1. The interview was conducted over Skype. I did a little editing because it took a while for my grandma to figure out how to use Skype and sometimes my grandpa would say things unrelated from another room. I called my grandma and instructed her how to login to her skype and get the call going on her laptop. I downloaded a third-party program that effectively captures the audio of skype calls. This program is often used in a business setting to record calls to review later, but also served me well. I was in a quiet space but my grandma has her computer setup in her living room, and I wasn’t about to ask her to move it. A few times we were interrupted but for the most part I was able to edit it out. At one point I said I was finished but then she kept talking so I had to edit out that part. It was ok and I thought the interview went very smoothly.

 

2. Rose Evans is a Pennsylvania resident who is in her early 70’s. She has two sisters that are mentioned in the interview: Esther and Gladys, who also reside in Pennsylvania. She is married and has two kids, Ted (my father) and Marsha. Rose grew up in Curryville, PA and moved to Souderton in 1969 after graduating college. She moved to Telford, PA in 1981 which is where she currently resides. She attended Geneva College, a christian college in western Pennsylvania, in 1965. She also took some classes at Juniata College which is a small private liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. She graduated in 1969 with a degree in biology. After attending college, Rose went to work at a hospital for a number of years until her early 30s. She then began work at MERK Inc, which is a large pharmaceutical company. She did experiments and quality checks on the pharmaceuticals for 38 years. She retired at the age of 68 and has been living in her home in Telford, PA with her husband.

 

3. Rose was born in the 1940’s, which means that she was around when several events regarding equality occurred. In the interview, Rose mentioned segregation and buses, which is probably because Rosa Parks sparked the bus boycott in 1955 which was right when she was a young adult. She also mentions John F. Kennedy’s assassination which happened in 1963. Another thing that she talks about is how she heard about changes in women’s rights. This could be referring to the passing of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex by public schools. In addition to that the Equal Pay act was passed in 1963 which she referred to as an issue in the workplace. She also said regardless of the equal pay act it was still hard for women to move up in the company, meaning that they still got paid less than men because only the men were moving up.

 

MLA Format Citations:

 

“Decade by Decade: Women of the Century.” Discovery Education. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. <http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/womenofthecentury/decadebydecade/1960s.html>.

 

Beach, Justin. “Women’s Rights in the 1950s.” Our Everyday Life. Our Everyday Life, 01 Apr. 2011. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. <http://peopleof.oureverydaylife.com/womens-rights-1950s-7628.html>.

 

 

4. Interview Transcript

Rose Evans Interview, History 150 Spring 2017, Conducted by Mitchell Evans, March 12, 2017.

Rose: Ok Mitchell.

Me: Ok. So I’ll just start right off with the first question. Was it common for a woman to hold higher positions than men in the workplace?

Rose: No not when I started out. I started out…well I came down to work at MERK in 1969 it was not common for a woman to hold higher positions or even to be a boss. There might have been a few I had a lady boss but it seemed that she was always competing with the guys.

Me: Ok. Did the men treat them differently if there was… so you said there was just like one you knew?

Rose: Yea one I knew. It was pretty much of a mans world. When I started to work in industry it was a mans world. I worked a year in a hospital… that wasn’t so much a mans world. We had the doctors and you had the med techs and the nurses but it wasn’t so much of a mans world because you had to perform your services for the people and the patients and get back to the doctor so they….they usually didn’t treat you bad.

Me: Ok. So they just focused on the patients there?

Rose: In 1968 they did. Where I was.

Me: Can you describe what it was like working… so you worked at MERK for how long?

Rose: 38 and a half years.

Me: Ok Can you describe what It was like a little bit? Just your everyday kinda thing?

Rose: Well I worked in research I always worked in research I never really wanted to be in management or even in medical where you sat at the desk all day. I learned a lot and I felt that I was a good researcher. I really liked having a good experiement and provided good data to the boss. That’s pretty much what I did for 38 and a half years was research. I had good bosses and I had bad bosses.

