Job Desperation

Caroline was fresh out of college and sitting in front of the man who she hoped would give her her first teaching job. To her astonishment, he asked her if she was using birth control. “I was so stunned I didn't know what to say. If I said no, I probably would not have gotten the job, if I said yes, it was revealing too much. I finally caved in and said yes. I often think how I should have stood up and told him off, but I needed a job. Thank goodness times have changed.”

Interestingly enough, I was asked the same question as Caroline in the 70’s by a female interviewer. She owned a large business and had made it in a man’s world, so I suppose she had learned to think like one.

Caroline is a boomer, and her incident also happened many years ago, but still haunts her in a way. She wrote to tell me about this after my last column in which I championed the womens’ movement and reflected on the gratitude I feel for how far we have come.

Conversations I’ve had, and letters I’ve read in the last two weeks have me troubled though. The term sexual harassment didn’t even exist when we were coming of age, but it was rampant. Every single woman I’ve asked about this has experienced it in some form. I’m sorry to say that despite changes in laws and consciousness, it still exists. It has simply taken on some new characteristics.

I’ve long been haunted by the 2006 movie Sherrybaby starring Maggie Gyllenhall. Her character is a 22 year-old who is fresh out of prison, fighting to get custody of her young daughter. In one scene she is desperate to get help from a paunchy middle-aged bureaucrat who tells her his hands are tied. When she offers to perform a sex act, then and there, his hands are no longer tied.

Then there’s the scene from the movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The man in charge of her trust fund won’t release money she desperately needs unless she performs the same act. And she does.

Both of these movies are set in current times, and reveal similar circumstances going on behind closed doors. Women in desperate situations, with no one to turn to, looking for help from men in power. Are these movies reflective of real life? I strongly suspect so.

As I reflect on my 40+ years in the working world, there are men who helped me enormously, asking for nothing in return. There are also men who attempted the same types of coercion that happened to my movie counterparts.

I told a friend recently that one of the things I liked about getting older was that I was no longer subject to street harassment. You know, the hooting out of car windows that some males think they are entitled to. Anyway, what worries me is the world in which young women seeking employment now find themselves.

Not in my lifetime have jobs been so scarce. When there is intense competition for an existing job, the stage is set for these types of abuses. Who would you tell now if this happened to you in an interview for a job you badly needed?

I’ll end this with a story that happened to me when I was 27, and a brand new flight attendant graduate. It was the night before I would fly to my new home base and begin my dream job. There was a knock on my hotel room door. It was the new chief of flight attendant operations who we had trained with for a month. I smiled as I opened my door, wondering why he was there so late in the evening. He pushed his way into the room and grabbed my shoulders and kissed me full on the lips, telling me how beautiful I was. Unbenown to him, one of my classmates was in the bathroom, and I called out to her loudly. He let go of me and made some limp excuse about seeing us all off and wishing us well, and quickly left. I told no one.

Boomers and birth control

When I was 18 years old and in a committed relationship with the man I would eventually marry, I made an appointment with my family doctor to discuss birth control options. He had been in charge of my care since I was a little girl and I felt I could trust him with anything. To my astonishment, he began to lecture me about my choices and said that if I did go on birth control, I should not tell my boyfriend. I left his office, never to return.

A few weeks later, I had an appointment with a gynecologist in a neighboring community. This time, I was more savvy. I told the doctor that I was engaged to be married that summer and wanted to discuss birth control. Again, to my astonishment, this doctor commented that since it was wintertime, that I had come to him rather early to handle such matters.

If there are any young women reading this, perhaps you are as astonished now as I was then. We now have multitudes of female physicians, and male physicians who understand the realities of life in a way that I suppose didn’t exist in small town America in the 70’s.

A few girls in my high school had become pregnant before and shortly after graduation, and I would guess that to this day, anyone from my class could name who they were. It was a scourge on your reputation and your family’s and it never went away back then. If you didn’t marry the child’s father, the baby was forever labeled illegitimate. If you did marry him, no one ever forgot to use the phrase, “well, they had to get married you know.”

This was just a few years before Roe vs. Wade allowed elective abortion to become legal. As I typed that sentence I thought of something that hadn’t crossed my mind in years. One of my classmates who was from a highly regarded family was humiliated when her father was arrested for performing illegal abortions. This girl was a friend of mine, and I don’t know any of the details except that he went to prison, and I suppose it is still talked about in my hometown. He was a professional man who did this after hours of course. I have no idea if it was for the money or to help women without other options.

As the years have passed since all of these incidents and abortion has become such a divisive issue, I have had many conversations with people, and read much about arguments on both sides. I have tried to keep an open mind and really hear the opinions for and against legal abortion. One thing that has remained solid in my mind is what a personal, individual decision it is for the woman who is carrying the fetus.

All of this has been on my mind lately for many reasons. I recall my mother refusing to go to a baby shower for a neighbor who was having an “illegitimate” baby. From the old, deep South, my mother found the entire idea shocking and wanted no part of it. As she got older, and times changed, she befriended more than one young woman who was unmarried and had a small child. She faced the realities of the changing times, and the lessening of the stigma on unmarried mothers. As I spent time with her as she was dying, she expressed how proud of me she was that I had done many interesting things with my life, and had never gotten pregnant. “It would have ruined your life and caused such sorrow.” She told me. Old Beliefs don’t fade easily.

That was in the early 90’s. We all now know that many women are choosing to have babies on their own, and that the term “baby daddy” has become a part of our lexicon. Showers for these women abound, and few – not even the grandmothers – sees it as a blight on the family name.

So, how do I feel now, reflecting on all of this? I feel gratitude. Gratitude that women now have choices that were unavailable to me and my peers. Gratitude that there is less societal judgment. Gratitude that  in our country, babies are coming into a world that wants them and treasures them whatever the circumstances of their birth may be.