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Our September 2023 meeting was a lesson on writing from one of our members, Mary Helen Stefaniak.  We were invited to contribute our efforts to post here.  Below are a couple of submittals from our members:

6 Minute Memoir 

Jane Nettleton

So much of my life has been pure luck, like the time I, a second-year home economics teacher in Algona, Iowa, became one of the very first “boys’ home ec.” teachers in the state.  The senior boys in 1965-66 were an unusual lot in a class that still is the one scoring the highest on the ITEDs of any class ever in our high school.  They were not only bright but also excellent athletes and the kind the school board and the high school principal respected. They decided that they wanted to take home economics, only a class for girls at that time, and they successfully petitioned the school board and the principal to allow such a class to be developed.

Just so you know, it didn’t hurt that I was a young woman that they admired.  I thought this would be a fun challenge, so we set up a course together that included cooking variety meats like Rocky Mountain Oysters donated by one student’s father who owned a meat market, making pies, sewing buttons on shirts, making nutritious meals, etc.  It was a popular class for the next four years and even inspired an article in the Des Moines Register.

In 1969, I became pregnant with my first child. I didn’t bother to tell my principal because I intended to stop out of teaching at the end of the school year and stay home with our family.  One day he stopped me in the stairwell and said, “I hear you are going to have a baby.”  After congratulating me, he said, “You know you really should put this in writing because you have to let me know when you are pregnant.  That’s part of your contract.”  I was shocked and asked where it was stated in my contract, and he replied, “If for health or other reasons you cannot continue to teach, you must notify the principal.”  

I said that I felt fine and planned to continue teaching for the rest of the school year.  He said, after a moment’s contemplation, “Well, I guess it will be okay since you are tall. But what about the boys’ home ec. class?”  I had no idea what was on his mind and thought the tall part was bad enough, but I later found out that he was worried they might be disrespectful to a pregnant woman!  Of course, they were most solicitous of my safety and health, and we ended the year just as we had begun it.

When I returned to teaching in 1978, we were still in the midst of Title 9 adjustments, but one we never had to make was to allow boys in home economics classes.  They were already there!

 

6 Minute Memoir

Penny Foy

I was in Huntsville, Alabama.  My company, Grant Communications, who owned and operated Fox 18 KLJB-TV and several other stations after a few years of acquisitions, had sent me down to help troubleshoot what was happening in the traffic department there and make some suggestions for improvement.  This was quite an accomplishment for me, to be “picked” as the person to fill this role.  I recall, when I left the television station for another position, Mr. Milt Grant told me that I was the best traffic manager he had ever seen.

Being in another city, away from home and alone, was a new experience for me.The people at the station were aware of why I was there and were NOT friendly.They weren’t rude, they just didn’t talk to me.  It was an awkward situation.  Fortunately, I had learned how to ignore other people pretty well before then. After all, I had pledged a sorority in college and decided to de-pledge (that’s another story) after 3 weeks, resulting in me being ignored for the rest of my college years by the members of the sorority.  That was no sweat off my brow, though, since I hadn’t known them before I pledged.  I found it quite amusing after a bit, thinking that they obviously needed to rearrange their priorities into the right sequence.  My first priority was to get an education, NOT to see how many parties and sorority events I could get to.  I considered myself fortunate that I received an honor scholarship that paid for half of the tuition for the first two years at Augustana College since I had been a National Honor Society member in high school.  

Getting back to the station in Huntsville, the call letters were WZDX, I believe.  I observed how the traffic department was functioning and returned to write up some suggestions for helping them get the job done better than what was happening at present.  I was also chosen to go to Virginia to help get a traffic department set up and trained at a new station that Grant Communications had just purchased.  That was a great experience, and I was asked to help with questions for the next several months from the traffic manager there.  I learned a lot in the 13 years I was at that television station.  

 

Pay Equity 1974

Mary Helen Stefaniak

My first professional teaching job was at an all-girls Catholic high school in Milwaukee, my hometown, where I began teaching just four years after I graduated from another all-girls high school on the other side of town. 

About half of the faculty at both schools consisted of nuns. The rest were “lay people”–almost all women.  In fact, at my old high school–Saint Mary’s Academy (SMA)–except for the priest who served as chaplain and made guest appearances in various religion classes, there were only two male teachers on the premises during my student years. One was temporary and the other part-time.  Ironically, Mr. Kramp taught typing and other “business” classes.  Less ironically, he coached basketball. He also coached and taught at Notre Dame–rhymes with “lame”–a co-ed high school on the south side of Milwaukee that, like SMA, is no more. 

Our other male teacher was from Jordan, perhaps on some kind of academic fellowship. I had Mr. Sudah my sophomore year for Algebra. He was a youngish man, though not to us at the time, clearly a bit discombobulated by a classroom filled with teen-aged girls. He endeared himself to us by doing things like perching suavely on the edge of his teacher’s desk as he lectured, only to stand up with one foot in the wastebasket. 

