Interview with Joyce Claman, History 150 Spring 2023, Conducted by Laurel Claman, March 18, 2023. (Featured Image is a personal photo approved by the interviewee).
Overview to Social Change:
The rise of women in the workforce has been a theme in America since the 1930s during World War II. Since then, there has been a complete shift in family dynamics with many families being dual income. From 1950-2000 the percentage of women in the workforce rose 30%, with 60% of women being a part of the workforce by the early 2000s. This dramatic change is notably due to the increase of high school graduates, the change in technology and fair treatment of women in the work place. One act that helped the treatment of women in the work place is The Equal Pay Act of 1963. This act is an amendment to The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and it prohibits gender-based wage discrimination. These changes allow women all across America to enter the workforce and be treated with the same standards as men.
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was amended in 1968, and this led to many women in the 60s and 70s joining the workforce. One of these women was Joyce Claman. In the interview, Joyce explains her experience with not many job opportunities in the late 50s and how she was able to get a better management position in the 70s. The rise of women in the workforce and better treatment allowed her to get this job that she would have most likely not gotten twenty years prior.
Biography:
Joyce Gallagher Claman was born on March 23, 1938 in Chicago, Illinois. She lived in Chicago for the first five years of her life and spent the rest of her childhood in Northern California. She attended nursing school in California from 1957-1960 and got a job at a hospital after graduating. Joyce had an on and off nursing carrier for 27 years from 1960-2000. During her time not working, she was a stay-at-home mother raising 4 children. She was also the wife of a Navy officer, John, and this meant the family of five made many moves around the country. Her family lived on many naval bases in California, Guam, Connecticut, and Virginia. Joyce and John were both retired by 2000 and settled down in Roseland, Virginia.
Research:
Women in the early 20th century were not given many opportunities for occupations. The opportunities women were given were very basic jobs that did not require much education. These jobs were usually in sales or teaching and were usually for unmarried white women. Things began to change throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By 1970 close to half of the women in the United States were employed. A key act that would help many women and mothers was The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. This act instilled that all women regardless of pregnancy or childbirth shall be treated equally by employers and for employment opportunities. The act also allowed women to continue working through pregnancy as long as they chose to.
One profession that was largely dominated by women in the 20th century was nursing. The nursing profession dramatically increased during World War II, but was extremely difficult and provided little to no benefits. Nurses were scarce, post war, as many women returned to their duties at home. However, in 1960 over 150 universities offered bachelors degrees in nursing, which made the profession more accessible. Throughout the late 20th century, nursing was a field that many women got degrees in. Nursing developed into an occupation with many difficult fields including nurse practitioners, registered nurses, surgical assistants and labor and delivery nurses. Today, nursing is the largest healthcare profession with over 4 million registered nurses in the U.S..
Transcription:
Laurel Claman 0:01
This is Laurel Claman. And today I’m going to be interviewing my grandmother Joyce Claman. Today’s date is March 18 2023. And we are having an in person interview in Nellysford, Virginia. So, could you start out by just giving a brief introduction of yourself?
Joyce Claman 0:22
My name is Joyce Claman. I’m almost 85 on March 23. And I am Laurel’s grandmother. I’m married for almost 60 years to my husband, John. I have four children. Laurel’s father is my youngest son. I have seven grandchildren and I live in Nellysford, Virginia retired. My interests are bridge playing and golf, and I love to cook and entertain and enjoy my family and friends.
Laurel Claman 1:02
Okay, great. All right, I’m gonna backtrack a little bit into the past. Could you describe what it was like growing up in a very large family in the 40s and 50s?
Joyce Claman 1:15
I’ll do my best. My earliest memory is probably when I was maybe only 18 months old. And I can date this because my grandfather died. My maternal grandfather and my sibling after me was 18 months younger than I was. So somewhere between I was between 18 months old and two years old, and I was taken into the room. It was a bedroom where my grandfather was laying on the bed, and I assumed he was dead. But being a little girl, of only two years old or so all I saw was purple. And I just remember this purple. They told me that was my grandfather so I always thought of him as purple. Many years later, I talked with my, my aunts who were there and they said there may have been a purple bedspread, on the bed. And that what I probably was looking at was the bedspread. And I couldn’t see above it. So that’s my earliest memory that I have of that particular time. And it was obviously a very emotional time for everybody. So that would have impressed me as a toddler at that age. Grandma lived in Illinois, in a little farming community, coal mining farming. My grandfather was a coal miner. And he died of probably black lung disease, but they called it pneumonia. And so I just remember being there and my aunts and uncles, my family and everybody were together.