ME: Where there men doing the same job that you were?

Rose: Yes there were men doing the same job that I did.

Me: Was there ever any times where they were treated differently than you were because they were men?

Rose: I thought so. And we all thought so all the women thought so. Its just the way it was and there was nothing you could do about it you just had to keep on doing your job. Depending on who you work with promotions were given unfairly I thought. It wasn’t always..they said it was called Hay points you had a certain number of points when you started and then you progressed up the scale from like $3.09 to $3.56 and them it went to $4.25 but there was a big gap between $3.50 and $4.25 to get there. And some people didn’t have to write a paper or do any kind of research to get there. And then finally there were some of us…even guys when we finally got a good boss… and we had to do a research project then we could qualify for a promotion. I didn’t feel that the promotions there were fair.

Me: Ok

Rose: But there wasn’t anything you could do about it. Depending on your boss and how he was favored by his bosses. I thought that was kind of unfair. But it was still a place for a women to work because when I left the hospital in 1968 I was making $12,000 a year and to come down to MERK I made $15,000 a year, so it was still a good place for a women to work that way.

Me: Did you have friends that were…like you said it was a good place for you to work but do you have any friends that worked at other places that were treated even more unfairly than you were. Did you ever hear stories about that? Like the discrimination between men and women?

Rose: Sometimes if you got to go to a conference you could talk to other women and they basically had the same issues that MERK had. It was just the way industry was.

Me: Do you remember any of the social movements or protests that were in the news or anything regarding these problems. Regarding gender or race or anything like that.

Rose: When I grew up…I’ll go back to when I grew up… I grew up in an all-white community. There were no blacks, maybe in the city there were some blacks, but there wasn’t any. At the time around the 1960’s. That’s when Martin Luther King or JFK was shot and Martin Luther King did his march and everything. So that was a social movement, I wasn’t that close and involved, but it was pretty prominent for the few tvs that we did have and it was in the newspapers. We did go through that but not so much myself because I wasn’t involved in that.

Me: Ok. There was also like the Women’s rights the equal pay kind of argument that a lot of people did things for that. You never got involved with any of that?

Rose: I never got involved in that, but there were some movements for equal pay and rightly so. There definitely was discrimination and it was like I said it was still a man’s world and it was hard to break and then finally I guess maybe 10 years before I retired that started to change because we were getting more women PHD’s and they had a lot of knowledge and they were able to move up because I think that social movement helped them… to move up along the line and get more prominent positions.

Me: Ok yeah. It looks like it worked.

Rose: It did work. Year I forgot about the women’s rights but It did help. Because then employers were more not threatened but more aware that they couldn’t keep the women under wraps. Even though that’s not a nice way to say it and probably they wouldn’t view it that way but that’s just the way it was… it was an unspoken word.

Me: Would you say that there were some people that didn’t want this change like they didn’t want equal pay and they didn’t want more women in the workforce?

Rose: Oh yes. You definitely have the chauvinist. There were still chauvinists there and even some of the bosses were chauvinist. And they definitely were. But at that time toward the end they really couldn’t say too much because like you said the movement was that you had to incorporate women into the workplace. Another thing is that they didn’t have too many women African Americans in the job and sometimes I don’t know if they two girls that I was real good friends with…they were kind of like tokens. Tokens to move into more of a different clinical position. I mean they did fine there and everything but they weren’t taking any whites they were taking African Americans. We always felt and I think they felt too they were tokens but you don’t have any choice if you put so many years in there you got to go with the flow and they did fine in their jobs you know. But that’s just nothing you can do about it.

Me: Yeah, so with the social change stuff like the company just put them there to show that they were ok with it almost.

Rose: Yeah right. Like the way it appeared to the rest of us. The way it appeared to them I don’t know because they had other African American men in some of those jobs. But then that changed toward the end because we got a lot of Indians in the workplace. Both men and women Indians came into the workplace. Most of them were doctors but not all of them were doctors.

