Back Story Part IV (Gradual Epiphany)

So, I have spent my life in red states.  I've had a vague interest in feminism, but it hasn't been strong.  In the culture where I've lived, feminism was one of two "f words."  People loved Rush Limbaugh, quoted him like they were quoting Scripture.  And we all know his views on the topic.  He coined the term "feminazi."  That pretty much summed up the sentiment of most folks I knew.  The term "feminist" was absolutely toxic.  It was up there with "communist" and "atheist." 

And this was equally true of the women I knew.  Even in law school, the other female students generally were not fond of anything that focused on their gender.  There was sort of a head in the sand approach to sexism.  Most of the women were perfectly content with the way things were.  And they were smart and confident in their ability to make their way in what was still a man's world.

My last year in law school something unexpected happened.  We began the year and one of the women on law review was pregnant.  She was expected to give birth sometime in the spring semester before graduation.  This was quite scandalous in some ways though she was happily married and had wanted to start a family.  I don't remember the male students saying much, but the other female students were generally horrified.  That was not the right order.  You were supposed to wait, get established in your career, THEN you start having babies.  What would happen when this woman jumped the gun?!  She had an offer for permanent employment upon graduation.  How would it all work out if she needed to start that job while on FMLA?

And then something even more shocking happened.  It was like there was an epidemic.  Several other women in our class seemed to be inspired and they got pregnant too!  By May when we had our graduation ceremony, we had half a dozen women waddling across the stage and needing help climbing up and down the steep ramp to the dais.  The dean even made a joke about what would happen if a baby was born at commencement.

I remember my 3L year when my husband and I talked about trying to get pregnant ahead of schedule.  Maybe these women had a better plan.  But we decided against it.  It just seemed like a sure shot to wreck your career.  Why waste all the time, money and effort to not be a lawyer?

When I began my post-graduation job, I was one of the only women.  It was a very white, very male work environment.  I had no one to talk to about things that interested me.  Football and conservative politics were the mainstay of lunch time banter.  No thanks.  I remember once driving with my manager and a supervisor in our office, desperate for a conversation topic.  I began with, "I've got some exciting news!"  The two men turned to me with a look of horror, which I didn't understand.  I then told them my husband and I had scored some cheap tickets to London and we were going to go on a short vacation there over the New Year's holiday.  The two men then exhaled and the looks on their faces brightened considerable.  It dawned on me that they thought I was going to announce I was pregnant. 

That was insightful.  I got the clear message that pregnancy was not going to be welcome news in our office.  And that was disappointing because in law school I had worked long and hard to find the most family friendly work environment I could.  This was the best I could find, and it wasn't in the end that friendly to family.

Indeed, around that same time, I had become friends with another woman in another department.  I admired her because she was smart and down to earth.  And she was married with kids.  I viewed her as a great role model for me.  She was one of the only other women with kids in the company.  I would ask her about her kids sometimes.  I remember being shocked once because she told me the reality of what happened when her kids got sick and could not go to school.  Her mom was her only local relative, and she was still working so that typically she was not available to stay with the kids.  So my friend or her husband had to take off work to stay with the kids.  More specifically, they had to use vacation days when their kids were sick.  This was alarming news because our employer was notorious about giving very few vacation days each year.  She said that between the two of them, most of her vacation and her husband's went to caring for sick kids.  They never got a real vacation.  That was so demoralizing.  We worked long hours.  I was at the office 6-7 days each week.  I was already thinking I'd be burnt out with so little vacation time allotted.  What on earth would we do if we went years without a break other than to nurse sick children?

Meanwhile, three women had been pregnant in the department when I had been a summer clerk.  That had been encouraging to me.  But by the time I arrived to work as a permanent employee, a very different situation had come into play.  One woman had had to ask for a transfer to another part of the company when her husband's job was moved to another city.  She was lucky in that they accommodated her.  But she effectively was dead-ended in a part of the company without much growth opportunity.  Another woman was also put out to pasture after she became a mom.  She was sent to another worksite in the same city, one where the boss was an ogre and there were few opportunities for advancement.  She was at a dead-end.  The third of this trio had realized after becoming a mom that she needed to find a new job to better accommodate her family.  She went to a large law firm that promised it respected her need for job flexibility and a less intense schedule.  Unfortunately, the person who became her boss at the firm had not gotten the memo on that flexibility, and he put tremendous pressure on her to work insane hours.  I don't think she even lasted a year before moving on.  Parenthetically, I've lost count how many female lawyers I've known who've gone through that same experience.  During interviews, the firms say they'll be flexible and accommodating of family, but then that doesn't last long before they are forced to travel and work more and more hours.

