nineteenth Amendment? It was passed the
year she was born, and her immediate and extended family didn’t believe it was
appropriate to have such a law. They didn’t educate their ‘girls’, either. She lost a scholarship to Columbia University because her father wouldn't allow her to go. (If she had gone, though, she might never have met my father.)
I grew up in a small city where young people my age accepted
each other based on some invisible measure, completely unrelated to family economics
or ancestry – a sliding scale from ‘jocks’ to ‘brains’
– athletes, greasers, ordinary folk, and academic sparklers. By the grace of my DNA, I was among the latter –
academically successful in nearly all that I cared to touch. Neither of my
parents accepted less than perfection in every subject – or as close as they
could reasonably expect to perfection, given that I was a poor student of
biological sciences.
I went off to college in the fall of 1963. I entered as an ‘English
– Journalism’ major. I loved to write. Later that first year, I found myself
frustrated and bored with my studies. My father gave me a subscription to Time
Magazine – and told me I had until June to decide which section of Time I would
like to have written. I chose Business & Finance. With my father’s encouragement, I applied to transfer from the School of Liberal Arts to the School
of Management. That was when I discovered for the first time in my life that
there were social and educational stereotypes for women.
I was assigned an adviser, a Dr. Young. Apparently, his job
was to discourage me and send me packing back to Liberal Arts. There were only
three ‘girls’ in the Business curriculum, he told me, and all three were
Accounting majors. I wanted to study Business Law & Collective Bargaining.
After some heated arguments, he agreed that I could ‘try’ that major for a
semester – knowing I would be the only ‘girl’ in my classes. I stayed and I
succeeded. That led to my career in both applications and systems software
engineering. None of my fellow students treated me as 'different' because of my gender.
I went on to earn two MBA’s – one in Small Business Practices, and
one in Business Computing. In the course of my career, I only once came across open gender bias. During an interview with Jack Welch, then an up and comer with
General Electric Plastics Division, Jack told me I should go home, take care of
my husband and baby, and not be looking to take a man’s place on his team. Ultimately,
he moved on to be much more powerful in GE, and so did I – I helped to save his
ass and keep his plastics company on the map as Project Leader of the Y2K effort, 1998 - 2000. Besides the put down from Jack, in the course of my career I never felt gender discrimination. I was always paid an equivalent salary to my male colleagues. I was never a second class citizen in my techie world.
Now I see a despicable fat ugly old white man changing forever
the America that was so good to me, my personal land of opportunity, left to my care by courageous ancestors. I have failed the men and women who came before me. It could mark
an end to the legacy of the descendants of Edmund Hobart. My granddaughter may never know the land of her forefathers. I cannot stop it, but I will accept my share of the blame, the shame.
As a token nod to Equal Rights, the new sovereign will appoint two women to his council. They will serve in traditional female roles. Education, transportation - the soccer mom roles. Women’s work. Keep the girls happy.
Contented cows give better milk. And one of them doubles as his token Asian. There's a small win for someone there. [Yes, he did appoint some women to minor roles, but these are his inner circle councilors.]
And he will appoint his token black man to lead where he perceives that only a man of color belongs and could succeed – management of inner cities and slum housing.
And he will appoint his token black man to lead where he perceives that only a man of color belongs and could succeed – management of inner cities and slum housing.
Otherwise, his proposed council members are much like himself: mostly fat,
mostly old, mostly ugly, all white men. A distinct scarcity of eye candy all around the table, including the monarch himself. Together, they will lead society back into the sixteenth century at best,
and the fourteenth at worst. [I am pretty sure that in the past year or so we
have transited rapidly to seventeenth century culture by just watching this runaway debacle.]
The future was yesterday.
The future was yesterday.
The past awaits tomorrow.
MRP
MRP