Laurel Claman 3:07
How did your childhood family structure shape the way you raised your own family?
Joyce Claman 3:14
My parents were born between 1913-1912, something like that. And so their background is they went through the Great Depression. They were not wealthy people. Neither one of them went to high school. I think my father may have had some high school. My mother had to go to work in Chicago, which was the closest city and she went there after eighth grade. And she was what they call today an au pair. But she was taken care of a little boy for some people who owned a grocery store when she lived with them. And she was 13 years old and sent her money home to her parents. So that was her life. And she apparently was treated very nice by these people that that you work for. They were obviously very nice people and treated her well. She only had good things to say about them throughout the times that she talked about. Harry and Betty were their names and she liked him very much. So I’m assuming everything was good. She met my father there and they were married.
After Betty and Harry, I think moved to California and mom probably didn’t have anywhere else to go. So anyway, she she was married to my father. My father was a mechanic, automobile mechanic. So he always worked at with cars and he had a job and he worked in a automobile company. And I grew up with third, third daughter, third in line of nine children. We we lived in Chicago. I just remember cold, cold winters, soggy snow in March when it was sunny and nice, but the snow was still on the ground. I went to the local school and I walked just a few blocks, nothing much. It was also a very Catholic neighborhood. And you were just automatically enrolled in the Catholic Church’s catechism for young people. I just they just assumed you were Catholic. Turned out I had never been baptized. But I went to, to the Catechism because that’s what you had to do. And I never questioned it. I was only in first grade. My sisters went so I just assumed we were supposed to go. But I found out just before we were to make our first Holy Communion in the Catholic Church, which is a sacrament that I wasn’t baptized. So, on the Saturday, the my Aunt Mary came over to our house in my end, we she took us all to the church. And we were all baptized in one fell swoop. And then the next day, I was being my first Holy Communion. And I had a white dress in a veil. And I was about seven years old probably where that happened. And that’s tradition in the Catholic Church. And then I finished my education throughout the Catholic requirement, which is up to the time when you’re confirmed. My family moved to California from Chicago in 1948. So I was almost 10 years old when we moved, and we took the train from Chicago to probably San Francisco. And dad bought us a house in Alameda, California, which is at the time was an island right off of the East Bay of San Francisco. It is not an island any longer it’s become a peninsula because they filled the land in around parts of the island to extend it and make more available land space. But at the time that I lived, there was an island and every street ended at the ocean at the bay it was called the bay. So if you just walked down the street from my house, one block was the bay and I spent all of my summers going to the bay, going to the parks, playing in the water never learned to swim. Mom would caution us not to go too far. And there was a big tide. So you know we could walk out for seemed to me as a kid miles. But we never learned to swim. And then the park system was very nice in California. And so I played tennis in the parks, I took my brothers to the park. We’d go to the park after we had dinner and in the summertime and play tennis and there would just be maybe somebody’s father who was teaching the kids how to play and I did a lot of that I played a lot of tennis. I liked the game a lot. And went to elementary school and high school in California and graduated in 1958.
And I decided I wanted to become a nurse. I had broken my arm once when I was very young, in Chicago, and mother took me to a hospital and I had to sit and wait for a long, long time before I got seen by the doctors, but I had broken my elbow. And one young doctor came by with I don’t know what it was it was something like a medicine box or something came in and had intricate little holes or intricate little areas in it. And I guess he thought maybe this little girl who was sitting there very bored, would be able to play with this. It was really nothing but he did he threw it in my lap or maybe he said something to us. And I did I played with it and it kind of took away the time I was waiting, but I remember that little bit of kindness because I mean, he obviously just saw a little girl sitting there bored to death and thought she might like to play with something. Then that kind of set the tone for me. I wanted to be a nurse and the nurses in the hospital they are, I think it was Cook County Hospital in Chicago, were walking around in their capes are navy blue capes with red collars and white uniforms. And I just got, I was very impressed by that. And I wanted to be a nurse. So in 1958, I graduated from high school, and I, or 1957, And I applied and was accepted to Providence College of Nursing in Oakland, California. And I graduated in 1960.
