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TOUGH CHOICES FOR WOMEN (Part 2 of 2)
"Gosh, I should feel so good. I'm a 1950s housewife, fulfilling my dreams in every way. My hubby even bought me this new toaster for our anniversary! So, why do I feel like I'm just coming apart at the seams?" |
In '54, 'Housewife' was #1
career choice for most girls
of TheColumnists.com
What a difference half a century can make.
In a 1964 survey conducted by my Santa Cruz, Calif., High School Class of 1954 for our 10th Reunion, female graduates who responded listed housewife or homemaker as their #1 occupation. By the numbers, 52 reported they were housewives, 19 more said they were housewives but also were working or had worked outside the home, and only 22 listed occupations without once referring to themselves as housewives.
For our 50th Reunion memory book in 2004, only 2 responded that they were housewives, one said she had worked outside the home but was first a housewife, and 48 told about their working careers but never once mentioned that they were or ever had been housewives.
I’m no sociologist but I would guess that:
1) In the 1950s, many, if not most, women who graduated from high school considered housewife the ultimate occupational goal in life--at least up through 1964.
2) In 1964, when my classmates ranged between 27 and 29 years of age, most of the married females were at home raising young children.
3) By 1964, many women who had worked before marrying or before bearing children thought of their previous jobs simply as temporary stopovers before starting a family. They neglected to mention their outside jobs because they never viewed them as life-long vocations.
4) When their youngest children reached their teenage years, many women joined the workforce again, either for self-satisfaction or to supplement the family income.
5) Also in the mid-1960s, the high incidence of divorce had not yet struck America; therefore, many women hadn’t yet been forced to strike out on their own to help support themselves after a divorce.*
Few women who graduated from my high school in the ‘50s went to college. In a 2000 special edition reviewing major local news events of the 20th Century, the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper reported that only 12 percent of the grads from Santa Cruz County’s three public high schools in the mid-Fifties--girls AND boys--went to college immediately after high school. The state average was 26 percent.
Of those who did go to college, there was probably more fact than fiction to the Fifties’ buzz that some women went to college with their sights set on an MRS Degree. Getting hitched to a college-degreed husband who had good job prospects seemed a worthy course to take.
“My objective in attending college was certainly not to get my ‘MRS’ degree, although that is what happened shortly after graduation,” conceded Vada (McCray) Lovato of Camp Verde, Ariz., in remarks made for the 50th Reunion book in a chapter about job opportunities for women in the mid-1950s, titled Limited Choices.
Most girls in the SCHS Class of ’54 were commercial majors who took business classes to prepare them for jobs as office workers or in-store sales clerks.
Vada was a commercial major. Nevertheless, she took the entrance exams for San Jose State College, but “wasn’t accepted because of my high school courses--no college prep.” So she attended Hartnell Junior College in Salinas, Calif., for two years and then transferred to San Jose State.”
On the other hand, Diana Ray of Santa Cruz, salutatorian of the SCHS Class of ‘54, took college prep courses in high school, but “I had always known there would be no college in my future. I’ll never regret having taken college prep courses rather than clerical courses because the more you learn the richer your whole life is.”
“I think most girls raised in the Fifties were advised by our parents to be sure to take typing and learn secretarial skills because that is all that we would be considered for in the world of the working,” wrote Sherri (Cable) Vultaggio of Citrus Heights, Calif. “So we all took typing or home economic classes, and many went on to a nursing school.”
Some women married quite young and dropped out of school; most, however, waited until after graduation.
Added Sherri, “I thought marriage was the grown-up thing to do, so just before turning 18, I married. He was in the Air Force and off we went. After a year in Crescent City, Calif., where I worked as a clerk in a Rexall Drug Store, we were stationed in Tonapah, Nev. There I was offered a job dealing faro in a local hotel.”
Bev (Caton) Pinelli of Corning, Calif., married her high school sweetheart, Bob, SCHS Class of ’53, six months after graduating and then spent the next 10 years moving around as an Air Force wife.**
Before she married, Bev said her goal “upon graduation was to get a position in either banking or retail. But without work experience, I had to settle for sewing jeans at the Levi Strauss factory in Santa Cruz. Several years after graduation I became aware that some of my classmates had been working in local businesses because their counselors had arranged positions for them as work experience while still in school. I had never been made aware of any such opportunities.”
