I always felt like I had a firm understanding of my mother and grandmother, and my interviews with them mostly justified that understanding. I learned very little new information regarding their lives, but I did learn more about how they felt about their lives as they reflected upon their years. My mother commented that she was only beginning to reflect about her life as she discussed the answers to my questions. My grandmother did not even seem to recognize reflection as a way to spend her time, but that may have had more to do with the atmosphere in which I interviewed her, rather than her attitude. Gerda Lerner, author of The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, would probably say that my grandmother had lack of feminist consciousness due to her era, and that my mother had acquired one due to the era of her young adulthood.

I interviewed my grandmother after Thanksgiving dinner at my uncle’s house in Concord, MA. We were in the family/living room with the football game on in the background right behind me. Thus, my extended family was listening to our interview and watching the football game at the same time. Despite my objections, my parents seemed to think this was the most adequate atmosphere. I had more time to speak with my mother because I spent the entire weekend with her, doing errands, shopping, and helping prepare my grandmother’s birthday dinner, which took place the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

The grandmother I interviewed is my father’s mother, and not my mother’s mother, which would have probably been more fitting for this project. This is more for convenience sake, as I was actually going to see my father’s grandmother. Also, she is extremely fascinating (though she doesn’t realize it) because she brings the background of two countries to her opinions, England and the United States. She also has only sons, my father and his two brothers, and thus I interviewed my mother, who has been married to my father for twenty-nine years.

My grandmother, Patricia, was born in Yorkshire, England, on December 2, 1917. She was the youngest of seven children, and the eighth child her mother gave birth to. She had five older brothers and one older sister to whom she was extremely close and closest in age to as well. There were fifteen years between her oldest brother and herself. Her father was a mining engineer, and her mother was a homemaker. When she was a child, she enjoyed playing with her family members, acting, walking, and beagling, which involved chasing beagles on horses and on foot. For her early education, governesses taught her reading, writing, math, and music. Out of the three governesses she had, she only liked one.

When she was ten, my grandmother’s parents sent her to boarding school, St. Cintrinnion’s School for Girls. Her favorite subjects were English, history, and dramatic arts. She claims she was not very good at math or science. School was extremely challenging and difficult. The students learned the same material as boys in similar schools, and when they left, they had an equal education to someone who had completed their first year of college in the United States, or “probably better,” as she stated. After her final year, when she was seventeen, my grandmother returned home to Derbyshire, where her father had retired. She apprenticed at a local theatre and trained as an actress. Her sister was also home, continuing her studies in music and piano. My grandmother and her sister desperately wanted to attend the Royal Academies, my grandmother for drama, and her sister for music, but their parents would not allow them to audition. My grandmother stated that it was not the fields they chose that prevented them from auditioning because they were women, but their parents. Their parents simply expected them to get married and have children, especially with men of similar economic prospects. My grandmother’s father didn’t love the fact that my grandmother was apprenticing at a theatre, but did not seem to mind as long as it did not prevent her from marriage. At the onset of the war, my grandmother joined the Women’s Air Force and worked in an office, and when she quit she said they were happy to do without her.

When my grandmother met my grandfather in 1938, she was twenty-one. My grandfather was invited to her house for a dinner party, most likely a meeting of other engineers. He ran Stanley Works England for about three years, which was also in Northern England. Gram and Grandad spoke the entire evening, and he proposed about six months later. Unfortunately, Grandad had to return to the United States as Stanley Works wanted him out of danger and back in New Britain, Connecticut. My grandmother left her family in 1939, and took the last American ship from England before World War II. When she arrived in New York, The New York Times had a picture of them on the front page.

My grandparents were married later that year, settled in New Britain, Connecticut, and had three sons in quick succession. My father is the third son, born in 1946. Obviously, my grandmother did not return to England until after the war, but my grandfather returned in 1945 to settle things at Stanley Works England. By coincidence, he ended up helping in the burial of my grandmother’s parents, who died in a car accident that year near their home. My grandmother returned the following year right after my father was born, and spent three months catching up with her family and friends. When she returned, she continued to raise her sons, and care for her husband, who worked for Stanley Works for the next twenty-five years. Presently, she lives with my ninety-one year old grandfather in their retirement houses, as they have for the past thirty-years: Southington, Connecticut in the winter and Martha’s Vineyard in the summer. They also spend a month in Bermuda, and two weeks in England each year.

