Memaw, From Rural West Virginia to Arlington, VA as a Woman in the Latter Half of the 20th Century, Hist 150H Spring 2022, Conducted by Hannah Dodson, 17 March 2022.
Overview to Social Change Interview
After World War II, what life looked like in America varied drastically depending on one’s location, class, gender, and race/ethnicity. As seen in this and other interviews involving gender and general social change, while the men primarily worked to bring income to the family, household chores were largely expected to be done by the women and girls in the house, and the chores themselves depended on whether or not they lived on a farm and whether or not they could afford to buy a machine or pay someone to do the jobs for them (like making and washing clothes and preparing food). On top of household chores, girls were expected to go to school and often to church and to develop other skills, such as playing the piano.
That being said, life was very busy for a girl who later became my grandmother being raised by a relatively poor family on a farm in West Virginia. However, her daily life changed when, due to the job insecurity that came with her father’s being a coal miner, her family moved to the city of Arlington, Virginia when she was a teenager. With no farm, instead of spending time helping to grow and process the family’s food and taking care of the animals, she now spent her time struggling to keep up in school, and, like many other women at this time and as seen in other interviews, working various, non-field-specific jobs to make money and starting a family with her husband.
While the location and household chores changed when Memaw moved to Arlington, some things, like the gender expectations discussed above and racial and ethnic discrimination, did not change. Despite the disappearing segregation laws and increase in integration in schools and the workplace, the “us” and “them” mentality of seeing races and ethnicities as distinct, possibly unequal groups remained strong. This appears in this interview in the way Memaw speaks about people of color looking back on her life and even today.
This interview also shows how life changes for aging populations, following Memaw’s journey from being an employed housewife to her husband for 53 years to caring for her husband as he developed Alzheimer’s to being a widow trying to stay fulfilled in the rest of her life.
Biography
Memaw (she/her) was born to a white Christian family in May, 1942 in rural Ravencliff, West Virginia. She and her older sister were raised by her father, who was a coal miner and World War II veteran and mother who worked as a housewife. They lived on small family farm within walking distance of her relatives’ homes. She attended a local school which was a 6-room schoolhouse.
When she was a teenager in 1960, the coal mine in which her father worked shut down, and her family moved to Arlington, Virginia so that her father could find employment. Here, she went to a large urban school where her graduating class was around 725. She struggled in her academics. Later she learned that she had struggled with an undetected learning disability. She married on April 11, 1964, and graduated that May.
Her high school had a Vocational Office Training program which enabled her to get experience babysitting processing library books. She [enlisted in?] the Navy department of the Navy Annex in Arlington from 1964 to 1966. She then moved to the Air Force section of the Pentagon and worked there from 1967 to 1969. In September 1969, she stopped working to care for her and her husband’s newly adopted son. She returned to work when her son entered school. She held various jobs as a school secretary and aide from 1979 to 2000, even working three part-time jobs, including at a gas station, from 1980 to 1983. After her retirement in 2000, she and her husband moved to Staunton, Virginia where she “adopted” me from her neighbors and lived until her husband died of Alzheimer’s Disease in 2017. Then, the house being too much for her alone and with health issues, she moved to a smaller house in a neighborhood in Stuarts Draft, Virginia where she lives in relative peace with her cat and enjoying time with friends she has made since she was widowed.
Research
After World War II, Americans prioritized the family above all else, meaning that women tended to wed and bear children early then stay at home and care for their families rather than continue their education and career outside of the family. The few women who did pursue careers outside of the family faced discrimination, especially those who did traditionally male-dominated jobs. Single and divorced mothers faced even more discrimination. However, as time went on and advances were made in women’s sexual and reproductive rights, women started to strive for more fulfilling and economically secure lives than those of their mothers in the form of work outside of the home, leading to a rise in women in the work force as well as divorce rates.