Laurel Claman 10:54
Okay, well, that’s a perfect segue into my next question. You’ve always told me to go very far with my education and job opportunities. Can you describe what opportunities you had as a young woman entering adulthood?
Joyce Claman 11:10
Well, to be honest with you, I didn’t have that many opportunities. A young girl in my standing with a large family and working class parents. They were good parents, and they provided well for us, but it wasn’t expected that you were going to go to college. College was kind of reserved for people with a little higher socioeconomic status. But I kind of knew I wanted to do something more than get a job in a department store or a bank or one of the jobs that you could get without a college education. As a matter of fact, in high school, we were given a choice of a baccalaureate or a collegiate program, or a secretarial program, and I took the secretarial program. But I had an English teacher who was pretty influential. And apparently, she took some time with me. And she kind of promoted college. No one ever had told me I could go to college. So I just didn’t think about it. But she went to Stanford University. And she took a group of girls to just Stanford University. Well, I just fell in love with that place. It was absolutely everything a young girl would want. In those days, they called Stanford University, “The Farm”. And that’s because I guess they had rural areas. And my English teacher was horseback rider. And she took us to see the horses and whatnot. And well, I just thought that would be cool if I could go to Stanford University. But I never got the courage to ask my father if I could go, because I just assumed that it would be no. So I decided to become a nurse and I got accepted. And I told my father. He didn’t encourage me at all, he said, something to the effect that you probably don’t want to be a nurse. They work too hard. That’s really hard work hard job. But I did want to be a nurse. So I just let that go by me and I didn’t stop. So I entered the College of Nursing. And I finished the course of study. And I passed my, my nursing boards. And in 1960 I went to work for Alameda County Hospital, which was the county hospital in Oakland, California. Very busy, big metropolis with a lot of trauma. A lot of you know, very, very big hospital. And I worked in my first job was, I wanted the emergency room, but they wouldn’t give it to me because I had no experience. So they taught me to work in the OB GYN department. Well, they put me supposed to put me in the recovery room after childbirth, the postpartum unit. Well, that didn’t last very long. The next thing you know, I was pulled from there and I was into the delivery room. So I worked between the delivery room and postpartum. But I did have a lot of experiences in the delivery room. One night, a very, very busy night. I was on duty with just one other nurse with about same amount of experiences I had. And we were checking in these mothers who were coming in to have their babies. And we had a resident who was supposed to be sleeping in the sleeper, which was right next to the delivery rooms. Well, obviously he left and he didn’t tell us and we were very busy ourselves with, with admitting all these patients. True this is this is 60 some years ago, so my memory is not that good. But anyway, Annie was her name, so we had a lady she was going to deliver her baby. And we knew enough because we’d seen enough deliveries. But Annie was going to deliver and the resident could not be found and look like she was going to tear. If you know anything about delivering a baby, a woman does not want to tear because tear has very bad effects on a woman for the rest of her life. Well, after calling telephone calls to every department, we could find. Mind you, this middle of the night, we’re calling everybody, we’re probably very short staffed in the hospital, and we’re not getting any help. I even sent Annie out in the hallway to scream down the long hallway for a doctor but nobody came. So she came back and I said Annie, we have to do this, we have to do an Episiotomy, which is a cut of the ladies, perineum, near the perineum. Well, I did it. And I was scared to death because the nurse does not do a doctor’s work. We all know that. But we also know they told us never let them tear. So I did, I did this cut, and we delivered the baby. And I don’t remember everything about it but the doctor did arrive afterward. And a resident arrived. And this one and that one arrived. And then a lot of people came. And I was just simply told by the doctors that I did a very good job. And nothing was ever said about it. Now, if that had happened today, or 20 years ago, when I was working, it would have