Strong Individualism

Individualists place a great importance on the strength and integrity of individuals. Because of this trait, most place a higher emphasis on personal traits and strengths rather than on issues of race, class, and gender. This description is perfect for my grandmother, a woman who seems to share much with feminism on the surface but is closely aligned with an individualist way of thinking underneath. As I interviewed my great-grandmother I became surprised that although she embodies many feminist ideals she does not consider herself a feminist.

Born in the 1920s, Mary Haugk quickly learned to be a strong woman. She remembers always having a job and refers to most of her upbringing as “backdated” or old fashioned. Although her family was well off, she had to work for what she wanted. As she joined the workforce, she brought with her the ambitious and assertive qualities she had learned as a young adult. She worked as a telephone operator and quickly made it known that she wanted “top pay and top raises” and would not accept anything else. The job was a closed shop operation and she was forced to join the union, which was segregated by gender. She quickly became discouraged with the union and applied for a managerial position. She started to associate the women who relied on the union to help them instead of helping themselves as “weak sisters.”

Mary got divorced in the 1940s, a time when most of the world was less tolerant of those kinds of acts. Realizing that she would have to raise her family on her own, she started work at Bell because they offered several more benefits than her old job. As a working divorcee, Mary states that backlash amongst her male counterparts was surprisingly minimal. “Never at Bell Labs,” she stated, although “the operating company tried to hold [her] back.” She quickly moved on from the operating job into the managerial positions she would hold at Bell for the next 15 years, part of that time as the only woman overseeing an all male research group of PhDs. A possible reason for the lack of backlash is that she worked mostly with educated, upper class males, professor-types, who were generally more accepting of Mary and her assertive nature. While working at Bell, Mary became convinced that women were their own worst enemies within the workplace and that they must overcome their prejudices against each other in order to truly prosper.

When I asked her what feminism had meant to her, my grandmother said she “never liked the feminist movement” and equated the movement as a union for “weak women.” Although you could say that this correlates to Susan Faludi’s piece “Blame It on Feminism,” the truth is far more personal in my own opinion; Mary Haugk saw herself fighting to get ahead in life while those in the unions and the early feminist movement made a lot of noise and not much else. Because my grandmother was working and thriving in a period during which the feminist movement was not widespread she sees her own actions and not the actions of the feminists as the reasons for her successes.

As we delved further into her working career, Mary showed that although she had no ties to feminism, she still did things that would be considered feminist today. She was progressive in the work environment for much of her career and was a staunch believer in “giving credit where credit was due.” She maintained a working relationship with the unions and, although she encountered a lot of prejudice against African Americans, generally worked well with them. While working with mostly white male management Mary helped her fellow women to move up the corporate ladder, regardless of their class or race.

Although Mary took great pride in her illustrious career working for Bell, she had to work many hours almost seven days a week. As a result, as a single mother, she encountered problems faced by other women in the 1980s. Mary’s children quickly learned to be self-reliant and assertive as Mary herself was. My grandmother sometimes had difficulty finding a babysitter when the children were young and took on boarders from the nearby Nursing school in order to help with this problem. By the time the children were fourteen, Mary stopped having boarders and the children could largely operate the household on their own, had their own jobs to supplant the family income, and helped deal in the finances.

Mary was an intelligent person, but she never went to college. Although she never had a classical education, while she was on the job she learned as much as she could about the operating systems and Bell. She was one of the only women in her department with computer training. Even without a degree, she was able to make more money than someone with one in part because of her tremendous work ethic and her assertive ability to get what she wanted. As part of her job overseeing the designers, Mary tested products and pushed through operating systems that revolutionized the nature of the telephone. When the designers would design something too complicated, Mary would “send it back” and explain that they were designing for the consumer. She also tested operating systems for the phones and told the designers on more than one occasion to “go try it for themselves” when the systems failed. In this way my grandmother showed her assertiveness and willingness to do top notch work and do well for the company; she remarks that some employees told her jokingly that she was “stamped by Ma Bell.”

As I asked her about the nature of feminism, it became clear that my grandmother was truly an individualist. When asked what she thought the goals of feminism should be, she replied she considered the movement “practically dead.” She acknowledges that women have come a long way, but is unsure if feminism is the true reason behind it. In her estimation, women have achieved what they have because they have “gotten more aggressive” and have “strong work ethics.” She says that now the country is “more accepting” of divorce and other reproductive rights than in the forties and fifties and admits that women did not have many choices and were “downtrodden” then, remembering that in some of the male dominated operating switchboards promotions for the operators was determined by sleeping with their bosses. She thinks that women have definitely created these new opportunities and freedoms “for themselves” by “pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.”

Mary Haugk could be the face of the second wave feminist movement – she was divorced, had an illustrious career, and eventually remarried and retired very successfully. However, her personal views correlate with an individualist; she believes in the power of self reliance and personal strength. Even though she did not identify herself with the movement, her successes and achievements mirrored the Women’s Lib movement’s efforts at reaching equality with men in the workplace and acceptance for personal decisions.