Similar interviews on this website support these trends in pressure for women to start a family as well as trends in women’s relationship with the workforce, especially that women tended to work a variety of jobs (especially those requiring less education), often primarily to provide for their families as compared to men and faced discrimination when they strayed from those expectations.
Additionally, the racial and ethnic demography during Memaw’s time period was widely varied across the U.S. and underwent changes. In 1960 when she moved from West Virginia to Arlington, VA, 4.8 percent of the WV population was black while 20.6 percent and 53.9 percent of the population was black in VA and Washington, D.C. respectively. The way the U.S. Census recorded data also evolved with the the racial and ethnic social movements of the time, changing from door-to-door subjective enumeration by a government worker to mailed forms that households could fill out themselves. These forms also became more inclusive over time, expanding to include more specific Asian and Native racial categories, the Hispanic ethic category, and the ability to identify as more than one race.
Transcript
HD 0:02
Hello, this is Hannah Dodson. I’m here with my grandma, Memaw. Memaw, how are you doing today?
Memaw 0:08
I’m doing good. Thank you, Hannah.
HD 0:11
So you were born in West Virginia, and that’s where you grew up. What did your day-to-day life look like there?
Memaw 0:18
Well, we got up early in the mornings, about six o’clock, and we— Mom had breakfast ready. And then I fed the chickens, Margaret [Memaw’s sister] fed the pigs. We both did the dishes, one washed and one dried. And we got ready for school. And it took about 45 minutes or better to get to school, by the school bus. We walked down the holler [colloquial name for a hollow, or a small valley] to get to school, and to get to the bus. And we had a dog, Rex, and Rex followed us all the way down.
HD 0:52
[Laughs]
Memaw 0:53
And Rex stayed there until the bus picked us up. And then he went home.
HD 1:01
[Laughs] What was it like growing up in a coal mining family?
Memaw 1:05
I didn’t realize it was tough, but it was tough. Everything was tight. Coal miners didn’t work all the time. They struck a lot, or they didn’t have the orders, one or the other, so Daddy never knew when he went to work, if he was going to work that day or not. And then a lot of times he had to work over—
HD 1:27
—To make enough money?
Memaw 1:29
Yeah, well, that was—they had the orders and they had to continue working until a certain job was finished. And it didn’t matter how long it took, they had to stay in the mines down underground, working.
HD 1:44
Okay. Okay.
Memaw 1:45
One of the things that stood out to me more than anything else, and please don’t take this in the wrong way, is that when the bucket would come up, and the miners would come out, everybody was black. And I asked my mama, “How can you tell which black man is your man?” But she could always tell by his walk.
HD 2:10
[Laughs] Did your mom have a job to make money too? Or did—could you—
Memaw 2:14
—She worked off and on at the grocery store, or at the service station down the holler—or down the road from us [unclear]. Whenever they were short of help, they would ask Mom if she could come down and work, and she would go down and work off and on.
HD 2:31
Okay, okay. And how did your life change whenever you moved to Arlington and what your day looked like?
Memaw 2:39
Drastically. There was no more chickens and pigs to feed. You got up, you got ready for school, eat your breakfast, went down and caught the bus and went to school, came home. My second year there, I started babysitting. So after school each day, I would go over and start babysitting right after school was out. And then in my senior year, I went to school half a day, and I worked half a day in the Vocational Office Training class. So I worked at the library.
HD 3:18
What motivated you to work there while you were in school?
Memaw 3:23
I had enough credits. And of course, you got double credits for that course, the VOT [Vocational Office Training]. And I wanted to get out and start earning money.
HD 3:33
Okay. Okay. How was school in Arlington, different from in West Virginia?
Memaw 3:40
Well, you go from a class that would have graduated of maybe 30 or 40 people to 700-and-some graduating class, and just imagine the hallway in school! And of course, you’ve got your stairways, and the stairways is where the interchange goes from first floor to second floor and the congestion at each class period and trying to get from one end of the building to the other end of the building and having to go up the staircase as well was tough.
HD 4:14
That’s a big change from the schoolhouse you were at in West Virginia, right?
