I spoke with a woman named Frances, who was born in 1929. Obviously, 1929 is a year soiled in American history as the period when the U.S. entered The Great Depression. Frances always said that her parents said she was the greatest blessing to come out of that year. Frances is 88 years old and she is retired secretary and school teacher. She was eager to describe the enormous changes that she has seen take place throughout American society. To begin with, Frances wanted to emphasize how being a child during the Great Depression had an enormous influence on her life. Her parents barely had enough to survive and feed their children. This made her “scrappy” and she was eager to finish high school as soon as possible and get a full time job. In the 1940s, she said more girls were considering college, but they were still the minority. The expectation for young women, Francis emphasized was that they would graduate high school (if they came from good families) and get married and start having children, being prepared to spend the best years of their lives raising those children. Her mother was very eager for her to meet a nice young man, but it was her grandmother, Frances explained, that always emphasized to her that marriage and children were not what they were cracked up to be. She was very close to her grandmother and heeded those words closely. This influence, in combination with growing up during the Great Depression, made her particularly eager to get a job and be self-sufficient. Her mother ultimately acquiesced, but not completely.
Frances explained that her entire life she wanted to be a writer. Her mother forbade it, explaining that it just...
Frances explained that she felt compelled to listen to her mother because, she didn’t have any evidence (or much evidence) to the contrary. So Frances set out looking for a job where she could at least use some of her writing skills. She found a job as a typist, which she said was grueling and very demanding. However, she didn’t mind it so much. It was her first job out of high school, and she enjoyed taking the train in to work and get hot soup for lunch for just a nickel and being on her own in the city. She later got a much higher paying job as a clerk and secretary for a famous writer. She didn’t want to say who the famous writer was, and got very teary-eyed when I pressed to find out more details about him. This was her longest position. She worked for him for over 20 years, until he died. She cited him as the most influential person in her life. He encouraged her to write, but he acknowledged that society was very harsh and cruel to female writers. He was someone who pushed her to write because he believed that she was good at it and it gave her pleasure so why not.
Frances said she went to work for him in 1954: she was aged 25. It was 1954. In those days, she explained, it was very odd that she was not married nor engaged nor pinned. She said in those days, employers could ask you all about your personal life in job interviews, such as questions about whether or not you were married, planned on becoming married, how many children you wanted. Frances explained that she had been on other job interviews where the interviewers…
