Interview with Adrienne Adams, History 150 Spring 2023, Conducted by Maggie Moonis, March 18, 2023

Overview to Social Change Interview:

Coming out of the 1950s, the idea of the working mother completely changed. Instead of staying home and caring for her children, women were able to take on roles within the workforce that were previously unheard of. As the idea of what a working mother is has evolved over the years, the general consensus currently offers many different types of mothers to live under the term of being a working mother, such as stay-at-home moms, part-time workers, full-time workers, work from home mothers, etc. The list continues to grow and expand as we continue to encourage and discover new ways that women can be within the workforce while also raising children. However, like everyone else, problems may arise and having to deal with family structure, gender hierarchy, social norms that come with being a woman in the workforce and the general struggles a job can place on you can cause a strain on both relationships with others and yourself. 

Recently, I interviewed my mother on her views of being a working mother in a high leadership position within her job and the struggles that have come along with it. After my father lost his job and decided to become a stay-at-home dad, my mother became the sole breadwinner for our family and because of this I never talked with my mother about the struggles that came along with deciding between having to be a mom and being a Senior Vice President of Development within her job and how that impacted her. In this interview, we talk about the general journey of making it to where she is today, gender norms within the workforce and if she experienced them, how her personal relationships have changed in relation to her job, and if she thinks more women should be given higher opportunities. 

 

Research: 

Women have always worked. Whether that be at home or at a place of employment, women can, in a lot of cases, be considered the backbone of our society. The idea of the working mother, however, didn’t come into effect until around the 40s. Previously, the idea of a women working while also taking care of her children was only seen for families that were in need of money and casual jobs, such as taking in lodgers. World War 2 though saw a major increase of women within the workforce, specifically with women taking over for jobs that were previously held by men. Statistic-wise, women in this period made up for a quarter of the workforce. The movement of working mothers was looking positive at this time. The government was also involved and approved of the war effort and women were given major benefits for taking over these jobs, specifically childcare for mothers. The 50s through 70s saw not only a massive increase in women wanting to continue to work, but a social and political movement, feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement, that was willing to fight for the continuation of mothers and other women within the workplace.

While women in the workplace currently make up around 57.4% of the workforce and over the years have made significant strides in putting themselves into positions that lead into leadership offers, specifically managerial positions with 52.2% in 2013. However, only 22% of senior managers in 2014 were women. This statistic is surprising when in many cases, women bring attitudes and traits that are wanted and needed within these positions. Three-in-ten Americans say that having more women in positions of higher leadership would improve the quality of life for other women. However, a majority of Americans state that obstacles like lack of readiness, inexperience, and especially, family responsibilities lead to significant barriers for women in these positions. While many have qualms with women being in such high positions, many women currently are both more educated and out-qualify their male counterparts and express the want to continue climbing higher on the leadership ladder.

While women in the workplace as changed and increased in aspects, the roles and relationships between parents have also changed throughout the decades. Based on long-term data coverage by the Pew Research Center in 2013, the way that mothers and fathers are spending their times has changed dramatically in the past half century. More roles that are considered “gender specific” for men and women have intertwined. More men are spending time at home with their children and women at work/being the breadwinner for the family. Stress within these newer dynamics though is occurring, with 56% of working moms and 50% of working dads stating that they are having difficulties juggling these new and different responsibilities. While a majority of men though are focused on finding and being in jobs that are high-paying and women in ones that are flexible, these swapping of gender roles is massively different then it was a few decades ago. However, in terms of the future, are very important and needed within society.

 

Biography: 

My mother, who is going by the pseudonym Adrienne Adams, was born and raised in a small, rural town named Stafford, Connecticut. Under a scholarship from the state of Connecticut, Adrienne went to college at William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA and graduated with a degree in English and Secondary Education with the hopes of becoming an English teacher back in Connecticut. After graduation, she became a receptionist and later an event planner for a political action company. Currently, Adrienne is Senior Vice President of Development for a nonpartisan nonprofit that use business practices to help address national security threats through relationships with the Department of Defense and other national security agencies. She has worked at this company for over 30 years, is happily married with 3 college-aged children, and spends her free time helping out previous organizations and the high school that her children have been in/gone to.