Something else happened to me that was insightful about the work-life balance issue.  As a summer clerk, I worked with several women who had to balance tremendous work demands while dealing with a very difficult pregnancy.  One woman's experience particularly impressed me.  She had been put on bed rest by her doctor due to the risk of miscarriage.  But her husband suddenly lost his job and she became the sole breadwinner.  This was in the late 1990s.  Telecommuting was not yet a thing.  So to work, she had to be at the office--45 minutes from her home.  She shared with me that if she had followed doctor's orders, they would have put her on disability.  She would have been paid less--exacerbating her family's financial woes with the loss of her husband's paycheck.  And the disability would only last a certain number of weeks such that she'd have to go back to work right after giving birth.  I was stunned at her situation.  And scared. 

I'm always getting sick at inopportune times.  I'll get the flu or a stomach bug or pneumonia when I'm under stress and have a lot to do.  I began to worry about what I'd do if I had a difficult pregnancy.  I didn't know how I'd handle it all.  Maybe it would wreck my career.  I wasn't terribly ambitious.  I didn't want to be a manager or make a lot of money.  But I had worked hard in law school and seemed to have a talent for the work I was doing.  I wanted to practice my profession for the foreseeable future, and not let my hard work and students loans be in vain.  I'd always had an interest in adoption.  I'd vaguely thought that maybe we'd have a few biological children, then adopt.  But after seeing my female colleagues' difficulties balancing pregnancy and demanding jobs, I began to think about adoption more and more as a primary way to build our family.

I spend the first few years of my career focusing on work and proving myself.  But I also spent my limited free time researching adoption.  My husband and I ultimately decided to go in that direction.  Both our children are adopted.  I've never regretted our decision.  Our daughters are the lights of our lives.

Moreover, I've often thought how trying to get pregnant while working would not have been a good combination.  Eventually, we had a few more women join our department and we became close.  One dear friend suffered through several miscarriages, one was very far into her pregnancy.  I cried with her but had no silver bullets to make the pain go away.  What's worse, she had had to confide in her bosses about her pregnancies because she was suffering severe gestational diabetes and could no longer travel or work really insane hours.  They accommodated her needs temporarily, but when she miscarried, she had to tell them of the situation so they would know why she no longer needed the accommodation.  The humiliation of having to share something so personal and so painful with one's bosses to talk about cold, hard facts like business trips and who was covering which project.

That same friend was also advised to breast feed for at least a year to help ensure that her son would not develop diabetes.  Her manager knew of this situation and was accommodating.  But her immediate supervisor was quite the sadist, contriving excuses to send her on needless business trips during this time.  This was not long after 9/11.  The nightmare of having to lug a breast pump and a refrigerated cooler through security was more than I could imagine.  TSA couldn't conceive of a breastfeeding woman without a baby.

Interestingly, this friend's accommodating manager was male and her sadist supervisor was one of the few females in a position of authority in our whole division.  To be specific, there were three.  One had married late in life and never had children.  Another was married and had one child.  Her husband did not have a career and cared for their daughter full-time while her mom worked and traveled a lot.  The third was the youngest woman in a position of authority.  She was brilliant but she had no social life.  Though her star was rising within the company, she complained openly about not having a love life and her ticking biological time clock.  This third woman was my friend's sadist supervisor.  My friend and I were convinced she treated my friend so cruelly only because she was jealous of her.  Several years earlier, she had also said some very cruel things to my friend when she announced her engagement.

That vicarious experience--and the pattern within our division--gave me important insights.  Before that time, I had figured we women were all in it together.  We were all in the same boat and were natural allies.  Thus, we should support one another.  It began to dawn on me that that was not the reality.  There was actually a division between the moms and the non-moms.  The women who rose to positions of authority were not moms or they had partners who were devoted to caregiving.  Either way, they could not conceive of the plight of my friend who had to use vacation days to nurse her sick kids or my friend who was not supposed to travel due to pregnancy or the need to provide breast milk for her son.  The first two women of authority in the division were just ignorant of their plight and thus unintentionally insensitive.  But the third woman was deliberately cruel due to her own jealousy. 

I began to see a delineation between the few women at work.  There were the moms and the non-moms.  Some of the non-moms were sympathetic--either because they hoped to one day be moms themselves or they were just kind hearted human beings.  But some of the non-moms were decidedly not sympathetic.  They wanted to be like the men, which seemed to be the surest path towards success.  However, this was a small group--thank goodness! 