My mother, Sarah, was born on March 29, 1950 in Levittown, Long Island. She is the second and only daughter of three children. My grandfather was an engineer for Grumman, and my grandmother was a homemaker. When she was two, her family moved to Stony Brook, Long Island, where she lived until she was ten. When she was young she enjoyed playing with her brothers, reading endless books (still does!), playing with her dolls, and sewing. She hated swimming because there were no pools in the neighborhood and she did not like to get her head wet. She started school at the traditional time, and enjoyed its challenges. She took piano lessons, unlike her two brothers who were actually musically talented. Her family did not watch much television, and they did not get one until she was seven.

When my grandfather switched jobs, her family moved to a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio called Gates Mills. She was ten years old. She started school at the local elementary school, and then attended Hathaway Brown, a private all-girls school in Shaker Heights, starting in the seventh grade. She excelled in school becoming number one in the school several times throughout her six years there. She liked all subjects, and confessed that she usually finished her textbooks ahead of time because of lack of reading material at home. She also excelled at sports, field hockey and track, but her parents did not encourage her to continue them. When she was asked by her coach at school to attend a track meet in Cleveland, her mother would not let her go, as it was not important.

After high school, my mother attended Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The first year she attended was extremely traditional, waiting tables, and curfews, etc., and her final three years were extremely liberal. They were the first years of no curfews, cafeteria style dining halls, and men allowed in the dorms. My grandfather was the first man to spend the night in her dorm, due to a snowstorm that kept them stranded at the college over night.

College was also a way for my mother to get away from her parents and their rules for the first time in her life. For once, she did not have her mother asking her if her homework was done, what her plans were for Saturday night, or to go to church on Sunday. She attended many socials and went out on many dates. At the end of her junior year, she met my father, Sam, when he was picking another date in front of her dorm, and she grabbed a ride to Cambridge with them. My father was in the Navy and stationed in Newport, Rhode Island.

My mother majored in history, planned to become a history teacher, and do her student teaching her final semester. Instead, she decided to become a paralegal and graduate early. Her paralegal position ended early because she was frustrated with older male attorneys making snide remarks to her, and she decided to enter the world of finance. She started as an administrative assistant and eventually became a bond trader for White Weld in Boston. She lived with her friends from college in a house in Cambridge for a year, until she married my father, and they lived in an apartment across the street.

My mother supported my father through business school. She made nine thousand dollars a year, which was supposedly a large sum of money in 1973. When my father graduated, my parents moved to Pittsburgh, and I was born in 1977; my sister Abby was born in 1978, and my sister Sarah in 1983. My mother worked three days a week after I was born at a brokerage firm in Pittsburgh, until Sarah was born. My family then moved to Cohasset, Massachusetts in 1986, a small town of seven thousand people on the South Shore of Boston.

When Sarah started first grade, my mother resumed work part time at a bookstore, where she has worked for the past fifteen years. She is also library trustee of our town, an elected position, and is leading the building of the new library and its endowment. She runs all the local school’s book fairs. She is in two local clubs, the Cohasset Discussion Club, and the Cohasset Garden Club, both of which she has served a term as president. On top of these positions, she reads or listens to about five to ten books a week, plants and landscapes our house’s beautiful garden, decorates our home, designed the new bathrooms, searches for the perfect fence, and still has time to do the New York Times Crossword puzzle.

Despite the difference in age and eras between my grandmother and mother, there are still many similarities between them. First, they both felt that they did not have much to offer in regards to this paper, as they both felt that they had lived uninspiring lives. I obviously disagreed, as they are both extremely inspiring figures for me and are examples that I follow in how I carry out my life. They also have been extremely lucky to have been free of great tragedy or hardship in their lives so far, and that perhaps makes them better examples of women of their eras than others who had dealt with tragedy, as those women could be seen as exceptions.

Secondly, both my grandmother and mother came from privileged, upper middle class backgrounds, and have stayed at that socio-economic level throughout their lives. They both were expected to become well-educated individuals, and eventually to become wives and mothers. Their brothers were expected to find a career and support a family. Despite these similarities, my grandmother and mother had completely different reasons for making their decisions.