 

Transcript of Interview: 

[MM]  0:00: So, hi, my name is Maggie Moonis and today I’m going to be interviewing my mom, who is going by the name of Adrienne, about kind of her life and the jobs that she’s had up until now, and then that in relation to changes in gender roles and gender discrimination, and just kind of getting to know more about who she is. So, can you tell us a little bit about your childhood and like what you wanted to do? Before you know your previous job that you have now, what did you grow up thinking  you wanted to be?

 

[AA]  0:49: Sure. I guess I grew up thinking that I wanted to be a teacher. I loved school, I loved everything about it, I was really good at it and I just thought that my teachers growing up were the coolest people I knew, so I really thought that that’s what I wanted to do. So, I went to college and studied English in education with the goal of being a high school English teacher. But, when I went to college, when I graduated, I went home to Connecticut because that was part of the part of the scholarship that I had gone to college on stipulated that I would come back and teach in Connecticut for five years after graduation and that they would, you know, they had like a placement program where they found you a job in Connecticut to teach and so I was all ready to do that, except for when I got home to Connecticut, they said, “Oh, we’re so excited that you want to be a teacher, however, we don’t have any jobs for you, so you need to go figure something else out,” and so I, it was quite a quite a moment for me, I had, you know, had this very set plan and then I had to kind of totally rethink things, and I decided that I would move from Connecticut, down to Northern Virginia, DC area, because that’s where I had gone to school and that’s where my friends were and it seemed like there were more opportunities in that area. So I did, and I was very lucky to find this job as a receptionist for an organization that one of my friends worked for. They interviewed me over the phone and hired me on the spot, and so, I moved down to the DC area and started work with that organization that was a local political organization that worked with folks in Congress and on the hill. So it was very exciting, and I really loved the people there and they taught me a lot of things and after I’d been there six months in the receptionist job, the woman who planned all of their events left to have a baby and my boss said, “Oh, well, you could do that job,” and so they moved me from receptionist into the event planner job and the first event that I ever organized was at the White House. So, it was pretty cool and then I just kind of never looked back from that. It was interesting. I had been really set on being a teacher, but once I moved down to this area,  and kind of started in this other lane, I just kind of never looked back at that.

 

[MM] 3:55: Was there like anything specific about this new job that made you not think about teaching? Or was it just because you like, you were so focused on one thing and then you immediately moved into another that you were like, “Oh, who cares about that?” 

 

[AA]  4:14: No, I don’t know. I think that the event planning job was just really, it was very interesting, it wasn’t like anything I had done before. I did lots of cool events in cool places, like I said, the White House and in the US Capitol and at foreign embassies, and it just was a very cool job and it was interesting. I met interesting people and it was fun work and so I think I just, you know what I mean, I just enjoyed it and it was almost like I moved on from the idea of teaching.

 

[MM]  4:56: Can you talk about the job that you currently hold, and what your organization is, and what you do for them?

 

[AA]  5:05: So, the job I currently hold is I’m a Senior Vice President for Development, which is really more like membership and fundraising and I work for a nonprofit, and so I’m in charge of all of the fundraising activities and events for that organization. We raise between eight and ten million dollars a year. It’s kind of our budget. So I have a staff of, a team of, nine people that work for me, and yeah, so we, you know, we recruit members to join our organization, those people give anywhere between $2,500 a year to over $100,000 a year and we do events with speakers that focus on national security topics, and we do a couple of big fundraising dinners a year. So yeah, so that’s what we did.

 

[MM]  6:18: How did you move from the job that you were talking about previously, where you were doing event planning, to the job that you currently hold now? How was the process to get to where you are now? 

 

[AA]  6:35: Well, it was kind of, it was an evolution. So, my current organization that I worked for, I’ve worked there for a long time, almost, almost 30 years, actually. And which is, which is kind of unusual now. I mean, I think people tend to move jobs more often. I’ve been very lucky to find a place that I liked working, people I liked working for, and that, you know, we’ll probably talk about this later, but that offered me a very flexible and accommodating work environment that allowed me to, you know, to be good at my job, but also to be a mom and, you know, do other things. So, for those reasons, I’ve stayed a long time. And I think my job has evolved over those years and grown over those years, as I learned new things, and new people join the organization and the organization developed new priorities, then I kind of moved along with it. And was promoted along, got increased responsibilities as time went by and was promoted accordingly so that now I’m on the senior leader team.

