Working Women

My son came home from school and said that he needed to find a subject for a paper for his economics class. He is a senior this year and is hoping to graduate with a very high grade point average. He is in the running for an academic scholarship which would greatly help him for his first year of college. The project for the economics class was to present and discuss something that had impacted the financial structure of the United States in the past one hundred years.

That evening my mother came over to have dinner with us. She was going to be leaving the next day to attend a conference. She was excited about the conference because it would be the last one that she would be attending prior to retiring. My son and husband were discussing the class project during dinner when my mother suggested that my son do this project on working women. She relayed what a huge impact working women have had on the economy in general and the labor force especially. As we continued to discuss this through the meal time my son became excited about the topic. Both of his grandmothers are in excellent mental health and both worked for many years outside of the home. He also has a great aunt that is alive that was the first woman to graduate from a local law school. We also have a neighbor who was the first female fire fighter with the local fire department.

My son began interview many different working women of all ages. He talked to those that held jobs that have been traditionally considered women’s employment such as nursing, teaching and food service positions. He spent a great deal of time interviewing women in nursing homes and elderly housing that began employment when it was disapproved of. Many of these working women shared that they felt pressured to quit their jobs when they were married and certainly after they had children. Some of the working women relayed that they lied about their marital status in order to keep working because it was against some company’s policies to employ married women.

My son would come home from these interviews filled with admiration for the females that he was talking to. He was astonished that the working women had so many obstacles to overcome. The biggest impact for him is that these women were still alive and proof that our society is still in the very early stages of accepting that women are important for our national work force. He received a very high score on the paper and his grandmother is very proud of the fact that she came up with the idea for the project.