Ann (Petroni) Orsolini of Santa Cruz was more fortunate. She had a teacher-advisor who did help set her up for a job.
“Right before graduation in 1954, I was sent to County Bank of Santa Cruz (now Comerica Bank) to interview for a position. They didn’t hire me there but instead took me down the street to Santa Cruz Land Title Company, where they were looking for a temporary gal. I became secretary to an escrow officer and really liked it. That ‘temporary’ position lasted for nine years until I quit after my first daughter was born and I got to be a stay-at-home mom.”
Ann always had her career sights aimed at secretarial work. “I cannot remember when I first decided I wanted to work in an office and/or become a secretary. I just knew that I loved all the commercial subjects and I got straight A’s in shorthand, typing, business English and bookkeeping. Back then, you could get trained really well for office work in high school, as there were no computers or other fancy machines. We only had those big, clunky typewriters and copy machines.”
Carole (Skinner) Ray of Scotts Valley, Calif., who started her banking career with County Bank the week after graduating, remembered that college “was not required to become a banker. It was all on-the-job training. Men held almost all officer positions. Women started their careers by filing checks. No one had account numbers then.
“To climb the ladder of success, a woman started as a bookkeeper, posting checks and deposits with a bookkeeping machine,” Carole said. “Then you advanced to a machine that sorted checks by bank name and which were sent out in transit. The next position was bank teller, where you remained until the bank offered classes you could take to advance to a higher position and to become a bank officer.”
Although most girls who married while still in school didn’t finish, two in the SCHS Class of ’54 decided to remain in school and earn their diplomas.
Nancy (Cummings) Jellison of Santa Cruz was one of them. She was 16 when she married in the summer of 1953 before the start of our senior year. “It always seemed that I was born older. It could, however, have just been the times because it wasn’t that uncommon in the Fifties for girls to get married at age 16, 17 or 18,” wrote Nancy. “What was unusual was for a married girl to continue high school until graduation.
“Attending college was never an option, including lack of financial resources. I entered my senior year as a young bride, but my peers never acted any differently toward me. Several of them were planning on getting married soon after they graduated, so it was no big deal.
“The only real difference between being a single teenager and being a married woman,” Nancy continued, “was that I could write my own excuse if I decided not to attend class.”
For those who dropped out to get married and never earned a diploma, opportunities for good-paying jobs were difficult to come by, according to Diane (Gunderson) Jackson of Yuma, Ariz.
“I remember taking a test at the employment office for a job opening, but I never got called. When I asked why, a person at the office told me that I had scored higher on the test than some college students who took it but since I didn’t have a high school diploma, I didn’t get the job,” Diane said.
“During high school and after I left in 1953, I worked at the Santa Cruz Theater downtown as an usherette and at the concession stand. The movie theaters were among the few places where young girls could find work during the Fifties. They were fun places to work and good places for a schoolgirl to work, but they didn’t pay enough and there were no benefits.
“When the Wrigley’s plant opened in Santa Cruz in 1955, I tried to get on there. Again, I didn’t get hired. I don’t know why. I just never heard from them.”
The glamour job of the Fifties, from a female standpoint, was that of airline stewardess, now known as flight attendant. Two of my classmates became stewardesses: Nancy (Herbert) McInnes of San Anselmo, Calif., and Barbara (Tobey) Childs of Hattiesburg, Miss.
“I took a year off from UC-Berkeley to be a stewardess with United Air Lines, and I thoroughly enjoyed the work,” said Nancy. “In that field women were not equal to men in any way. The pay was negligible, but in that era passengers were very respectful; not like today.”
Barbara took a different path to the airlines. “Because music seemed easy, I took my cello and country attitude to Mills College in Oakland in 1954. Being unprepared to survive in a socially sophisticated and rigorously academic atmosphere, I left after one semester.”
She took a calculator course at Burroughs Business Machines so she could get a job and live in San Francisco. “What I really wanted to do,” said Barbara, “was to live in The City, attend art school at night, learn to drink rum-and-Coke and play chess. The day of reckoning came when I went to work in a room full of women at a major insurance company. All day I kept my head turned to the left while my right hand rapidly ran its fingers over a calculator. Unwilling to work a second day from 8 to 5 in such a stilted environment, I quit.”