 

[MM]  8:10: Okay. So kind of veering off from the topic of how you got the job that you currently are at now. Um, I think a lot of people know that when jobs deal with national security, that means that the military is involved and I’m very curious and I’ve always kind of wondered, because your job is very male dominated, especially, upper management or leadership positions, did you ever notice kind of a difference between like, the way you were treated versus any male colleagues? Or were there any female colleagues of yours that were treated differently within your organization or a previous organization that you’ve worked at?

 

[AA]  9:12: You know, I, I can see how you would think that and I think, I think much of the military does have the reputation of well, obviously is male dominated, and has the reputation of, of maybe not supporting women as much as other kinds of organizations or lines of business might however, that has not been my experience. I have been very lucky that the people that I have worked for at my organization have been very supportive of women and very inclusive of women, to the extent that, so at my current organization, our CEO is a retired Four Star Army General, our COO is a retired One Star Army General. However, the four Senior Vice Presidents on the leadership team are all women. And so, you know, I would think in the case of my organization, you know, there is not a gender bias in terms of how women are viewed and how women are given responsibility and authority and how they’re viewed in those jobs, how they’re supported in those positions and I just think it’s been, it’s been a very, it’s been a very supportive place for me to work. That’s not to say, I mean, I have obviously had friends who worked in other organizations, and who worked in other lines of work, where that has not been the case and so I have seen it in action. But I have thankfully not had to experience it myself.

 

[MM]  11:10: So, we know that you are my mother, and I know that you never stopped working after you had me and then my siblings, So, I’m just curious, how did your life change once you became a mother, and specifically a working mother in this environment? 

 

[AA]  11:38: Well, yes, motherhood changes everything. It changes your priorities, it changes the time that you have available to yourself, and the time that you have to make available to other people around you. But like I said before, I was very lucky, in that my job, the organization that I worked for, was always very supportive of me as a mom and offered me a great deal of flexibility that enabled me to be both successful at work and at home. You know, we had very generous maternity leave programs, I was able to, after my first child was born, I was able to adjust my work schedule. You know, my usual, our standard work schedule was 8:30, to 5:30 and I was able to adjust that to like, 7:30 to 4:30, so it allowed me, because babies get up early, and so I, you know, was up earlier and so after we dropped to him at daycare [the “him” is in reference to my brother], then I would go in, and I could leave earlier, so that I could be home and you know have time in the evening with my children and, you know, kind of give you guys a normal going to bed routine and stuff, and we could have dinner as a family. Whereas, you know, if I had worked a longer day, then we might not have been able to do that. They were also very supportive of, even now, you know, work from home now is a very normal thing, when I was having kids, it wasn’t as normal, there weren’t as many like, wasn’t as much technology to support it, but they were my organization was very supportive of if somebody was sick, or, you know, if there was an event at school, then they were happy to have me attend and I think they understood that I would make sure that my work was done, you know, regardless of whether I was in the office or working from home. But, by the same token, I took it very seriously, and so  I knew that that flexibility was not really a privilege, but it was, you know, being extended to me with the expectation that I would still get my job done, and so I took it very seriously and I made sure that you know, if I was taking time off to be with my kids, that my that my work responsibilities were not suffering. And so that’s all.

 

[MM]  14:38: So, as you transitioned into becoming a working mother, how did yours and dad’s relationship change? Because for us personally, Dad stayed home when we were younger and I’m curious to see how that relationship changed when you were the only one working and dad was staying home with us?

