Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Grandma Kay

Because my Grandma Kay will be 90 years old on December 26, because she’s feisty and sarcastic, and because she majored in Journalism at Pitt but was unable to complete her degree, I think I have the misguided notion of her as a would-be Martha Gellhorn, stifled by family tragedy and obligations. Part of this comes from my bewilderment as to how she ever married my Grandpa Bill. They seem to be polar opposites, and he’d be a hell of a difficult man to get along with. I haven’t the slightest idea about how they really feel towards one another.

For years I had the feeling that Grandma could have done more, and the stupid unenlightened world hindered her. That world, of women being firmly pointed towards the kitchen, is not an illusion. Grandma Kay tells me that she saw it. She remembers her teachers in school, and it dawns on her that they were men, or they were spinster women. Her three years at Pitt, she was taught my only male professors. She tells me this now, and she sounds surprised. She was born in 1917, on another planet, in my mind, but maybe she’s used to my world now. The idea that women had to be single to teach school, would that have been a bizarre thought, if she had stopped to think about it then? Or did something change in her mind, in all the decades since then?
Grandma says there were expectations in the world. Poor women, especially, they knew where they would end up. “Behind a counter at Woolworth’s”, then married, then children. Other women might be nurses, teachers, or…housewives. Of course they could always be housewives.

I don’t know what my Great Grandmother would have expected her daughter Kay to be. She died when Grandma was 12, and I try not to ask too many questions. Terrible age to lose a mother, but I somehow doubt there’s a good age.
As Grandma tells it, her father and older brother decided that she would go to college. She would live with her brother in Pittsburgh. Even a widower with eight children could manage that.
She doesn’t know what she would have done if they hadn’t said she was going to college. She would have stayed in Welland, Ontario and gotten a job, she supposes. It would have been ungrateful to refuse college, certainly. In highschool she was concerned with having fun, boys, popularity, what the other girls were doing… All the things that sound shallow and petty to me now. But they take on a wonderful and impossible quality of story, when I realize that they took place in the middle of the 1930s. Ten million lifetimes away from everything I know, or so it seems to me.

Once when Grandma was married and had most, or all of her children, she took her only daughter to the doctor. The doctor and my Grandma went to Pitt together. He told her, “I always thought you were going to end up being a journalist. How come you never pursued that?” “Because I didn’t have anything to say.” Now she tells me that she still thinks that’s true. He thought she had a talent in that area that she never thought she did.

Grandma did work, for decades of her life. She worked in that utterly stereotypical expected career of women of long ago. She was a secretary. She took a 23 year break between her time as a working woman, but she was always a secretary or an assistant of sorts. The ultimate female career, in the time of almost no female careers. She was not the stifled Martha Gellhorn that I sometimes imagine. But she tells me that she had no ambitions for a career, and maybe that’s true. Still, it was decided for her. Her brother and father sent her to college, and the death of her father made it necessary for her to drop out. The world implied that she could be a teacher, a nurse, a secretary or a housewife. The women who did something else were notable, strange exceptions to this rule.

My Grandma Kay has no notion of what she would have done, if she hadn’t been pushed along by outside forces.