been biggest incident in the world. Because the nurse would never have done that. But that’s the way it was in my day with nursing. You did what you had to do. People just didn’t make a big, big deal about it. But it was probably a very unheard of incident. I worked at Highland for a couple years and I eventually got to the emergency room. But then I met my husband and I was dating him and he lived in San Diego. So I was he was just coming up to see me on weekends, maybe two weekends a month. And for some reason, it was decided by my parents that I should go live in San Diego with my sister. She was married and was living in San Diego with her husband who was also in the Navy. So I did. And of course my boyfriend John and my husband now he was delighted that I was there and so we dated for quite some time. But that didn’t quite work out. We decided not to get married. My husband was decided he was too young to get married. So we didn’t and this was 1962. And I thought well, what am I gonna do now, I didn’t want to hang around in San Diego and I didn’t want to go back to California to Northern California where I was living. And so my sister found an ad for an airline stewardess. And I answered that ad and the next thing you know what I was an airline stewardess for American Airlines. And I was accepted and I moved to New York City. So I didn’t hear from my husband, my future husband, he didn’t know where I was. And he didn’t ask until about a year later. And then he decided he wanted to look me up, which he did. And he found me found my sister, she gave him my contact information. And then next thing you know, he was writing me letters and telling me that he wanted to see me again and that he made a mistake and he wanted to get married. So that was 60 some years ago, July 20 1963. So I guess it was meant to be. And then we were married in July on July 20 1963.
Laurel Claman 19:49
Wow. So I’m gonna fast forward just a little bit. But could you describe what it was like being a working mom in the 60s and 70s?
Joyce Claman 20:02
Ah, yes, I can. It was, I started out, well, of course, I got married and had a child. The next thing you know, and I had three children. And so I didn’t work for quite some time I was raising little babies and my husband was going to graduate school. So I just didn’t have help and didn’t have any way I could work outside the home. And so I didn’t work for several years, until probably about 1970s, we decided that I wanted to go back and see if I could still do some nursing. And so I went back to a little hospital in Connecticut, and I worked two evenings a week. And I found, you know, babysitters to take care of children between three o’clock and five o’clock when my husband came home. So I did that for many years, part time work. And that was fine, because I could finally work two days a week, I certainly had enough time to take care of my children. But then, in 1977, we came back from Guam and we moved from Connecticut to Washington, DC. And we had to buy a house and had to get a much bigger house. And so it became apparent that I should work and save some money for our children’s education, because that was the way we would we would have done it would do it. We would save our salary, if we could as much as we could. So I went to work. And I was selected to be a head nurse and asked if I would go full time then. Well, it was hard. It was really hard. I did. I put my youngest son, in a private school. And he took the bus of private bus to school. So he pretty much got taken care of by the neighbor next door, who took care of him in the morning. And then the bus took him to school. So I didn’t have to worry about a babysitter for him. My other children were old enough to get the bus themselves. And I did that for many years. And I worked. I worked almost 20 years as a full time nurse at Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax, Virginia, which is the Nova Hospital now. I did management work, I was asked to be a manager. So I was the head nurse. I did that for about 10 years. And then it became very frustrating for me a lot of staffing issues. And my husband then became selected for another job and another rank and we were expected to move. So I had to resign my position and move to Connecticut. And when I did that, I thought well, okay, I’m probably not going to go to work again, as a nurse, but as it turned out, I did work. I worked in Connecticut, and I did come back to Fairfax Hospital. And I worked for another 10 years. So I did have about a 27 year career in nursing, interrupted by our many moves to two different duty stations.
Laurel Claman 23:51
Okay, well that segues into my next point. How did you feel about your husband being in the Navy?