Memaw 4:18
Oh, definitely. Most definitely.
HD 4:20
[Laughs]
Memaw 4:20
Yes. And we had PE [Physical Education] at school and you had to go in and undress in front of everybody. And of course, this is something that was unheard of, as far as being raised in West Virginia.
HD 4:37
What grade were you in when you moved?
Memaw 4:40
Ninth grade.
HD 4:40
Ninth grade? Ooh. [Laughs]
Memaw 4:42
Yes. At 15 years old. It’s very rough.
HD 4:45
Yeah. Yeah. What was your experience in school different from that of your peers in any way?
Memaw 4:54
Than my peers in West Virginia, or my peers—?
HD 4:58
—Like the people the same age as you in school.
Memaw 5:01
It was, in a lot of sense, in the fact that I didn’t know anybody. You didn’t have time to make friends. Mom and Dad—Mom especially would not let me do any extra things after school. You go to the games or anything like that, any activities, I didn’t get a chance to do that. So you didn’t get to know anybody. I had two friends at school. And that was it.
HD 5:31
Why didn’t your mom let you do anything outside of school?
Memaw 5:35
I don’t know. But whatever Mom said is what you did.
HD 5:40
So you didn’t sneak out or anything? [Laughs]
Memaw 5:42
No, never did. No. That was uncalled for. Didn’t do those things.
HD 5:51
[Laughs] So you’ve mentioned a few times that you have had—you had trouble reading when you were in school?
Memaw 5:57
I was a very slow reader. And as doing that, that made it more difficult for me to read my assignments that I had. And I also have an attention deficit. I mean, we can talk about something other and everything will be fine. Or—you hear—a teacher is up front, talking, and it doesn’t communicate with me, it doesn’t stay. I have to read it. In order to be able to hold it and to be able to keep it and remember it.
HD 6:36
Yeah. Yeah. How did that affect your experience in school?
Memaw 6:41
I always never felt up to being able to do the job. My biggest fear was that I would never be able to graduate, that I would not make the grades to be able to graduate.
HD 6:56
And you felt that that was different from the other kids in the school?
Memaw 7:01
Well, from all the other kids that could answer the questions and see their papers when they’re handed out with all the good grades on it. And mine with not the good grades on it, you knew you weren’t like the rest of them were. My sister was smarter than me, as far as her grades and all in school. She claims that she had to work harder for it, but I worked hard. I did everything that I could, but I still had difficulty doing it. And one of the things that I have, as an adult, realized is that the Lord blessed me with common sense. He didn’t give me the smarts that I would like to have had, but he blessed me with common sense. And one of the experience that I had when I was working for a high school in Arlington, after we had adopted our son, was the teachers were, of course, all college educated in there. I don’t remember what the job was, but there was something other that needed to be done. And these educated people couldn’t see how to do the job. But to me, it was as plain as mud [phrase that means obvious or clear]! There was nothing to it. What is your problem? Why can’t you understand it? So I feel blessed that I had the common sense. It’s got me through a lot of difficulties in life.
HD 8:27
Yeah. What did you want to do after high school when you were still in school?
Memaw 8:32
Well, when I was in high school, I got married in April and graduated in June. Of course, I wanted to go to work, and I wanted to have children.
HD 8:43
Okay, and do you feel like that’s what others wanted you to do, or did you think that was different from any pressures from people around you?
Memaw 8:52
No, there was no pressure.
HD 8:53
No?
Memaw 8:53
No, not the fact that I wanted to get married before I graduated. Not in any way.
HD 9:03
And you had been with Pawpaw [her husband] for a long time before then, anyway. So it was kind of expected—
Memaw 9:07
—We had dated four years before, so yes.
HD 9:14
So you went to school around the time that—and you lived through the time that desegregation was happening?
Memaw 9:22
Yes.
HD 9:23
How did that affect your experience in school and then in the rest of your life?