Barbara returned to Santa Cruz and was working as a hostess in a dinner house “when I learned that American Airlines was hiring. They had dropped their registered nurse requirement and lowered the age from 21 to 19.
“When asked why I thought I would be a good stewardess, I thoughtfully replied that I would be a good stewardess because I had been a Girl Scout.
“Being a stewardess was my first ‘real’ job,” Barbara continued. “At 19 and the youngest in my class, I was assigned to the least desirable base and aircraft. Home became Newark, N.J., and a Convair 240, a two-engine piston workhorse that carried 40 passengers, two pilots and one glorified Girl Scout.”
Most stewardesses were disciplined college graduates or registered nurses with previous work experience. None was allowed to be married, and the starting salary was $190 a month plus expenses. “American was not an equal opportunity employer then,” she said.
Not every girl who thought about becoming a flight attendant could qualify for what today would be considered outlandish reasons. Probably illegal, too.
Shirley (Thuringer) Faux of Fresno, Calif., originally hadn’t intended to go to college. She was a commercial major, but “my high school counselor told me that I was terrible at shorthand and typing, so he changed my SCHS classes from business to college prep.
“After two years of college, I decided I didn’t want to be a schoolteacher,” Shirley wrote. “I wanted to travel and see the world. I explored becoming an airline stewardess, but I couldn’t apply until I was 21. I was 19 at that time. My plan was to work until I could apply. Pacific Bell in Santa Cruz was hiring in the business office in 1956, and I was hired that August. I married Jim Faux, a Pac Bell manager, in April 1957.”
Vada Lovato added, “A large number of women who graduated with me with teaching credentials went directly to work for the airlines as stewardesses. When I taught in Millbrae, Calif., a lot of our subs were off-duty stewardesses. I would like to have done the same thing, except I wore glasses and wouldn’t have qualified.”
Judy (Malloch) Craig, who divides her time between homes in Capitola, Calif., and Benalla, Australia, applied to become a stewardess but wasn’t hired. “The application was long and detailed, and we were examined for our appearance and deportment. I was told that I had no hope of making it because I stood 5-9--and the cut-off height was 5-8.”
Fifty years later, Salutatorian Diana Ray expressed her delight with the advancement in women’s opportunities, “There are virtually no limits. They can be astronauts or police chiefs or anything. Even the glass ceiling in corporate America has been cracking in places.”
Sherri Vultaggio put her own personal twist to the choices available to today’s women: “Now my grandchildren are getting ready to start college, and one of the girls wants to be a pediatrician and another one a psychologist. Maybe the youngest will choose to be an astronaut or something equally exciting. The sky is the limit. Isn’t it great?”
If our parents, teachers and society in general--who had set limited boundaries on women’s possibilities in the Fifties--had only contacted me 50 years ago, I could have set them straight. I served as editor of the SCHS Class of 1954’s yearbook, the Cardinal. The staff consisted of 10 girls and one other boy, who was the sports editor. (We did have two male photographers and a male cartoonist, but they weren’t actually involved in the production.)
We were trying to do some original things with our yearbook (creative at that time anyway), and our advisor cornered me alone one day to complain about the potential costs. I informed her in no uncertain terms to stay out of it, that we knew what we were doing. I should say, the girls knew what they were doing. I only submitted some ideas for them to consider.
I don’t think the teacher and I passed two courteous words between us the rest of the year. But I learned that if you are in charge of some task and want it to be successful, surround yourself with excellent people. We not only published the yearbook our way, but we also made a little extra money to leave for the next year’s staff.
The teacher never forgave me, I guess, for telling her to leave us alone. She gave me a “B.” Traditionally, an “A” was automatic for a yearbook editor. I think the girls all received “A” grades. Deservedly so, too!
*Of the 20 married women mentioned in this two-part series, six had been divorced.
**At least nine female members of the Class of 1954 were married to men still serving in the military at the time of our 10th Reunion in 1964.
©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 illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted April 16, 2007. The photos are from the Santa Cruz High School 1954 yearbook.
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