Jackson: Interview Assignment

After getting her coat out of her car, Mrs. Lynne Ely claims she is about to tell me more about menopause than I ever wanted to know. She gets flushed and burning hot in front of the classroom, and she wonders nervously “if the kids notice.” I figure, well, this is a good start to an interview in which I was worried my acquaintance would be too shy to speak out. My fear is further extinguished as I continue speaking to my outgoing interviewee. She teaches A.P. Language and Literature at my high school, and, although I never had her, her easy presence and varied social background presents an interesting story to be told. Mrs. Ely particularly presents social representations of feminism and the subtleties in which feminism can occur.

She was born in 1953, and as we sip our coffee outside Jittery Joe’s, she delves into the details of her traditional childhood. She describes the culture of her childhood as being coated with a “Leave it to Beaver” mentality that still greatly affects her today. It was so interesting to have her explain her mother in comparison to herself. Her mother, who married at the age of twenty, was a housewife who didn’t work until her kids were older. She went to college “to help Daddy…she wrote all his papers for him (!),” but she didn’t get her degree. She also describes her mother’s isolated, “domestic sphere” lifestyle; she didn’t go anywhere except church and garden club while Mrs. Ely’s father worked as an engineer. Mrs. Ely remembers hearing stories of other mothers taking valium and sedatives to get through the “challenges of staying with the kids all day.” Similarly, even when her mother did start working, she describes the issues her mother had with having a man “who probably was less smart than her” looking over her shoulder all day. It was amazing to hear a more personal account of Friedan’s The Problem that Has No Name, and how it stretched even beyond the “housewife syndrome” but also to the working women who knew they were smarter than the men above them but couldn’t hope to do anything with their intelligence. So, obviously, her mother’s lifestyle was not the most ideal.

Mrs. Ely chose a life with much more freedom and independence. She works full time as a teacher, and her husband never needs to know what she is doing every second of the day. She doesn’t cook dinner every night, and she doesn’t spend all her energy on doting on her children and husband. She admits that it has been embedded in her psyche by her mother to “cook three meals a day,” but that the guilt takes place of the practice in reality. Although she knows her lifestyle is much more preferable than that of her mother’s, she still says she can “hear” her mother saying “’y’all don’t act right.’”

We move to the subject of how college changed from the time her older cousins (who were in college in the mid 1950’s) were in college to when she attended in the early 1970’s. She remembers how her older cousins, who attended Florida State University, had a strict dress code, an even stricter curfew, and their sole mission was “to find a husband.” The sexual revolution made a huge change in these rules, though. When she went to college she had no curfew or rules (or they’d “get around them”), and women weren’t necessarily expected to prematurely end their education because of an impending marriage. I asked her what she thought the impetus of this change was. “Part of it was the war…and part of it was probably birth control…when the women could all the sudden act like men and didn’t have to suffer the consequences!” I think of Is a Woman a Person? when the question then was birth control and now is abortion. Can women really act like men without reaping the consequences? Or will the consequences never cease? Although it is obvious this time of change sculpted Mrs. Ely, she is clear that her generation also had to carry the burden of the 1960’s movement. She reflects on the people of her generation who killed themselves with drugs and alcohol because of their liberty.

After college, Mrs. Ely started to think about careers. She knew she could have gone the business route, the secretary route, but she, even more than her mother, did not want a man looking over her shoulder. As she put “I love my Daddy, I love my Daddy, but who needs another Daddy?” So, she decided being a teacher would be a “fairly autonomous” choice. To her chagrin, however, her first experience with teaching paid 7,000 dollars a year. Her rationale for this low pay is that this income was meant to be supplemented with that of the husband’s salary. The assumptions of a married college girl were still lingering from the 1950’s. She could not support herself with this salary, so she became a real estate agent in Atlanta. This worked well for her because she had a woman broker to be her boss, but eventually she met her first husband. Who was he? A cotton farmer from the Mississippi Delta, of all things. I laughed at the thought of smart, sophisticated Mrs. Ely having cotton in her hair and living with her in-laws. Well, it turns out I wasn’t so far off.

She describes the culture shock of being an independent real estate agent in Atlanta to becoming an agrarian wife where, literally, her in-laws lived on the same plantation. She describes how archaic the society was. The civil rights movement was at least twenty years behind; they didn’t celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. day, and the public schools were still mostly segregated well into the 1980’s. Hitting more close to home, her brother-in-law was particularly intrusive by deciding how much money she could spend. She admits, though, that there were definite qualities she liked about living in an agrarian society. She got to live with a tight knit family in quite an “idyllic place.” I think it made her reminisce about the stability her family had back in the “Leave it to Beaver” days. Something resonated within her that her mother would like this. However, her husband finally decided that he wanted to stop farming, so they started their own restaurant. Mrs. Ely, who had had previous restaurant experience, took charge of the business to the chagrin of her husband. He was “pretty mean” to her during those years. She guesses, although he never said this outright, that he had a problem with his wife being above him in the business world. She guesses that if they had been in a different environment it could have been different, but the restaurant failed as the marriage disintegrated as well.

We notice that our time is dwindling because she has to pick her son up, so we move to the present. After teaching (for the second time, and more successfully) for fifteen years, our attention goes naturally to the newest news at our high school. Oconee County High School will have its first ever female principal next year. She notices that no women have been in the administrative offices lately and that the school has suffered from this discrepancy. We pretty much decide that football is the actual cause of male versus female issues in academic institutions. She calls it “one of the last vestiges for chauvinistic power trips.” It is really interesting to hear how passionate and convincing Mrs. Ely is about the inequality and divisiveness the sport creates. “Women can go to war, but they can’t play football,” she claims. She thinks because women can’t directly be a part of it, and because most men don’t want them to, it drives a wedge between the sexes. She reiterates that she is not against football, she is just against the way it divides the school on subjects that should be perhaps be more academically influenced. Out of the whole interview, this is when her feminist side comes out the most.

She admits that her feminist definition has changed a lot. She used to equate it with being radical, but now she has found that feminism is still needed. “I consider myself an adult now…I am deserving of equality...in a ‘man’s’ world.” She is amazed at the double standards that are still present, many of which we have talked about in Womens’ Studies. Specifically, she comments on women’s dress. She talks about how everything Hillary Clinton wears is ridiculed because she’s a woman. The male presidential candidates’ dress, however, is never mentioned. She adds that her parents probably add fuel to this fire. She admits that her parents, who have always voted Democrat, refuse to vote for a black man or a woman for president. She says she wants to say “wake up…it’s a different world.” I think of third wave feminism and how they would consider Mrs. Ely saying this to be feminist activism. We wrap up the interview, and one simple statement makes me think that Mrs. Ely is most definitely a feminist: “There is no reason for me to be excluded because of my gender.”

My interview with Mrs. Ely proved to me first hand the plights and successes of feminist thought from the 1950’s onward. I also saw in her that, although she did not consider herself a feminist before recently, she carried the theories and beliefs with her. This gives me hope that many other women who may not concretely consider themselves feminists will still transport the ideas and values of this increasingly ubiquitous, yet subtle, movement.