Joyce Claman 24:01
Well, I accepted it. He told me when, of course I knew it when I met him that he was he was a naval academy graduate, which automatically, I would, I thought made him a career officer. And he indicated that he was and so it was just understood that that he was going to be a career officer and I just never thought anything more about it. I assumed we would just have a 30 year career in the Navy. It turned out it was a little longer because he was selected for what they call flag rank which is an admiral. So he added four to six more years under his duty time in the Navy. But I didn’t expect that because that’s pretty hard to make Admiral but I didn’t know that he would and I was as surprised as anyone but it was a good life. It was, it was very interesting life, we did a lot of things, things that we would never been able to do. We lived in Guam, we traveled to Hong Kong, we traveled to Thailand. My children had a lot of good experiences that they would not have had. I don’t think they would have had the same experiences. But there were disadvantages too many school changes for them many, many trials with friends that they had to leave and, and make new friends and all of the things that children go through when they’re teenagers. But my husband and I always just adopted the positive attitude that this would make them stronger. And we didn’t, we didn’t let them think that there was anything bad about that type, this type of life, we just let them know, we we accept we expected them to, to, you know, be able to handle everything. And they did, mostly.
Laurel Claman 26:10
Okay. Um, I know that you and your family lived on multiple Navy bases. Can you describe what life was like there?
Joyce Claman 26:19
Yes, it was very pleasant actually. We lived several times, within the Navy community right on the base. You have a sort of instant friendship, instant neighborhood instant people that are your friends that you do things with. So from that point of view, it’s very nice. Your children go out play and make friends and it was safe, it was very you know being an officer was very pleasant, because we had privileges that they say rank as his privilege. Well, that’s true. There were officers clubs, there were ladies bridge groups. You know, like I said, you had instant access to friends and community activities. I didn’t work during those years, I did stay home, I was a stay at home mom. It was actually more affordable for us to live on the base. And so that was a bonus if we could do that, because we just had a better quality of life. So it was very nice.
Laurel Claman 27:37
Okay, thank you. And how did you feel raising four children while your husband was at sea? What was that like?
Joyce Claman 27:46
Well, it was frustrating at times. Many times, I would have to say I was frustrated. It was difficult to go through holidays. Because we didn’t always live near extended family we had to make our nuclear family, our traditions, I strive to make traditions that my children would feel were our traditions. And so we always had holiday traditions that we kept. And I did try to make those happen. And we weren’t, it wasn’t a long sea duties. It was mostly in our younger years that my husband would be away for six months, seven months at a time. But then I just had babies and one time I went to Hawaii and stayed with my sister and another time I went to back to my family’s home in Northern California and I stayed with an another sister. So I didn’t have to be alone when I had little children. I was able to go to be with family. But then as they got older, of course, I had more children. I couldn’t do that. But you’ve always had the support of your Navy family, you always have that support. And there’s a boardroom of people your husband’s ward on the ship and those wives stick together and captain’s wife is is kind of a one that would keep the Navy wives together. And it’s just like, like being in the military, you have your higher ranking wives and and it’s people take care of each other. So it was always a good friendly community.
Laurel Claman 29:44
Okay, thank you. That concludes our interview. Thank you. Let me start. Yeah. Can you describe what kinds of changes you saw during your 20 year career as a nurse
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Process Overview:
This interview was an in-person interview in my grandparents home in Nellysford, Virginia. I used the recording app on my phone for the interview and tried to limit noise distractions by conducting the interview with just me and my interviewee. The editing process was fairly simple because I used Otter.ai for the transcript but I did have to change a few words that the website could not hear properly.
Bibliography:
Peterson, Esther. “The Equal Pay Act of 1963.” US EEOC, www.eeoc.gov/statutes/equal-pay-act-1963#:~:text=The%20EPA%20%2C%20which%20is%20part,skill%2C%20effort%20and%20responsibility%20under. Accessed 3 May 2023.
Scott, Judith. “The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.” US EEOC, https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/pregnancy-discrimination-act-1978.
Toossi, Mitra. A Century of Change: The U.S. Labor Force, 1950-2050, 17 May 2002, www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf. Accessed 7 May 2023.
Whelan, Jean C. “American Nursing: An Introduction to the Past.” • Nursing, History, and Health Care • Penn Nursing, 4 May 2015, https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/nhhc/american-nursing-an-introduction-to-the-past/.
Yellen, Janet L. “The History of Women’s Work and Wages and How It Has Created Success for Us All.” Brookings, Brookings, 6 Jan. 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/.