Memaw 9:28
You know, it’s funny, because growing up in West Virginia, there were the blacks, and it was called Colored Town. And it was up next to the coal mines. And Daddy worked with them. And they were just the same as any white man ever was with Daddy. He was friends with all of them. And that was my introduction to the blacks. And whenever we killed hogs each year, they came down and helped because they wanted the intestines to make chitlins with, and so whenever school came along, it was just—it was just natural. It was normal. One of the friends that I had in a couple of my classes was the black girl. And we became friends. When I went to work for the Navy Department, my best friend there was a black woman. So no, color makes no difference with me.
HD 10:28
Did you feel like there was more prevalence in black people in Arlington than in West Virginia or—?
Memaw 10:35
—Oh, yes, definitely—
HD 10:36
—Well, there was also more people in general [laughs].
Memaw 10:38
Yeah. And one of the things that I observed, basically, after I was out of high school and working at a high school, the black kids that were bused in to the school, they really had an attitude. They really didn’t want to learn. They didn’t—they just, you could just sense their displeasure in the fact that they had to be bused over to a white school. You really— I really felt it. And I felt sorry for them. The fact that they did not try.
HD 11:15
Yeah, maybe they felt like it wasn’t worth it to try. They just felt out of place, which is sad—
Memaw 11:22
—Yeah. Yeah. Because they’re a minority in that aspect.
HD 11:28
Yeah. What was it like being a woman in the workforce in all the jobs you had?
Memaw 11:39
It was okay. There was pressure from the men. I didn’t see it at the time. But I see it. I seen it in later life. There was some pressure, there was some advances made that was uncomfortable. You kind of laughed it off and just kept on going.
HD 12:11
What kind of pressure was it? Like pressure to do your job or pressure—?
Memaw 12:17
—No, sexually. It was the Navy, the Air Force. I worked two and a half years for the Navy Department, and two and a half for the Air Force. And the Navy was more prevalent in the friendliness, the over friendliness of some of the men. Some of them were not. There was a lot of them that was good Christian men that was really good to work with. They were a jolly type of person. The Air Force was kind of dry.
HD 12:51
Okay, and did you feel that pressure and discomfort in all of your jobs or was it just in the one working with the military?
Memaw 13:02
At the time, I did not feel the pressure. I mean, you know, 18 years old—no, I just turned 19 years old when I started working for the Navy and you didn’t know what was coming at you. You didn’t have any idea of what was what. I mean, you just a young chick from the country, because you’re still country regardless, and it’s just—that’s just the way it is.
HD 13:27
Yeah. And did you notice that in your jobs working at the library or as a secretary or anything?
Memaw 13:39
No, no, not really.
HD 13:41
Okay, now, so as for work at home, what different things did you do and what different things did Pawpaw do around the house?
Memaw 13:54
Pawpaw, you’ve got to remember, had the lower lobe of each lung removed. So therefore his resistance [meaning lung capacity or stamina] was not what normal people’s resistance are. And I learned off the bat early that he had to have more rest. So I took over. I always did all the house cleaning and doing the laundry and doing all of that. That was just normal for me to do it because that’s the way I was raised. But mowing the yard and all of that, I did it cause I loved it and still love it.
HD 14:35
[Laughs] Did he do anything around the house, or—?
Memaw 14:37
—Well when there was painting—well, not really painting. He’d do the trim and I did the walls. But any repairs or anything that needed to be done? Yes, he was there to do all of that. But I did your day-to-day chores.
HD 14:56
Okay. And what about whenever you adopted your son, what did that look like in the house?
Memaw 15:06
It was different in the fact that, you know, he’s adopted. First off, we were supposed to get a child in September, and we didn’t get him until January, because the first child had too many complications that we couldn’t afford to address. I was not able to work until he went to school. And when he started school, then I could go back to work. Finances were very, very tight. We could go to McDonald’s maybe once a month and eat, but we’d never eat out besides that. It’s just, you know, it’s just a normal life. As far as you know, all of a sudden here, you got a baby, and you got all the extra little work to do, but you do it.