The sympathetic non-moms tended to fall into one of two groups.  There were women who wanted to eventually be moms themselves.  They often looked to me as a role model and mentor.  I was flattered, but always uncomfortable in the role because I had no silver bullet to make work-life balance magically work out.  The other group of sympathetic non-moms tended to be older women who had tried earlier in their careers to be like the guys, and had given their all to climbing the corporate ladder.  It had worked for a while, but eventually they had been pushed back down.  They were sometimes a bit bitter about the experience, but tended to be wise about office politics and realized that playing corporate games was not a fulfilling way to spend one's life.  They tended to retire as soon as they hit the minimum retirement age.  They then went on to lead a happy life away from work--gardening, painting, traveling or engaging in other hobbies.  They had lives away from work.  The unsympathetic non-moms did not.  When they have been forced to retire because they hit a certain age, they have not known what to do with themselves.  I feel bad for them.

Back Story Part I (Growing Up)

To understand why I'm interested in the subject of feminism despite the culture in which I live, we have to back up. 

I was a child of the 70s, then was a teen and came of age in the 80s.  When I was very young, my parents divorced.  I must have been a baby or toddler because I don't actually have any memories of them together.  My mom had primary custody of me.  It was just the two of us for a number of years, so she undoubtedly had an influence on my views on women and feminism.

She was a kid in the 50s and became an adult in the 60s.  She had always been a good student and she graduated early from high school.  But then she sort of floundered.  She had really wanted to be a veterinarian, but the only vet school in her state was at a public school that only admitted male students.  Her family did not have much money and out of state tuition was totally out of the cards. 

Eventually she got an English degree and fell into teaching.  It was either that or nursing for women with degrees back then.  But before finishing her degree, she married my dad.  She followed him around as he got his degree and started his career.  That slowed her own progress on finishing her education.  An early marriage ended up being a bad decision.  The marriage failed within a decade. 

My earliest memories were of just my mom and I living in a trailer park on the edge of a large Southern city.  She was a school teacher in a rural district.  On weekends, I remember my mom blaring the same records over and over.  She LOVED Tammy Wynette.  She alternated between "Stand By Your Man" and "D-I-V-O-R-C-E."  She also played Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" a lot.  These seemed to be her anthems. 

My mom eventually remarried.  The marriage meant we had to move to a new state.  Up until then, I got to stay with my dad every other weekend and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents.  The move meant I grew up isolated from my family.  My mom did not like the new town where we moved.  It was a lot colder, people were less friendly.  The urban traffic and hustle-bustle were more intense.  She hated it all and seemed pretty miserable a lot of the time. 

And moving also meant she gave up her career.  For years after the divorce, she had worked hard to earn her master's degree part time to become a librarian.  And a year or two before the move, she had been lucky enough to land a school librarian position.  Those were few and far between, but someone in her district had retired and she had beaten out the competition to land the spot.  She absolutely loved it.  She has always been an avid reader and loved being in charge of a library, encouraging kids to read.  When we moved, she was unable to get another library gig.  And she wasn't even able to get a teaching job because there was a glut of high school English teachers in our new area. 

She spent a year as a stay-at-home mom.  Initially, I was thrilled.  I'd be like everyone else with a mom who didn't work and was available to help at the school.  But things didn't work out as I expected.  My mom didn't know what to do with herself.  She'd go days without doing her hair and just wear knit hats with large pompoms on top.  She'd go on adult "field trips" organized by the local parks and recreation department, lose track of the time and be late picking me up, which was scary.  She cooked hot meals that didn't come in metal trays, but she has never been interested in domestic stuff so her cooking was a little odd.  She'd make this baked chicken dish with a black sauce.  It was actually pretty tasty, but it was so strange looking that I never wanted it served when I had a friend over.

Eventually, my mom realized that staying at home was not for her.  She needed the structure of a full-time job.  However, there weren't a lot of options.  She finally landed a job as a secretary.  Mid-thirties, master's degree, lots of professional experience.  And it was her freshman high school typing course that got her the job.  It probably hurt her feelings to start over like that, and not use her college education.  She was promoted over the years and towards the end of her second career she began to land positions with titles other than "administrative assistant."  Eventually, she had her own secretary.  However, she never made lots of money.  She worked in nonprofits where most of the work was done by women, though most of the bosses and the boards providing oversight were composed of men.

As far as I can recall, my mom never marched in any parades, but in her quieter way she definitely supported the women's movement.  Around the house, she would put up little cartoons about the struggle for women's rights, and if my step-father was un-PC and thoughtlessly used sexist language, he got a stare.  She was a fan of Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda and Geraldine Ferraro. 