Me: Ok. That’s cool I didn’t think about that. So if you compare the social structure of how society works especially in the workplace versus when you grew up versus now do you think that we… Obviously it has changed but do you think women now have the same status as men do in the workplace or is it still a little bit unfair. Maybe some women do but I think Its still unfair. I still don’t think that women have achieved that. You still have that underlying tone that women have to compete or women have to be really good to get ahead. Its much less than it used to be.

Me: How do you think that we as a society people can combat that and make it so everyone’s equal?

Rose: I think we have to keep working at it. I think that women have to if they have to do a movement they have to do a peaceful movement but I think we have to realize that everybody deserves a chance to move ahead and not be selfish about it beaucse there’s a lot of smart women out there and you know there’s a lot of smart men too but those smart women deserve a chance to move ahead and any women deserves a chance to move ahead. There’s no reason for a women to be kept behind. Because it’s a mans world. I don’t know if that answers it.

Me: Ok. Yeah!

Rose: I grew up and like you said there were no African Americans around me even though that was when Martin Luther King was coming you know…doing his marches and people were still sitting in buses. It was a farming community and we didn’t have slaves there were no slaves there. We had hired men and they would either live at our house and my dad would pay them to help because we only had girls at home I was the last one. So… there weren’t even any blacks…I guess there were some African Americans in the it but we didn’t see them that much you know. Now my sister she went to school in Pittsburg and she said there were…. she was six years older than I am and she said there were some…one girl in her class when she went out there. And then my older sister I asked her and she said…she’s twelve years older and when I asked her if she ever went out to Pittsburg she said one time in the early fifties she went out there to see a doctor or something. Her husband was working out there and she got on the bus and she didn’t know any different and she sat next to an African American man and he said “You’re not from around here” and she said “what do you mean?” and he said “A white women isn’t usually permitted to sit in the seat with a black man”. Now that was in the city in the north you know at that time when I went to school there was only a very few African Americans. I had one girl in my dorm, she was a lovely girl, and I went to a real strict church school but there weren’t that many African Americans in my school. So that was different. But everybody accepted them it was no problem you know.

Me: It might also have been because, up in Pennsylvania for that. I’m sure if you grew up south of… at least south of Maryland it would have been quite different.

Rose: But I guess I used to ride the bus back and forth from Pittsburg

and I never saw… at the time you know I was just glad to have a seat on the bus and I don’t remember any trouble or anything. One time I had to sit on the steps to get home all the way to half way home so I could have a seat they brought me anyhow, but I sat on the steps of the bus. But I don’t remember seeing all that racial things that happened down south we saw them on TV, we saw when John F Kennedy was shot, and we saw Martin Luther Kings march. But it was there, and maybe it was more hidden in the north. It wasn’t as prevalent. The farming community…everybody was farmers or they had farm related jobs or they were mechanics or they sold farm equiptment or sold feed. And nobody was more or less better than any other person. At least in our community in the farming area that I grew up in.

Me: Do you think it would have been different if your da

d was a farmer right near a city where everyone had industry jobs or construction jobs do you think it would have been different like in the social status do you think people would have thought differently of him because he was a farmer?

Rose: I don’t think so because when you went to the city like in Pittsburg they were all either… in West Virginia they were all either coal miners or they worked or they worked steel mills, so that was the same thing it was just that we were agriculture and they were steel mill workers and coal mine workers.

Me: Ok, yeah.

 

5. I believe that the interview went very well. If I had to do it again I would try and do better with my questions. I took a long time to get my point across and it wasn’t always clear. I think that had to do with the fact that I was being recorded along with trying to reword my questions based on her previous responses. It was choppy in speaking but the content flowed nicely. I found it significantly more difficult when I went off script because I couldn’t think of how to word my questions on the fly. I think the divergences were positive and everything that was said was good content. Overall I am happy with it except for how I asked my questions.