HD 16:03
Did Pawpaw help out with Jeff [her son] at all?
Memaw 16:06
Yes, yes. And one of the best things that Pawpaw did in helping out with Jeff, when he was an infant, was, I would tell him, “Now you keep him awake,” while I go in here and get whatever it was that I was doing, get it done. “You keep him awake, so that whenever we get finished, then he can go to bed and he’ll sleep a little longer.” And I would go in and find both of them sound asleep, on the couch, stretched out [Laughs].
HD 16:37
[Laughs] So you were with Pawpaw—you never got divorced, how long were you two married?
Memaw 16:44
53 years.
HD 16:45
53 years. How was life different for you after he died? And when he got the dementia, how he started declining, what was your life like?
Memaw 16:54
Well, with the dementia, it was different. One of the things that stands out in my memory the most is that my neighbor that lived next to us told me a long time after he had passed away, that one time Pawpaw had come over to his house and wanted him to go over and see who that woman was—there was a woman at his house, and he didn’t know who she was, and she was giving him orders and he didn’t like it. And Tom [the neighbor] did not tell me this until a few years later, and I was totally shocked to learn that he didn’t know who I was. And then the last three years, I guess three and a half years that he lived, he was not able to talk that you can understand what he said. I kept him at home for a good year and a half or so beforehand until he got to the point where he couldn’t understand to raise his feet to where I could help bathe him and take care of him. And it got too much because of my back problems that I just couldn’t do it. And then I put him in a nursing home for— He was there for a year and a half before he passed away.
HD 18:15
And you still went to the nursing home and helped out a lot still?
Memaw 18:19
Every day that was possible. There was a period of time where they had quarantine and you couldn’t go in. They had a virus that that hit the area and the nursing home, and you couldn’t go, but yes, I was there every possible day that I could be there. I got there around nine o’clock and stayed until about two o’clock every day. I helped out the staff whenever I could with transporting patients from the family room area up to the dining hall or back from the dining hall back down. Whatever I could do, I helped out.
HD 18:59
And after he passed away, what was your life like?
Memaw 19:03
Well, just before he passed away, it got too much for me to try to keep up the big house that we had [outside of Staunton, Virginia] and the two and a half acres. And so I bought a house in Stuarts Draft [Virginia], and the moving process was extremely hard. The weather was hot. My back was killing me. The movers came, and when they came in, they put the furniture in and the boxes and all. When it got to the boxes, it was like I was exhausted. I couldn’t do anything. I told them to stack the boxes up. And, fortunately, Jeff and Mary [his wife] came down that weekend, and they unloaded the boxes for me. But as far as the community was, it’s one of the greatest moves that I ever made. I have got fantastic neighbors that keep an eye out for me that include me in in their family. And across the street from me is a family that has really, really just taken me under their wings. And they have a son that has two children. He’s divorced. And he invited me just this past week to go out to eat with the whole family.
HD 20:21
That was nice.
Memaw 20:21
Yes, yeah.
HD 20:24
And what does your daily life look like here?
Memaw 20:28
Things are slow. Thank goodness, I’ve got things for church to do. At least one day a week, if not more besides Sunday, right now, I’m in a Bible study on Tuesday nights. On Wednesday mornings, we’re having a trip through the Holy Lands. Some members went to the Holy Land, and they’re sharing their journey with us, which is great. Friday mornings here at my house, we have a Bible study. And we have usually six or better of people that are here to listen to sermons. And on Fridays, we either go to a neighbor’s house and eat or we go out and eat. And then we play dominoes.
HD 21:16
And you and the people here in the community?
Memaw 21:19
Yes, yeah. Just the people here in the community.
HD 21:23
That’s nice.
Memaw 21:24
Yeah, it is very nice.
HD 21:26
And what have you felt, since Pawpaw died, and you moved here? What have your emotions been like?
