Capilouto: Interview Assignment

A Perspective on Feminism

Growing up in a small town in middle Georgia, Sandy and her two siblings were the only Jewish children in their community or in neighboring towns as well. Sandy’s mother was born in Shanghai, China, to Russian missionaries, and she attended a British school throughout her childhood with other children whose parents held left Europe. At the age of 19, Sandy’s mother left her parents in Shanghai and moved to the United States, eventually ending up at the University of Georgia. Her father, on the other hand, was sent to Savannah, Georgia, to live with his aunt prior to World War II while his younger brother and parents remained behind in war-torn Germany, and they were later killed in the Holocaust. After marriage, Sandy’s parents settled on a small town south of Macon, Georgia, to start a business and raise a family. They enjoyed the atmosphere of a close community, and found it a worthwhile trade for a bigger city like Atlanta, where they would have been able to find a strong Jewish community. Nevertheless, Sandy’s parents opened a shoe store in town and had three children. Sandy remembers her father teaching her Hebrew after school. As she reflects on it now, she realizes that he was just trying to bring his children some semblance of Judaism in a town far from it. At the time, however, Sandy recalls that she hated learning Hebrew and would have preferred to play with her friends. The family would travel nearly 30 miles just to attend the nearest synagogue. When I asked her what is was like growing up as the only Jewish child and whether she experienced any discrimination because of it from other children, she recalled several particular instances where several of her classmates had made derogatory remarks about Jewish people, and she remembers being very upset and crying to her mother. Today, however, Sandy doesn’t let past experiences like that haunt her. She knows that her classmates were simply uneducated about people who were different from them.

When I asked Sandy if she had ever felt ostracized for being a girl, she paused to think about it. She said that looking back, she definitely felt like girls were given a certain place in society and that line was never to be crossed. She remembers always wanting to secretly play sports with the boys, but never expressed her desire because she was told that girls are supposed to play with dolls or play the piano, not play basketball. To this day, she still regrets never participating in sports as a teenager, but she says that she has lived vicariously through her own daughter who has been very active in sports since a young age. She never imagined that so much progress would have been made in her lifetime as to non-traditional roles for males and females alike. Sandy feels like the sense of inferiority that women were to feel to their male counterparts was part of the culture and indoctrinated in women in numerous areas of development – education, religion, and family.

After Sandy’s father died of cancer when she was 13, her mother decided to move the children to Atlanta to be closer to family. After high school, Sandy attended the University of Georgia. She completed her undergraduate degree in Child and Family Development, and went on to do social work in Atlanta after graduation. Two years later, Sandy decided to attend law school, and returned to the University of Georgia for school. Sandy told me that she was the first woman to be hired at the law firm she worked at out of law school, and remembers the adjustment that her male colleagues had to make after her arrival. In fact, Sandy was riding on the tail-end of “Second Wave” feminism as she took this job. In the second wave, feminists were pushing for greater equality in both education and the workplace. Being one of only a handful of women in her law school class and then to be hired as the first female at a law firm, Sandy epitomizes the kind of strides that feminism was making in the 1960s and 1970s.

Being among all men, she noted, put her in an environment that was susceptible to innuendo and bordering on what today would be considered sexual harassment. “Other attorneys would make side comments about my outfit or try to act cutesy for attention. I just tried to ignore it and focus on my work.” She thought that the attention from the other men at first was nice, but it became bothersome after many months of the same undertones. When I asked Sandy about her generation of women in the workplace as compared to opportunities now, she said that the differences are astounding. “Women today can go into whatever field of work they choose. Back when I was growing up, women were subjected to a limited career path.” When I asked her what she meant by that statement, she explained that women she knew were either nurses or secretaries, if not homemakers.

I asked Sandy what was the hardest decision she had to make as a female attorney and she replied that, without a doubt, it was choosing between having a full-time career or being a mother. To her, raising children and being in the home during their childhood was worth halting her career for the time being. “Even though women have shown that they can be both successful businesswomen and mothers at the same time, for me it was a personal decision that I wanted to be with my children as they grew up and not just someone that they got to see early in the morning and later that night.”

I went on to ask Sandy what she generally thought about feminism and then ask her if she would identify herself as one. She defines feminism as a social movement that strives for equality between the sexes. Sandy said she would say that she is a feminist in many ways now that she thinks about it, but has never really considered herself one before because of the negative connotations associated with the term. “Whenever most people think about feminism, they envision women burning bras. I’m not like that, nor will I ever be. But I do believe in gender equality despite my upbringing in a traditional home. I hope I have taught my own daughter that her limits are endless and she can do anything or be anything that a man can be.”

I chose to interview Sandy because she has a unique background in that she grew up as a minority in the South during a time of great change and progression for our country on many levels. While I would not consider her on the frontier of the feminist movement in the 21st century, I do think that Sandy represents the average white, upper-middle class woman who has learned to balance raising a family with a career. Even though she still clings to the traditional ways that she grew up around, she is proud that she has been able to instill in her own daughter a more progressive approach to the differences between men and women, which she hopes will translate into even more opportunities for women like her daughter.