Barbara moved to academia when she became Assistant Director of her graduate program at Simmons College. From there, she became Chair of the Communications Programs at Hesser College in Manchester, NH where she developed and managed a program in radio and television broadcasting, and a program in public relations.
Her home and garden have been her salvation during the pandemic where she has quarantined with her husband and pet poodle.
CHANGES I’VE SEEN FOR WOMEN IN MY LIFETIME
I’m hoping you will bear with me as I spend some time walking down my own memory lane. I’ve been asked to talk about the changes I’ve seen happening for women in my lifetime. I grew up in the 50s when there was an expectation that little girls would play with dolls and have imaginary tea parties. I had a miniature porcelain tea set my grandmother gave me. I loved it when she explained all the conventions of socializing while we would pretend to sip tea. I cherished those moments, but when I was in my own house, I loved playing cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians with the boy next door in his basement. I don’t know how many other little girls did that. I never had girlfriends as confidants. My mom tried to get me interested in dolls, but that really wasn’t my thing. Finally, she settled on buying me “storybook” dolls that were exquisitely costumed dolls designed for display. I kept them in a cupboard high above my closet and they only came out when someone special came to visit like my cousins. Other than that, I could be found outside hanging upside down off the bars of the swing set and walking the top of our fence with the boy next door.
When our family met for a family dinner at the country club, I had beautiful dresses that I loved to wear. I understood that when the family was in public, I was expected to be well behaved, and I always acted like a young lady should. My mom worked six days a week in her father’s jewelry store. I knew that all of my friends’ moms didn’t work, but I never gave that much thought. Fast forward to today’s world when I bought my great niece a tea set that I have yet to give her. I have no idea if in today’s world that is an appropriate gift for a little girl. I definitely haven’t bought her a doll for fear of pushing her into a stereotype of what a little girl should be interested in. Last summer, I was truly astonished when my nephew sent me a video of his three-year old boy and five-year old girl riding bucking lambs at the annual rodeo…. Without living in proximity to these kids, buying gifts is a guessing game.
In middle school, I had a girlfriend who was desperately ill once a month when she got her period. The nurse wouldn’t allow her to go home. She had to hang in for the whole day when she needed to be in bed. My guess is that wouldn’t happen today, and if it did, the nurse and administration would be answering to my friend’s parents and perhaps a lawyer.
In high school, girls had bouffant hairdos. They would attempt to sleep with their hair wrapped around giant curlers. I can’t imagine any girl doing that today. The girls in high school were all required to wear dresses and nylons. This was before pantyhose, so these were individual nylons with seams going up the back that were held up by a garter strap or a girdle. So comfortable! A couple of years later I was back home visiting an instructor at the high school, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The girls were wearing pants and the guys were wearing colorful print shirts. That was a bit difficult to wrap my mind around. It looked more comfortable, but it was a major shift of expectations.
In college, I attended an evening lecture of a visiting poet. I was enjoying the lecture when I realized that I had to walk out so I could make my dorm’s 10:00 curfew. The guys remained to hear the end of the lecture. At the time I thought that this was so unfair.
Then there was the time when I accompanied two of my housemothers to dinner. Yes, housemothers were a part of my college experience! A female student joined us who was a law student. I was intrigued that she was training to be a lawyer, but it never occurred to me that I could go to law school. I had a subscription for The Congressional Record delivered to me at school, but I couldn’t make the leap to think that I could become a lawyer. When I reflect on that at this age, I’m stunned. What I did instead was come to Boston to train as a court reporter.
The school recommended that I stay at the Franklin Square House, a women’s residence in Roxbury. When I arrived with my foot locker and suitcase, they put me in a tiny long room that was so much smaller than the single I’d had in college. Then, I learned that they had a 10:00 curfew. I was beside myself. Not that I was planning to close all the bars in Boston every night, but I have never done well with arbitrary rules. There was a new YWCA residence opening on Clarendon Street in Boston. I reserved a room, turned up at the desk of the Franklin Square House with my trunk and suitcase, and told them I was leaving! I took a cab to the new YWCA where a lovely room was awaiting me, and where there were no curfews. It was eight blocks from my court reporting school, and on a good day, I could walk there. Later I made friends with a woman who was at The Franklin Square House at that time. She was amazed the staff just let me leave. My guess is that I looked older and professional, and they didn’t think I was a student.
I never became a court reporter. I was working at Shawmut Bank in operations and the bank kept promoting me. My husband and I were married in 1968. It never occurred to me to keep my maiden name. That idea gathered momentum a few years later. There was one officer at the bank, however, whose wife insisted that he take her name. I never could quite wrap my mind around that. Today, I’m coming to terms with the fact that “husband” and “wife” seem to be terms that are passe, replaced by the term “partner,” which I always thought was only used by gay couples. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all these changes.
Around 1979, there were many more young women college graduates hired at the bank into jobs that had never before been filled by women. One of the things that struck me was they were all dressing in the same pinstriped suit with the required silk tie at the collar. They were attempting to look like their male counterparts. The fact that none of these women seemed to have any sense of style made me a bit nuts. Somewhere in the mid-80s, one of the female banking officers became pregnant and was going to take maternity leave. She was one of the few women Vice Presidents. The bank administration was in a dither thinking that she couldn’t hold onto her VP title if she wasn’t working full time. They did come to their senses and allowed her to keep her title. She had her baby and returned to have a very successful banking career that included bringing in a lot of money for the banking division.