The all-girls Catholic high school where I began my teaching career was actually two different schools to begin with. Holy Angels Academy–founded by Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary–BVMs for short–was the older and more venerable of the two, but the Sisters of the Divine Savior–the Salvatorians–definitely had a newer, spiffier building. When the two schools merged in 1970, due to dwindling enrollments at both, neither one was willing to give up its name. Thus they became Divine Savior Holy Angels High School, aka DSHA. 

Although religious vocations were also dwindling in the 1970s, a good number of nuns were among the women teaching at DSHA when I joined the faculty in 1973.  There were also three men: Mr. Masrour, who taught French; a newly minted Spanish teacher whose name I can’t remember; and a history teacher named Mr. Binko. (Despite his name, I don’t remember Mr. Binko. I learned of him only recently from a former DSHA student who survived English and French classes with me and yet remains my friend to this day.) The principal of DSHA was Mr. Grover.

I was not exactly a student activist during my college years, but my consciousness had been sufficiently raised for me to think: all-girls school, founded by nuns, overwhelmingly staffed by women, and the principal was a man?  

That didn’t seem quite right, but as a first-year teacher, I couldn’t worry about it. There were not enough hours in the day or night–plus weekends–to prepare and teach five 55-minute classes, each of which met five days a week.  If I remember correctly, I had four sections of English (two each of I and II) and one French II, for which I spent the night before memorizing everything I was going to say in class the next day.  At least my pronunciation was excellent, as Mr. Masrour was kind enough to tell me.

I don’t know how I learned that the other new hire–the Spanish teacher with his longish, reddish hair and substantial sideburns–was getting paid more than I was. We’d been warned not to disclose salaries and other contract particulars to one another. That prohibition seemed a little slimy to me, but I don’t think I would have defied it, point blank, so to speak. Maybe the Spanish teacher and I were in the faculty lounge one day, comparing notes about other things. We were both first-year teachers, with bachelor’s degrees, right out of equally respectable universities. We both had five classes to teach, three preps. I think we both were already married. I know I was. Maybe he made an offhand comment about paying for the wedding? Buying a house? How, he might have wondered, was he going to afford it on a lousy $6500 a year? 

My ears would have perked right up at that. I was making 6300. 

That meant I made about $17 less than he did per month. In 1974, seventeen dollars had the purchasing power of just over $100 today. It wasn’t a HUGE sum, but–maybe because I spent all my evenings and weekends planning lessons and memorizing French conversations–it bothered me hugely. The question was: What was I going to do about it?

We were well into the school year. Meeting with Mr. Grover to sign next year’s contract loomed. I was vaguely aware of a law, recently passed, that made it not just unfair but possibly illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex when it came to teachers’ pay. I couldn’t have told you then that the law in question–thank you, Dr. Google–was Title IX of the Educational Amendment Act of 1972. 

When I pulled open the wood-paneled door into the principal’s office, Mr. Grover was not behind his desk at the far end of the room, the windows behind him. For annual reviews, he took a friendlier seat, closer to the visitor’s chair. I pulled the door shut behind me. My mouth was dry and my hands were shaking. I had more than just my first annual review to worry about. I was going to take a stand.

My memory of that meeting is full of holes–more holes than memory. I do remember the long walk over the carpet to the chair across from Mr. Grover, who was a hefty man, always in a suit, even at Friday night fund-raisers when students and faculty assembled pizzas for sale. Oddly, I also remember what I was wearing: a plaid a-line skirt–at least it wasn’t pleated like the students’ uniform–and a short wool jacket, either black or navy blue, that I had made myself. I don’t remember how I broached the subject of the Spanish teacher’s higher salary. At one point, I said, “You can’t do that” and, at another point, “It’s against the law.”

Mr. Grover didn’t blink at this news. He didn’t ask me how I knew that the Spanish teacher was making more than I was. He thanked me for bringing this issue to his attention. He said that we’d hold off on signing next year’s contract until he made sure that my salary compared equitably with those of my colleagues.  

You can bet my mouth got a little drier when he said that.

So I’m no Claudia Goldin, winner of the 2023 Nobel in Economics for her work in what we could call gender equity in the labor and salary departments.  Having recently read the text of the Education Amendment online, I’m not sure that Title IX applied to a school like DSHA. But I did speak up, even though my voice was shaking. Mr. Grover proved to be a man of principle (the other kind), or maybe he believed in greasing the squeaky wheel. I got my $200 in backpay and a contract offer for the following year. I would never know if the Spanish teacher was offered more.

 

The AAUW-IA eNetwork Online Branch provides connections to people, programming, and possibilities for action as an advocate for women and girls.

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