Memaw 21:36
I lost Pawpaw before he passed away. I had all of those years—He found out, mentioned in 2006, that he was getting forgetful. And he died in 2018, so there was times all through there that he was not working out—He wasn’t functioning properly, I mean, to his fullest. And so I assume that I mourned his loss during that time period, not after he passed away, because I was thankful that he was out of that body and into a new body with Jesus.
HD 22:17
Yeah. And what about here? Like, more recently, what have you been feeling?
Memaw 22:24
There’s days that are [makes sound suggesting negative feelings], and there’s days that are, “Yeah, that’s good!” It depends upon how hard you push yourself, and what you do. I am limited with my arthritis, and my back pain, and all in what I can do. There’s so much that I can’t do, but like cleaning the house, ever how many days it takes me, it takes me. You just do what you can, you sit down and rest, and you get back up and you go again, until, “Can’t do that again, got to go sit down!” That’s life [laughs].
HD 23:00
And that’s very different from how you’ve been living your life?
Memaw 23:04
Oh yes, most definitely. Yes, yes. It hurts me that somebody else is mowing my yard and doing my part of my yard work. It hurts, I don’t like it at all. I want to do it myself. And I try, but I can’t do it. And of course, I’ve got Precious [her cat], and Precious is the loving-est kitty cat that anybody would ever want to have. As a matter of fact, in the mornings, I get lots of loving and kisses on my forehead and all where she comes and tries to say, “Mommy, it’s time to get up! I want my breakfast!” [Laughs]
HD 23:42
I’m glad you have her as company.
Memaw 23:44
Yes, indeed. And she’s 14 years old.
HD 23:50
Well, that’s all the questions I have. So thank you!
Memaw 23:53
Okay, thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Overview of interview technology and process
This interview was conducted in person. Beforehand, Memaw and I set up a date and time over Spring Break (as she and I live near each other) for me to come to her house to spend the day with her and interview her. I decided to use one of The Makery’s Digital Audio Recorders (DARs) to ensure good sound quality and simplicity (as opposed to using Zoom in person), so I reserved the DAR ahead of time, picked it up right before Spring Break, brought it to Memaw’s house, recorded the interview with it on its tripod with us sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, and imported the audio to my laptop. The audio did not need any editing, so I uploaded and transcribed the original recording.
Bibliography
Esther McLean, Juggling Work and Home as a Woman in North Carolina During the 70s, Hist 150 Honors Spring 2021, Conducted by Joshua Kline, March 10, 2021.
United States, Congress, Population Division, et al. Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States, U.S. Census Bureau, 2002, pp. 41–81. Working Paper No. 56.
Interview with ML , History 150 Spring 2021, Conducted by Luke Armstrong, March 13, 2021.
Interview with Patricia Crocker, History 150 Spring 2021, Conducted by Elizabeth Kraut, March 10, 2021.
“Mrs. America: Women’s Roles in the 1950s.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-mrs-america-womens-roles-1950s/.
Office of the Historian. “Postwar Gender Roles and Women in American Politics.” US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007, https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/Changing-Guard/Identity/.
Perez, Anthony Daniel, and Charles Hirschman. “The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the US Population: Emerging American Identities.” Population and development review vol. 35,1 (2009): 1-51. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2009.00260.x
Transcription Process
To transcribe this interview, I started by using Otter.ai to get a base transcription. I then listened to the audio and edited the AI-generated transcription, correcting any spelling, punctuation, or grammatical mistakes caused by the AI. During this process, I also added in brackets to explain some names, locations in reference to the biography, colloquialisms, and words that Memaw used incorrectly that would confuse the audience otherwise. I also added brackets for laughter and other non-verbal noises, and I used em-dashes to signify false starts I decided to leave in there for meaning and to show that we were overlapping or interrupting each other. I chose not to correct most of Memaw’s improper grammar because that is how she talks, and it felt inauthentic to change that so much when you can still understand what she means. I also omitted some reflexive non-verbal sounds in the audio, as including them would clutter the transcription.