MY MOTHER, THE PIONEER

My mother was a woman ahead of her time. While she taught all three of her daughters her excellent ways of “keeping a house,” (it took with the other two) she really raised us to be career women first. If we wanted to marry and have children, fine, but marriage and family weren’t necessary for women to have rewarding lives.

So, what in the world did she think when only one of us finished college before marriage, and we all had either brief working stints or none at all before jumping into the motherhood role? A clue to her thoughts could be found in her remark when she learned of each pregnancy. It was always, without fail, “Oh, no!” And it wasn’t as if we had tons of kids a year apart. Most of them (three per each daughter) were carefully planned and spaced out.

Maybe she thought our marriages would fail and we would drag the children back to move in with her and my father. She did tell each one of us when we married that to be sure it would work because when we left, that was it. (Actually, all three of us at one time or another lived with our parents for a few weeks/months while waiting to move to another location.) But her ideas seemed to be more about something else than just worrying about having us and the grandkids underfoot.

Mother was a Vanderbilt graduate in an age when women didn’t even go to college. After her marriage, she didn’t work outside the home until the principal talked her into being the secretary at our high school during my freshman year. (She had to teach herself to type over the summer in order to take the job.) That position lasted only that year when she took another one at the Methodist Board of Education, eventually working her way up to a level dominated by males. She seemed to find real fulfillment all the years she worked there.

After all is said and done, perhaps this was the real issue: She felt that women should be valued for their intellect as well as their other abilities – their reasoning powers should be appreciated! Fortunately, she married a man who agreed.

So back to my original point – she was ahead of her time. But on second thought, maybe not; perhaps, she was just in the minority. What I do believe is that she was breaking new ground in the field of women’s rights without even being aware of it.