Still Life
She was part of that Depression Era -World War II generation of women, twenty years too young to take strength from Alice Paul, twenty years too old to model themselves after Gloria Steinem. It was the generation of women who were told, when it suited the country, that they could do anything: drive a truck, run factory equipment, bring in the harvest.
My mother, who had studied clothes design at Pratt Institute, was hired as a draftswoman to design the wings of war planes. Every morning before she left her apartment, she used her sharp eye and her even hand to draw stocking seams on the backs of her bare legs. Eyebrow pencil worked best. All the women did it when they could no longer buy nylon stockings in the store. Nylon was needed for parachutes, for the boys. My mother had her own set of precision tools she brought to work in a small black leather case. She sat on a high stool in front of a big, slanted wooden table and did important work every day. She was good at it. She got bigger assignments. She was promoted several times until she became head of a twenty-person department. Then, in the fall of 1945, she was fired. The war was over. The men had come home. Thanks, gals, now get back where you belong.
My mother listened: She quickly married a returning GI and settled in for the long haul. By the time Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystique hit the bookstores, my mother was serving her second term as president of the local PTA and serving her family four-course home-cooked meals every night.