Are we moving forward or backward?
Part of a series on “What I Still Want to Accomplish.” For previous installments, this and this.
The very long title of the memoir I want to write could be “Tales and Stories of a Non-Traditional Woman Growing Up and Living in a Traditional World.” This was the situation I found myself in as a mid-period baby boomer.
I want to share my personal story with my millennial daughters and their contemporaries. I want them to know and appreciate their mothers and others who blazed the trails to gender equality in the workplace and elsewhere.
The time and place and context of what happened to me are pivotal to understanding my behaviors and reactions then—although much of that may or may not be realistic or relatable to the working woman of today. But I hope to make them so because I want to write to help others.
Exploring my family tree is also something I want to accomplish, even if I still have trouble correctly spelling genealogy! I want to learn about and write stories about my family’s history.
Dad was born in Germany where his parents divorced when he was a child. He and his mom, my grandma Lisette, reached the U.S. after an arduous and probably sometimes harrowing route through London and Surrey, England, where they survived the war years.
Mom was born in Brooklyn. Her parents had both been born and raised there, too. Until their small family followed one of mom’s uncles out to Los Angeles, they’d lived with her grandma Sarah. Like many who lived in their tenement building, mom’s maternal grandparents spoke more Yiddish than English.
Dad’s been gone for 20 years now. Mom had started telling some family stories, off and on, over the years before she passed in 2022. Those stories were more about dad and his harrowing youth and young adulthood. Most of her stories were about her very limited time as a single young adult. They were about her favorite high school classes, how she spotted dad at a B’nai B’rith Young Adults meeting, and about her first job where, she would tell us with pride, her employer so valued her skills that they would send a car to take her to work and back while she was pregnant with me.
I don’t think she accurately remembered the details of those stories, but they were interesting to me, nonetheless, and made me want to know more about mom and dad and their lives and times, and hopefully to interest my daughters and especially my new granddaughter in their forebears.
I’ve met just a few relatives of my parents’ generation, and fewer still of the generation before theirs. Some of dad’s luckier relatives had also escaped from Germany and many of them lived in the Los Angeles area. Mom’s larger extended family was spread around the country, though the few I met locally were certainly colorful enough to pique my curiosity.
I have started to search genealogy websites while also trying to glean information from documents I found stashed or filed away while cleaning out my childhood home. I have already discovered some fodder to fill out stories I previously knew about, as well as starting points for new ones that I will have to create mainly from those more sterile sources.
I would like my readers, especially the women, to learn from the experiences of their elder baby boomer and greatest generation mothers and grandmothers. I want them to develop their own manifestos, so they can thrive as their own authentic selves wherever they may be in the arc of modern life in the 21st century.
Are we, in general and as individuals, moving forward or backward? Or is the net result of movements in both directions just a wash for today’s women? I want to find out.
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Sue Frederick got her BA in International Relations from USC in 1975 and her MBA from UCLA in 1980. She retired as an aerospace parts and materials buyer in Southern California before moving to Nashville with her family in 2006. After becoming a bored empty nester there she got a new job in Oak Ridge, TN., where she moved with her then-retired now ex-spouse. Post-COVID and post-divorce, she was invited by her adult daughters to move to Kalamazoo, MI., where they now live.