In Their Shoes: In Their Shoes

7: New York—Meeting Women Role Models

7: Aw ~rk: Jffeelinr 7f!:men !]10k JIfoJefs ((Women should have liberty ofexperience; they should differ from men withoutfear and express their difference openly... all activity ofthe mind should be so encouraged that there will always be in existence a nucleus ofwomen who think) invent) imagine) and create asfreely as men do) and with as little fear ofridicule and condescension.)) - Vir;ginia Woolf, The Selected Letters ofVirginia Woolf .1my two Texas newspaper jobs, in Lubbock from 1941 to 1943 and in Fort Worth from 1945 to 1952, I saw no woman in a position of authority. In between those two newspaper jobs, however, from 1943 to 1945, I lived in New York. And there for the first time I began to meet working women who became role models. This was significant for me since I was born and grew up in a time and place when a woman knew her place and generally kept it. She was a stoker of the home fires, a nurturer for husband and children. Those who ventured into a world outside the home found limited job opportunities, such as store clerk, schoolteacher or secretary. Growing up, I never saw a woman in a military uniform, a policewoman , a woman driving a bus, a woman working in a bank, a woman deacon, a woman on the city council. The vast majority of women around me had not gone to college , were not widely traveled or read. They grew up believing in one primary goal: finding a man to provide for 67 68 In Their Shoes them. They were the second sex. Most were indoctrinated to believe they were not as intelligent, as worthy or equal to a man. Since we tend to become how others see us, most women felt themselves inferior to men. I was twenty in 1943 when I left Lubbock for New York. To get there, I withdrew savings garnered from my Avalanche-journal work and bought a coach ticket. After sitting up three days and four nights, I arrived at Grand Central and began sharing an apartment with my sister Hortense. Called the Juilliard, our apartment building was at Broadway and 122nd and was adjacent in that era to the famed Juilliard Music School. Soon after my arrival, I boarded a streetcar, traveling down Broadway to 42nd Street. Disembarking, I walked a block to The New York Times, went to the personnel office and applied for a job. "There's an opening in our reference room," I was told. "You would help editorial writers find source material and also run their copy to a Linotype room." I accepted eagerly. In my work I came to know, in a cursory way, a half dozen editorial writers who sat in private offices facing the reference room, among them Anne O'Hare McCormack, the first woman to write editorials for the Times. I was deeply impressed by her and her ability to write her own commentaries, wrapping up complex problems or situations in simple words the average reader could understand. Watching her at work, I felt she was doing what I would one day like to do: get the facts ofa situation and use them in a manner that would go beyond mere data to some kind of "truth." McCormack, then in her forties, was a short woman who wore simple suits and sensible shoes, and while she was of serious demeanor, she also had an easy, winning smile. When I delivered research data to her, she would on occasion ask me about myself. Her comments gave me the impression she was seeing me and giving me stature as a person. New York: Meeting Women Role Models 69 Some decades later, in the seventies and eighties, after I had written several books, I was invited to the home of Mrs. Arthur Hays (Iphigene) Sulzberger, who had been dubbed "the mother" of The New York Times. Her father started the paper. Later her husband, and still later on, her son ran the paper. Visiting her country home in Greenwich ' Connecticut, I stood with her before a framed photograph of Anne O'Hare McCormack, and she told me about her husband's decision to hire her: "At the time, it was most unusual for a big newspaper to permit a woman writer to express her own opinions in personal commentaries." In addition to McCormack, she could think of only one other woman in her league...