Gerda Lerner states in the conclusion of The Creation of Feminist Consciousness that feminist consciousness consists of gaining awareness of five important points. These five points are:

1) Awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group and that, as members of such a group, they have suffered wrongs;
2) The recognition that their condition of subordination is not natural, but societally determined;
3) The development of a sense of sisterhood;
4) The autonomous definition by women of their goals and strategies for changing their condition;
5) The development of an alternate vision of the future. (Lerner 274)

My grandmother grew up without any, or perhaps only a slight awareness, of a few of the above points, and my mother grew up with awareness of all of the above points. Fifty years, which included World War II and the growth of the women’s movement, changed women’s attitudes more than in the previous two thousand years. This difference of fifty years can be seen through how my grandmother and mother feel about the choices they have made in their lives.

My grandmother has always felt that women and men should live separate lives, that women should stay at home with the children, and that men should join the work force and support the family. As a result, she has always felt a sense of sisterhood with her girlfriends, but more on a family level than a political level. She feels that women were never subordinate in any way, and that women and men are equals when it comes to raising a family. This view probably comes as a consequence of her happy marriage and her friends’ happy marriages. She also feels that many families are falling apart and children are not getting the support they need because mothers are working. She especially feels this way because both of her daughters-in-law stayed at home with their children, and her grandchildren have all been healthy and happy as a result.

In regards to her own autonomous decisions, my grandmother has made very few decisions without thinking of her family, whether it has been her parents or her husband. She chose to marry my grandfather and move to the United States, where she knew absolutely no one, and that was probably the largest and only autonomous decision she has made in her life. Other than that, she stated that she never felt like she had done anything she had truly wanted to do, such as go to the Royal Academy of Drama and become an actress. But, she accepted that as the way things ought to be, and feels that she made the right decisions.
My grandmother did feel that women in the United States had more freedom of expression than in England, ever since she first moved here. She states that she always felt that women had more of a say within their marriages in the United States. In England, men were more selfish and women accepted that their husbands were the head of the family, as well as their boss. She stated that the marriages of her friends in the United States were much happier than her friends and family in England.

My mother, as a consequence of the era she came of age, the late 1960’s, and where she attended college, Wellesley College, profoundly felt Lerner’s five points of feminist consciousness. By the time she reached college, the women’s movement was in full swing, and she was in the center of it, but not exactly taking part. My mother realized that she was a member of a subordinate group, and that she could make choices regarding her future, but she never felt like she was part of the new radical sisterhood bent on changing the status quo.

Yet, she has done what she wanted as well as made small steps toward the equality of women throughout her life. First, my mother entered the field of finance after college, a field typically dominated by men. During her first few months, the firm hired a man with no college education for the same level, and paid him a higher salary. She mentioned this in a meeting with her superior, and received a raise a week later. But, her father said that the man should be paid a higher salary because he was going to have to support a family one-day, and then she eventually had to support my father through business school.

This was just the beginning of why my parent’s marriage is significantly different than my grandparents. Even though both couples married for love, and both claim they have equal say, I feel my parents marriage is much more equal, perhaps my mother having even more power than my father. I think this is because my mother chose to marry my father, and to have a family, despite her many other options, rather than it being her only choice, as it was my grandmother’s.

Even though my mother always felt like she could do anything she wanted, and has for the most part, her parents always expected her to get married and have children. Whether or not this influenced her decision to marry my father I don’t know, but I know she would not have married him unless she knew he was “the one.” On the other hand, my mother always wanted to be “perfect” and “regular,” always blending in and doing what was expected of her, a feeling that probably influenced her decision throughout her life. My mother commented on the fact that a midwestern aspect may have influenced her decisions as well. She stated that six other classmates of hers from Hathaway Brown went to Wellesley, all of them extremely intelligent. All them worked for a while in professional positions or worked towards graduate degrees, and now the are all stay at home mothers of a sort (my mother considers her present job a “fun” job). Despite being influenced by Gerda Lerner’s five points of feminist consciousness, my mother and her classmates were more influenced by their backgrounds than the opinions of their era.

My grandmother, Patricia and my mother, Sarah, have also influenced me throughout my life and have been role models for me. They have worked toward giving me the best education possible, which has allowed me more freedom of choice in my future, and neither has tried to influence my personal decisions. Despite my grandmother’s opinions, she is extremely proud of my sisters and me, and the decisions we have made. Both my grandmothers and my mother were married by the time they were twenty-three. I am almost twenty-six and not even close to being married. Nobody except me has even noticed this fact, possibly because my grandmothers are more influenced by the present era than they think they are, or they are holding their tongues. This oral history has given me a new understanding into the lives of my grandmother and mother, allowed all of us to examine their lives in a new light, and has allowed me to give their opinions and views a historical basis.