Family Stories
On the evening of Monday, November 7th, 2016, we called my maternal grandmother on the phone. My kids call her Gigi for Great Grandmother, a title that is extremely well-deserved. The reason for our call was that my son, Robert, had a family research project due the following Monday. They were to interview an older family member, and feeling so fortunate that my children still have a living great grandparent, the choice was obvious.
My grandmother is now ninety-seven years old and I am still getting to know her. She is one of the reasons I speak out each day, one of my heroes who has experienced great joys and devastating losses, and has always believed in family, good choices and possibilities. I was as eager as Robert to learn about her daily life.
Robert had interviewed his great grandfather and Gigi’s husband, Pop, a few years earlier when he was five years old. At the time, Robert was becoming interested in World War II and learned that Pop had fought and was injured in the war at the Battle of Anzio. Robert couldn’t write yet, and my mom served as his scribe while he asked my grandfather about his experience and his injury. I still have that piece of lined notebook paper with those few brief answers tucked away in a safe spot, the beginning of what I hope will become a bank of family stories.
Last November, it was Gigi’s turn. We placed the cell phone on the kitchen table, on speakerphone, so that Robert could ask and we could both listen. Robert began the interview with the required questions on the school worksheet about her birthday, childhood songs, chores, special food and family traditions. Her birth year, 1920, blew him away; his face lit up as I saw the wheels turning in his head, double-checking the math. Not able to keep up with the answers, he handed me the pencil to write while he leaned in and listened. When the worksheet was filled, we expanded the questions a bit. Gigi started talking about being a nurse during the war. She explained how many of the doctors were gone, and she and the other nurses essentially ran the hospital in rural Lansdale, Pennsylvania. The regular hospital was a large house on one side of the street and the maternity ward was on the other side of the street. My grandmother, a young, unmarried woman at the time, was working to support herself and serving her community. My grandfather had not returned home from the war, and they had yet to meet.
As I listened, it occurred to me that in all those years of looking to academics to learn about history, I should have listened more closely to the stories from my own family. US History classes, pop culture books, gender studies and research into women’s history all explain how the growth of women in the workforce in the 1930s and 1940s was quickly replaced by the aspirational American housewife in the postwar boom of the 1950s. It made sense at the time, I’m sure, when men returned from the war to a strong US economy and re-entered the workforce. Popular culture painted a shiny picture of domesticity, complete with the latest and greatest General Electric and Maytag appliances debuted at World’s Fairs. After years of economic struggle and war, this new family life represented opportunity and the American dream. Except that here we are today, more than sixty years later, still living in a cycle of women’s rights that can best be described as two steps forward and one step back.
I wanted to go back in time and watch my grandmother at work at Lansdale Hospital, the same one where my mother was born in the maternity ward a few years after the war ended. My grandmother, too, saw life improve with post-war prosperity; she could give her two daughters a childhood of stability and upward mobility that differed from her own. During the course of the conversation, I found myself riveted by a story that has been at my fingertips for my entire life, but one that I have barely explored. Who was my grandmother before she met my grandfather, and how did those years shape her? How do her core values, more than the songs and family traditions, shape who we are now? Robert says thank you as he finishes his interview; mine has only begun.
Before we got off the phone, my six-year-old daughter Eliza and I talked to Gigi for a few more minutes about what we would be doing the next day — wearing white and casting our vote in Rye, New York for the first female candidate for President of the United States. Gigi would be doing the same thing in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, minus the white clothing perhaps but with a more secure understanding that we cannot take these things for granted. She was born ninety-six years earlier in 1920, a few months before women were finally guaranteed the right to vote.
After we said goodnight to Gigi, I tucked the kids into bed and hoped for a new tomorrow. I held tight to the words of my grandmother and our shared vision, and I still hold that today, despite a disheartening reality. Progress, like life, is not a straight line, and sometimes it is downright twisted. November 8th was a step forward, and a devastating step backward. It is a step in a march we pledge to continue, for our mothers, our grandmothers, and our daughters.