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TOUGH CHOICES FOR WOMEN (Part 1 of 2)
Teacher, Nurse, Librarian...or homemaker...some of the few career choices open to women in 1954 |
IF SHE DIDN'T WANT TO STAY HOME WITH THE KIDS...
Girls could teach, nurse or
be some guy's secretary
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Len Klempnauer was president of the Class of 1954 at Santa Cruz (Calif.) High School and has maintained an interest in his former classmates for more than 50 years. In writing these articles, Len drew from the 1954 edition of The Cardinal, the original 1954 Yearbook, which he served as editor, and the Class of 1954 50th Anniversary Memory book. The 2004 Memory Book, which Len also edited, is the finest, most comprehensive publication of its kind that I've ever seen. --Ron MIller, Managing Editor, TheColumnists.com |
By LEN KLEMPNAUER
of TheColumnists.com
More than one of them, I really did believe at the time, might become a distinguished architect or a prominent surgeon or a talented trial lawyer. Maybe another would become a U.S. Senator. Or, perhaps, governor of California.
Was I ever naïve. As a teenager in the 1950s, I knew absolutely zilch about the obstacles girls had to hurdle in their quest for job success--or even self-satisfaction in the workplace.
“In the sixth grade,” according to my high school classmate Pat (Banach) Lowell of Sedona, Ariz., “I had a burning desire to become an archaeologist, and I shared that with my teacher. She totally shot me down by stating flatly, ‘No woman could ever be one.’ The sad part is that I believed her.”
Valedictorian of the Santa Cruz, Calif., High School Class of 1954, Pat, who attended the University of California at Berkeley, was sharing the career hopes she once cherished for a chapter in our 50th Reunion memory book about women’s job opportunities in the Fifties, titled Limited Choices.
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...Pat was valedictorian of her class, but was told no woman could become an archaeologist. |
As the book’s editor, I wanted it to be more than just a compilation of biographies telling "what-I’ve-done-since-graduation." So I asked my classmates to tell in their own words what life was really like for them as teens and young adults a half-century earlier.
It didn’t take a genius to realize that teen life wasn’t so innocent or simplistic as portrayed in such 1950s’ TV fare as Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Leave It To Beaver. Or so carefree as remembered in Happy Days, the 1970s’ nostalgia sitcom about teen experiences in the Fifties. But that may be the impression later generations might have of our so-called “Silent Generation.”
Until their stories started arriving, however, I had no clue what young women were forced to confront in the job market after high school and/or college. Forget the glass ceiling; they had trouble just getting in on the ground floor.
Wrote Salutatorian Diana Ray of Santa Cruz, “Back in 1954 the majority of girls graduating from high school didn’t go to college at all. Marriage and jobs were in the immediate future for most of us. Girl grads headed for the stereotypical women’s work: store clerk, waitress, bank teller, telephone operator, secretary or other clerical work. Even the college-bound girl’s ambition tended to head for careers such as nurse or teacher.”
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| From left, Diana Ray, class salutatorian, and her Class of 1954 classmates Barbara McCombs and Penny Keever. All tell much the same story: Our society had low expectations for female high school graduates in 1954. |
Barbara (McCombs) McFadden of Oakland, Calif., wife of TheColumnists.com colleague Chuck McFadden, said, “For females who went on to college in the Fifties, our professional choices--or what we had been led to believe were our choices by our families, society in general and our high school advisors in particular--were pretty much limited to secretary, teacher, librarian and nurse.”
That society in general had thwarted women’s chances for job success came as no surprise. That their parents and teachers, too, had put limitations on their daughters’ and students’ prospects was shocking to find out 50 years later. I was dumbfounded.
Penny (Keever) Shaw of Bellingham, Wash., remembered that “my parents were never interested in having me go to college, and my father told me to be a secretary until I got married. I was determined to go to college, although the acceptable opportunities for women in the’50s were primarily nursing and teaching, and I didn’t think either was what I wanted to do. I recall that my aptitude testing in high school indicated engineering, but my counselor was obviously perplexed at what to recommend because engineering was NOT a choice for girls at that time.”
Vada (McCray) Lovato of Camp Verde, Ariz., said she couldn’t “remember any preconceived career choice when I saw my counselor before entering high school. I took all commercial courses in high school and had enough units to graduate and work half-day as a secretary the last semester of our senior year. Being 17 years old and ready to graduate, I thought, ‘I don’t want to do this the rest of my life. I would really like to be a teacher’.”
Wrote Mary (Ghio) Stagnaro of Santa Cruz, “My Italian father believed college was not a place for girls. Instead, he believed girls should marry and raise a family; consequently, we wouldn’t need a formal education. So after high school, I took a job as a secretary with a Santa Cruz investment and financial services company: Baikie and Alcantara. I married in 1957, left the firm in 1962 when my first child was born and became a stay-at-home mom for 20 years.”
Mary’s cousin, Margaret (Ghio) Hartmann, who divides her time between homes in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, said, “After graduating from high school, I took a job as a bank teller in San Francisco, even though I had been offered a $300-scholarship in math and science to attend UC-Berkeley. (Boys received $600.) That wouldn’t have helped much, and my mother and stepfather said they wouldn’t help if I didn’t study to become a teacher or a nurse.”
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Joan (Kraus) Sweet of Oroville, Calif., who started college but dropped out, reported that, “I took college prep in high school and went to San Jose City College. It was brand new and not very well organized, and I found out it was just not what I was looking for. I quit school and went to work as an operator for the telephone company in San Jose.”
