Living History, Unknown [books to read in your 20s female TXT] 📗

were hallways I didn’t dare walk down because, I was told, the “shop” guys would confront people. Cafeteria seating was dictated by invisible borders we all recognized. In my junior year, the underlying tensions broke out with fights between groups in the parking lot after school and at football and basketball games.

The administration moved quickly to intervene and established a student group called the Cultural Values Committee consisting of representative students from different groups.

The principal, Dr. Clyde Watson, asked me to be on the committee, giving me the chance to meet and talk with kids whom I did not know and previously would have avoided. Our committee came up with specific recommendations to promote tolerance and decrease tension. Several of us were asked to appear on a local television show to discuss what our committee had done. This was both my first appearance on television and my first experience with an organized effort to stress American values of pluralism, mutual respect and understanding. Those values needed tending, even in my suburban Chicago high school. Although the student body was predominantly white and Christian, we still found ways to isolate and demonize one another. The committee gave me the opportunity to make new and different friends. A few years later, when I was at a dance at a local YMCA and some guys started hassling me, one of the former committee members, a socalled greaser, intervened, telling the others to leave me alone because I was “okay.”

All, however, was not okay during my high school years. I was sitting in geometry class on November 22, 1963, puzzling over one of Mr. Craddock’s problems, when another teacher came to tell us President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Mr. Craddock, one of my favorite teachers and our class sponsor, cried, “What? That can’t be,” and ran out into the hall. When he returned, he confirmed that someone had shot the President and that it was probably some “John Bircher,” a reference to a rightwing organization bitterly opposed to President Kennedy. He told us to go to the auditorium to await further information. The halls were silent as thousands of students walked in disbelief and denial to the school auditorium. Finally, our principal came in and said we would be dismissed early.

When I got home, I found my mother in front of the television set watching Walter Cronkite. Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had died at 1 P.M. CST. She confessed that she had voted for Kennedy and felt so sorry for his wife and children. So did I.

I also felt sorry for our country and I wanted to help in some way, although I had no idea how.

I clearly expected to work for a living, and I did not feel limited in my choices. I was lucky to have parents who never tried to mold me into any category or career. They simply encouraged me to excel and be happy. In fact, I don’t remember a friend’s parent or a teacher ever telling me or my friends that “girls can’t do this” or “girls shouldn’t do that.”

Sometimes, though, the message got through in other ways.

The author Jane O’Reilly, who came of age in the 1950s, wrote a famous essay for Ms. magazine in 1972 recounting the moments in her life when she realized she was being devalued because she was female. She described the instant of revelation as a click!―like the mechanism that triggers a flashbulb. It could be as blatant as the mhelpwanted ads that, until the mid-sixties, were divided into separate columns for men and women, or as subtle as an impulse to surrender the front section of the newspaper to any man in the vicinity―click!―contenting yourself with the women’s pages until he finishes reading the serious news.

There were a few moments when I felt that click! I had always been fascinated by exploration and space travel, maybe in part because my dad was so concerned about America lagging behind Russia. President Kennedy’s vow to put men on the moon excited me, and I wrote to NASA to volunteer for astronaut training. I received a letter back informing me that they were not accepting girls in the program. It was the first time I had hit an obstacle I couldn’t overcome with hard work and determination, and I was outraged.

Of course, my poor eyesight and mediocre physical abilities would have disqualified me anyway, regardless of gender. Still, the blanket rejection hurt and made me more sympathetic later to anyone confronted with discrimination of any kind.

In high school, one of my smartest girlfriends dropped out of the accelerated courses because her boyfriend wasn’t in them. Another didn’t want to have her grades posted because she knew she would get higher marks than the boy she was dating. These girls had picked up the subtle and not-so-subtle cultural signals urging them to conform to sexist stereotypes, to diminish their own accomplishments in order not to outperform the boys around them. I was interested in boys in high school, but I never dated anyone seriously. I simply could not imagine giving up a college education or a career to get married, as some of my girlfriends were planning to do.

I was interested in politics from an early age, and I loved to hone my debating skills with my friends. I would press poor Ricky Ricketts into daily debates about world peace, baseball scores, whatever topic came to mind. I successfully ran for student council and junior class Vice President. I was also an active Young Republican and, later, a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan “AuH,O.”

My ninth-grade history teacher, Paul Carlson, was, and still is, a dedicated educator and a very conservative Republican. Mr. Carlson encouraged me to read Senator Barry Goldwater’s recently published book, The Conscience of a Conservative. That inspired me to write my term paper on the American conservative movement, which I dedicated “To my parents, who have always taught