If it’s not one thing… Part 2 of 3

My interest in women’s rights and the general state of women’s affairs is a relatively newfound passion. There are a few reasons why I kind of didn’t care, or at least make it my business to know, in the past. One of them is that my female role models have never made female-ness an issue, if something that isn’t a word can even be an issue.

My grandmothers are a textbook contrast of the generation of women born in the 20s and 30s. By the way, my parents grew up across the street from each other, so the families have known each other for at least 40 years or so.

My dad’s mother married at 17, had five kids (and nine pregnancies!) and was this warm, capable, and gentle matriarch. Everyone loved her, and the only time I have witnessed my extended family act appropriately in a group was when she died. Everyone was shell shocked, and things are not the same to this day.

All along, my grandfather was a bit of a buster. I was a kid, so I thought his antics were in good fun. But then I heard the whisperings of the other woman, the half-sibling, but I remember that son, a grown man by this point, coming to Las Vegas and visiting with my grandparents. My grandmother accepted him it seemed like. Being a kid, the situation and the emotions didn’t really register.

My dad’s oldest sibling told me the story from my grandmother’s point of view, though, just before she died. My grandfather had carried on a decades-long affair, and my grandmother had said that she just didn’t feel like he was her friend anymore. That phrasing is a pitch-perfect example of my grandmother. My dad’s oldest sister and my grandmother had fought about whether she should leave my grandfather; my grandma stayed because, even though their financial situation had required her to work back then, she really had no real way to keep her family together and support herself. She stayed, and they were married over 60 years before she died. The rumor is that he apologized on her deathbed, but I can’t help but wonder if he is the only one who benefited from that.

My mother’s mother, on the other hand (also five kids, nine pregnancies), told her cheating husband to take a hike. Scratch that: She told the other woman “you can have him.” My mother’s parents were incredibly good-looking, social people. After she died, I found out that my grandmother had met and dated celebrities, was a lingerie model for Frederick’s, and broke off an engagement to marry my grandfather. But his social habits carried on through their marriage, and by the time my mother, the oldest, was 17, they were divorced.

This was the same time period (roughly mid-70s), and these were tried and true housewives. BUT my mother’s mother had always been an activist. Her complaints to labor departments and unions effected real changes in her workplaces (factories at the time). She was always writing letters and meeting her elected officials. By the time she was divorced, she was working as a bookkeeper, was a whiz with insurance and employment laws, wearing pants, smoking (well I suppose they all were), and driving a car. A different world from my Grandma Elly right across the street.

My mom’s youngest sister tells me what my grandmother went through to make sure the kids never felt deprived. I was 12 when she died, and it makes me so incredibly sad that I didn’t get to know her as an adult.

When she died, we cleaned out her apartment, and in true Mary fashion, she had tons of books about every subject, was still doing bookkeeping for different companies (I remember one very well. It was a fuel recycling company- that lady was always ahead of her time, in her own life and in her activities). She had all this information about healthy eating (we laughed at her when she was recommending tai chi and reduced carbs in the late ‘80s low-fat diet and weight lifting craze), politics, and history. She knew her stuff, and it is only now that I get how rare she is for a woman of that era.. or at least what disapproval she must have faced.

My mother definitely takes after her in a lot of ways. My grandmother taught her how to take care of the finances for my dad’s business, and my mom took to it really well. As a kid, finances, and financial decisions, were openly discussed in our household. We learned what our parents had, and also how to keep that information confidential. I witnessed the factors that people consider when they make decisions with their money, and on top of the immense value that had in terms of learning how to think about money, it also exposed me to all sorts of investments, insurance information, tax concerns, and risk factors. Most importantly, I witnessed equality in my household with respect to finances and decision-making.

My mom worked in the race and sports book at Caesar’s Palace for about a decade when my parents moved to Las Vegas (they moved across country at the ripe old age of 28- we laugh all the time about how they thought they were too old to start over- they had two kids too). While there, she advocated for security cameras because the sports book was such a common target of robbery. Can you imagine any casino nowadays without a camera watching your every move? Well, the sports book used to be dark! She even had a near miss herself, but she took a rare day off once and her replacement handed over the contents of his drawer at gunpoint that day. Guess what happened after that? The vice-president of the hotel, I think, got in touch with my mother personally, and the cameras went in. She left right around that time anyway.

The casino went through several personnel restructurings and down-sizing throughout her years there, finally leaving her and two co-workers in charge of the vault in the sports book, which could hold upwards of $1 million even on a slow day. She asked that they stand behind glass or bars and have other security measures in place. Caesar’s has that stuff now, and I’m pretty sure it’s because my mother complained in the era before the huge corporations came in and standardized everything.

Her activism can be something of a headache in day to day life, but the woman will fight for a cause to the death, so I give her credit for it. My dad would have supported me in anything I wanted to do, but it was always my mom who was very vocal about getting an education and putting my career first.

She didn’t say to me things like “you don’t need to rely on a man,” or “just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you can’t do x, y, or z.” It was always advice from the perspective of the best way to advance yourself is through work ethic and education. There is time for everything. “You have your whole life to get married.” Her words never implied a limitation, and on top of that, her actions, and the stories of her mother, just ingrained in me that a woman can do anything.

How did I know? Because they were doing it. That was invaluable. I suppose I could have shortened this post by saying these women simply set a good example, but hopefully this illustrates that not only are you setting an example even if you’re not thinking about doing it on purpose, but the example outlives your era.

It makes me so sad that my dad’s mom, one of the most loving people I have ever encountered, had to the example of where things can go wrong. The love and caring and huge reliance everyone had on her in their own ways was not enough to give her the freedom (or at least for her to feel like she had it) to escape a bad situation. My aunt made it clear, though, that my grandmother loved my grandfather and was willing to forgive him anyway, but she still couldn’t get out when it didn’t work. It is a good reminder that, in case things go wrong, to have a back-up plan. 

These examples made me think that the instances of discrimination against women and lagging rights were very isolated and not very large. But doing the research for this blog, and especially looking at the contexts in which successful women have risen to the top, is very sobering. I had been living in blissful ignorance about the difference between men and women… hopefully we are moving toward a society where everyone feels that way, and the distinctions go away. Maybe in my lifetime?