The travel bug infected Joan, and she moved to Hawaii, where she worked as a sales person at Sears. “I then moved to Michigan, where I worked in the home office of an insurance company. On returning to California, I worked at a bank and then at Harvey’s at Lake Tahoe. Years later I took an upper division class on insurance. I really enjoyed it but not enough to go back to college. When I started as a teaching assistant, I was then sorry I had not gone back and become a teacher.”
Like Pat Lowell, Merle (Morris) Ongaro of San Anselmo, Calif., also had wanted to become an archaeologist, “When it came to jobs, my first thought was archeology. My parents said ‘no’ because women rarely got to go on digs in those days. One just did research in a back room. Then I thought lawyer. My dad said he would disown me. My thoughts about pursuing drama brought gasps as well. And so on with everything except teaching, which I didn’t want. That seemed to be the only avenue open.”
Their stories astonished me. I had been acquainted with some of them since elementary school. They were intelligent, hard-working students who received excellent grades. Never had I suspected while growing up that their opportunities would be so limited after high school.
Judy (Malloch) Craig, who avoids winter weather by spending half the year down-under in Benalla, Australia, and the other half in Capitola, Calif., said that “teaching and nursing were the choices of most girls I knew at college. We all believed that we would marry, have children and stay at home to raise them. Our training would give us something to fall back on if anything should happen to our husbands. None of us thought that we would divorce, which was not really considered acceptable in the mid-1950s.
“In the 1940s and 1950s,” Judy
continued, “people of our parents’ generation were
very practical. They had lived through a devastating depression
and a terrible war and what they wanted most for their children
was ‘normalcy.’ Women were expected to be pretty, to
defer to men in making decisions, to make a comfortable home,
to raise perfect children and to entertain beautifully. Having
a career was something only those who didn’t marry would
think about. Most of us thought that if we hadn’t married
by age 25, we would be old maids forever. And that was something
we didn’t want to be.”
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| Also involved in the survey were, from left, Merle Morris, Judy Malloch, Pat Krotser and Nancy Herbert. |
The recollections of Pat Krotser of Ashland, Ore., paralleled Judy’s. “My brother, younger by two years, and I grew up with the expectation that we would go to college and prepare for careers. For the male, the need to earn a living was understood. I also was expected to go to college to learn and develop a career through which I could support myself if I needed to. Marriage and kids were a fine prospect, but my mother’s point of view, having come through the great hardship of The Depression, was that one should be able to support oneself if necessary, male or female.”
Could it have been that I really wasn’t naïve at all? Instead, had I been so brainwashed by Fifties’ society to believe that most women never aspired to professional careers other than teaching and nursing and that most others actually wanted to become housewives and stay-at-home moms? Or were they, too, so culturally conditioned that they honestly believed those were the only choices available and, consequently, decided to make the best of what was practical and possible?
Pat Lowell explained, “I fell into the mindset that a woman’s goal in life should be threefold: 1) Go to school. 2) Get married. 3) Have children. I did all three and was vaguely disappointed. Is this all there is? I feel that I was short-changed in not feeling that there were indeed professional opportunities for women. However, if I had been a stronger individual and more motivated, I am sure I could have done almost anything I chose.”
“No one’s fault but mine,” admitted Merle Ongaro. “I should have had the courage of my convictions. Of course I would have needed convictions. Soooo Fifties.”
That most of the professional world was indeed a man’s world was made perfectly clear by Penny Shaw. “I can still remember taking an electronics class at Sylvania in Santa Cruz, along with several other women. The head of one department wanted to employ two of us--he said that we had better knowledge than his male workers--but explained he couldn’t because it was a high-pressure job and the men had to be allowed to swear. So he was prohibited from hiring us.”
Of course if a woman had set out to be a teacher, the path to success was not beset with barriers.
“After getting my M.A. from UC-Berkeley,” said Nancy (Herbert) McInnes of San Anselmo, Calif., “I immediately became a Spanish professor at Dominican College in San Rafael, Calif. I was solicited, so, as far as I was concerned, the job market was an easy one.”
As a college-bound liberal arts major, I shared more classes with bright gals than with bright guys. Most of the college-bound girls, after fulfilling their college prep requirements, were in social science, foreign language and English classes--the classes I took. On the other hand, most college-bound boys were taking advanced math and science classes. I wasn’t one of them.
One class in particular stands out in my memory: third-year Spanish. I was the only boy in a class of nine that included Diana, Barbara, Merle, Judy, Pat Krotser, Nancy, Liz (Koch) Fader of Brooklyn, N.Y., and the late Carolyn Hutchings of San Jose, Calif.
Eight of them ranked in the top 10 percent of the class, including our salutatorian (Diana), our honor student in foreign languages (Carolyn), two who taught Spanish (Pat in high school, Nancy in college), one who taught English as a second language (Liz), two who taught school (Merle and Judy), and one who eventually earned a degree in law (Barbara). The ninth barely made it into the top 25 percent. Guess which one.
Is it any wonder then that I thought any number of girls in the SCHS Class of 1954 would ascend to the heights? What a shame such barriers were erected against half of the best and the brightest in the Fifties.
(To find out how my female classmates who didn’t go to college coped, tune in next week for Part 2 of The Fifties Revisited: Tough Choices For Women)
©2007 by Len Klempnauer. The quotes from classmates were collected by the author and first published in 2004 in the 50th Anniversary Memory book the author edited for the Santa Cruz High School Class of 1954. The cartoon illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted April 9, 2007. The photos are from the Santa Cruz High School 1954 yearbook.
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