About that same time, I went to a conference at Harvard that was centered on family and children. It was the first session of the afternoon and I did a double take thinking that I’d misheard the speaker. He was predicting a phenomenal increase in single heads of households. He was chronicling what turned out to be a major cultural shift. More women were choosing to have children without marrying the father, or were marrying the father but were not staying in the marriage. And there were more women and men who were choosing not to marry or to have children.
I think back to a month before my high school graduation when all the female graduating high school seniors were invited to an event sponsored by the Association of University Women. The soon to be high school graduates showed up all dressed in heels wearing hats and gloves that matched their outfits. I’m sitting there listening to one of these speakers tell the audience there is an order for living our lives. We should go to college, find a husband, marry, and have children. I remember wanting to get up and walk out. It wasn’t that I had other plans, but I thought it was extraordinarily presumptuous for this woman to tell us how we should live our lives. I can’t imagine her horror as she watched the American social order turn upside down two decades later.
The birth control pill came on the market in 1960, and for the first time, women had access to a reliable form of birth control. The 1960s was labeled the decade of the sexual revolution. Free love was talked about a lot, and Haight Ashbury in San Francisco was identified as the center of the counterculture. That didn’t impact me. I was a traditional college student for less than a year in Montana in 1963. I was in Boston in 1966 training to be a court reporter and working at the bank. I was married in 1968. Having said that, the pill was what I was using for birth control until 1979 when I had my tubes tied. Unlike a lot of women, I didn’t seem to have a ticking biological clock. The one time I thought about having a child I asked my husband if he would come with me into the delivery room, a practice that was just gaining steam. He said “no,” and I said, ”Well, that’s the end of that idea!”
My pilot undergraduate degree at Simmons consisted of banking women whose banks gave them fellowships to attend this special program to earn their degree. Almost all of them deferred having children until they were older, some in their 40s. When I was 24, I had a gyn tell me to have my children in my 20s when I had the energy to keep up with them. I’ve thought that having children when you are older makes you a different kind of mother. From my vantage point, it looks to me like my classmates have been very successful in their roles as moms. My guess is there are tradeoffs between having children when you are younger versus when you are older. I’d love to see the research on this phenomenon.
At one of Simmons Leadership Conferences, I listened to Whoopie Goldberg who had just come from a women’s march on Washington. She talked about bringing a coat hanger to show her young D.C. audience as a way of reminding them what women used to do to abort an unwanted fetus before Roe vs Wade was law. Today I watch the news coverage of how difficult some states are making it for women to have an abortion since Roe versus Wade has been overturned. I can’t help thinking that some of these states’ legislators might as well join the Taliban. It seems to me that subjugating women to their rules, no matter how restrictive, is right up their alley.
One of the culture shifts that I’m still coming to terms with is the husband who stays at home and takes care of the kids while his wife works. In my neighborhood I see men wheeling baby carriages on my street during the day taking the baby out for some fresh air. Trust me, when I was growing up, there was never a man wheeling a baby carriage down the street. In a different time, however, I think my parents might have adapted that model if it had been acceptable. My dad had wonderful parenting skills and my mom had no interest in that at all.
When my husband and I were first dating in Boston, we’d gotten into an argument, and he pushed me which frightened me. I went to the police department to see if they could help. I’m not sure what I expected them to do. That was a really bad idea. Their policy was not to get involved in domestic disputes, and I was quickly rushed out of the department and back out onto the street. Today if I went to the police, they would be required to listen and follow up. That’s a huge change because a woman’s voice is finally heard.
Lauren is a childhood friend who wrote Jane Fonda and told her she admired her and wanted to work for her. Jane hired her to find scripts that her production company could produce. Because of Fonda’s connections in Hollywood, she was one of the first women to form her own production company. After five years working for Jane, Lauren formed her own production company which successfully produced three films. That was possible, although not easy, because women were just beginning to get a foot in the door doing jobs that had always been the province of men.
Lore Anne is a high school friend who after her freshman year at MIT was told by her father that he wasn’t paying this kind of money for her to earn Cs. Her dad made her transfer to Montana State University to complete her undergraduate degree. She completed her PhD at BU, and went on to be one of the first women to head up a division at NIH. She has two accomplished daughters, one of whom is an oncologist specializing in brain cancer at Einstein. That would have been a career that was unthinkable for a girl when her mom and I were in high school.
So yes, I have seen lots of things change for women, and I’ve had many of my own expectations drastically altered. And as encouraging as these changes have been, I’ve also been distressed to see the backlash created by folks who want things to be the way they always were. The speed of change may depend on your perspective. For a lot of us, these changes have been very slow in coming, but for some, they have come too fast to accept and to embrace.
Click here to hear Barb's talk.
Linda Ai-Yun Liu, PhD
Click here to hear Linda Liu's lecture.
References:
Talk at UMass Boston "Armed Conflict, Gender and the Rights of Nature": Dr. Keina Yoshida, International Human Rights Lawyer on Thursday 30th March 2023. (Possible speaker for WE)
Interesting article about expectations for women to do emotional labor work in the workplace: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/27/emotional-labor-work-women-career-gender