Because she had had to start over professionally, my mom was often older than the other women she worked with.  Many were just starting out, and my mom seemed to be sort of a mentor to many of them.  I remember my mom telling my step-father about their problems.  They were young, smart women who had a lot of potential.  But it is hard for anyone to get their foot in the door and get out of the secretarial pool. 

And their love lives were a constant challenge.  Actually that seemed to be a bigger part of her mentoring than career matters.  None of them seemed able to find a suitable mate.  The men they met seemed to be adverse to commitment.  They wanted to just have fun.  At the time, Three's Company was one of my favorite shows.  The character Jack Tripper seemed to embody the type of men my mom's mentees were meeting.  And the comic strip Cathy was very popular. I think I grew up with the impression that young, smart women would find it difficult to get a man to commit.  Yet even before the term "biological time clock" was coined, my mom's mentees were worried about not finding a man before it was too late.  These were the days before professional women would even contemplate conceiving or adopting a child without a husband.  My mom's mentees wanted to "have it all" as we were always hearing in the media.  But without a man to cooperate, they wouldn't be able to have everything they wanted. 

Several of my mom's mentees did get married and have kids.  That made an impression on me too.  Some of them were well into their 30s when they got pregnant.  That was not easy.  Working full-time, long commutes, maintaining a home.  Many of these women had difficult pregnancies.  I remember being with my mom when we ran into one such woman at the grocery store.  She was by herself after work getting groceries for the week.  She was normally a very attractive woman, but that night she looked awful, was leaning on her grocery cart like she could barely take another step.  I remember being a little scared.  She said she was ok and we eventually went our own ways.  But in retrospect, I'm wondering why her husband couldn't have gone to the grocery store and let her rest.

I didn't have the happiest childhood.  I've surmised over the years that I was a surprise at a time in my parents' marriage when divorce was being contemplated.  My arrival may have put that off briefly.  But my mom has even admitted to me that she never wanted to be a mom.  She said she didn't think she'd be any good at it. 

My recollection of my childhood is that my mom never seemed very interested in me.  She never took an interest in my schooling.  Never asked about homework or helped me study.  She'd look at my report card when it came, but she never said much.  Fortunately, for the most part, I was a fairly decent student and self-sufficient.

I also don't remember my mom ever wanting to do anything with me.  I was an only child and was pretty lonely most of my childhood.  I played by myself in my room a lot.  When I was older, I spent a lot of time on the phone with my friends.  But when I was at home, no one seemed to pay me much attention or talk to me--unless they were yelling because they were mad at me. 

We rarely ate together as a family.  Once my mom went back to work, she sort of gave up on cooking.  She'd microwave a hot dog or something for me.  I'd eat it alone at the kitchen table most of the time.  We typically just ate together when we went out to eat.  As I got older, I was implicitly expected to fend for myself, though there were rarely many groceries in the kitchen.  I guess if you don't cook, you don't think about buying food.

The TV was constantly on at our house.  We were in the same room watching it sometimes.  But we also had TVs in our bedrooms, so sometimes we watched separately.  On the weekends, my mom liked to read or do crafts.  But she never involved me. 

Every summer I would spend part of my vacation with my dad and other relatives back home.  I remember a friend of the family telling me once that my mom got very sad when I left for those trips.  I was shocked and had trouble believing her.  My mom never seemed to notice I was around most of the year, I couldn't comprehend why she would mind when I was gone.  I guess I had always assumed that she was relieved to have me gone.  At least she wouldn't have to worry about childcare.

So, with this assembly of life experiences growing up, I had a strange view of the women's movement.  My mom supported it and had her own career ambitions. But she completely gave up a career she loved very much to move far away for a man.  The ethos of the 80s was "having it all," and I'm sure to my mom's mentees, she seemed to have it all.  But she was a disinterested parent.  She was nominally a mom, but rarely interacted with me. 

I suppose the result of all this was that I did believe that women should be equal in every way to men.  But I also grew up realizing that women had issues men did not.  Men could start families in their 40s and 50s.  Women could not.  Men seemed to have a large pool of spouse candidates, if they were ever interested in marriage.  Women on the other hand rarely seemed to find men who might be interested in getting married.

Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I had never really experienced a happy home life, so marriage and children were not necessarily on my list of life ambitions.  I hadn't ruled it out, but it was not clearly on my list of goals.  As I was growing up, I wanted to travel and be a writer.  I wanted to speak foreign languages.  I wasn't terribly clear on how all this would translate into a career, but I knew I wanted to go to college.  I figured it would all fall into place from there.