LizzieMaine
Bartender
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The idea of women having to balance family and a job isn't a new problem. Perhaps it is a relatively new thing for middle class women, but traditionally working class and poor women have had to work while raising their families for a very long time.
I've been doing some digging into my family history recently, and some of the things I've found out made me think of this old thread. I never knew my great-grandmother -- she died when I was a year old -- but having dug a bit into her life story, I can see where the streak of independence in the women of my family comes from. And her story diverges quite a bit from what people today think of when they romanticize a "woman's role" in the past.
My great-gran was born in 1894, and fell in love with one of these good-time-Charlie type characters when she was 17 years old. He got her pregnant, and didn't want to marry her because it might cramp his fun, but, not to put too fine a point on it, his life was threatened by her father if he didn't live up to his responsibilities, and they were married two months before the baby -- my grandmother -- was born.
He had always been a drinker, and after the marriage began drinking heavily. He was a mean, abusive drunk and finally, after five years of marriage, she took the two children -- another girl was born in 1914 -- and left him. She got a divorce on the grounds of cruel and abusive treatment and got a job in a shoe factory where she worked for a good many years, until she finally remarried. During these years, my grandmother and great-aunt were basically left to raise themselves -- they were latch-key kids sixty years before the rise of middle-class "latch-key kids" caused all the social commentators to wag their heads in dismay, but they both thrived. They were the first members of our family to graduate from high school, and grew up to be strong, intelligent women.
It took a tough, strong woman to make a decision like my great-grandmother made in 1916. She didn't "stick with the marriage for the sake of the kids," because she knew that doing so would likely cause her children far more harm than good -- and the future proved her correct. Her ex-husband went on to marry five more times -- along with a long period of unmarried cohabitation -- before dying as a penniless drunk in 1950.