 

[AA]  15:11: Well, I think, anytime when you add children into a relationship then the parents relationship is going to change because, you know, you now have these other, there’s these other people in your relationship that demand a lot of attention and a lot of energy and a lot of focus, and so you don’t have as much time to spend on each other. And I, once dad started to stay home, that was a stressful time for me because there was a lot of, all of a sudden, there was a lot of pressure on me to provide for our entire family’s existence. You know, previously, I had had a partner in that, in terms of the financial responsibility, and all of a sudden, I didn’t have that anymore and so that was, that was stressful and I felt like it put a lot of pressure on me being the sole breadwinner, because there was, there was no safety net. So, if something happened to me or my job, then our family was really in trouble, and had no means of support. So that was stressful. And, and it was interesting, because you know, dad, staying home didn’t necessarily change my responsibilities as much as to the family as you might think, like, I still did most of the cooking, and I did the laundry, and I did the grocery shopping, and I did the you know, managing, you know, managing your guys stuff at school and doctor’s appointments and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, that was a stressful time when you guys were younger and dad wasn’t working, that was a stressful time for me.

 

[MM]  17:27: Kind of going off of that question, was there ever a point when my siblings and I were younger where you felt like you needed to kind of take a step back from work or felt like you had to give up job promotions or job offers at work? And kind of if that did happen, how did you overcome it?

 

[AA]  17:50: Well, it did. So, around the time that you guys were, I think you guys were three and your brother was five, I was offered a vice president job at my current organization and my boss at the time thought very highly of me and he really wanted me to move into that position and I, when he asked me about the job, I said, Listen, I don’t have, I am currently maxed out, I don’t have any more to give, I don’t have any more to give at work and I have two three year olds and a five year old at home that need, you know, need my max attention there, and I didn’t think that I had any additional bandwidth to take on the job responsibilities of this promotion. And so, he was very respectful, and he said, okay, he said, like I understand and okay, and we’ll find someone else to move into that job, and so, a few weeks went by, and he came back to me and he said, I know you said no, but I really think you’re the right person for this job, and I want to move you into this position, and I said again, you know, I’m flattered, and I’m grateful for you continuing to think of me in this way, but I really, I just don’t think I have what it takes right now. I don’t think that I can give the job what it needs right now. And so, he accepted that again and went away and then like a month later he came back and he said, “Well, I’m not asking you anymore, I’m telling you. I’m putting you into this job, and so you just need to suck it up.” So I said, “Okay,” and so I didn’t, again, that was a case where, you know, being a working mom didn’t really not prevent me from getting a promotion, I was preventing myself from getting the promotion, and my boss just didn’t take no for an answer. So, that’s that.

 

[MM]  20:35: And so, kind of my final question to sort of round this out, is based on statistics, more than 50% of women are within the labor force, however, a very small percentage are in manager positions or leadership positions in general, and I was wondering if you thought that more women should be in positions like yours or in higher positions. And if so, why? Or if you don’t think so, Why do you think they shouldn’t?

 

[AA]  21:12: Oh, I totally think that more women deserve opportunities for promotion and supervisory and leadership roles. I do think, for many, and in many business lanes, It’s sad, but being a mom and working and getting promoted are not necessarily compatible. I do think in recent years, a lot has improved in that respect. I think there are more opportunities for women, I think fewer businesses see motherhood as, you know, a dead end for women or see it as a negative. But I think there’s still a lot of work that has to be overcome in that area. Listen, being a working mom is hard, and it’s hard work. You are left with very little time for yourself. By the time you’ve given what you need to give to your job and you’ve given to what you need to give to your family, there’s not a lot of time left for you as a person. But I think many more companies and businesses are focusing on that and making it easier for women to do both, because I think they are seeing the value of women and what women bring to the table at work and in business and that it’s in their best interest to, I mean, you don’t want to lose if you’re a company or if you’re a CEO of a company you don’t want to immediately lose 50% of your workforce because they potentially might become a mother at some point. You want to figure out how to give the women in your organization the best opportunity to succeed at their job while supporting them in being a mom. Does that make sense?

 

[MM]  23:55: Yes Well, thank you for talking with me today.

 

Overview of Interview Technology and Process:

This interview was conducted in person on March 18, 2023 in Falls Church, VA using VoiceMemo and GarageBand on both my MacBook computer and iPhone. The audio was edited in GarageBand and the only editing that was done was to combine two parts after a pause took place within the interview. The file was then converted and uploaded to Apple Music as an MP4 file. As a first draft for the transcript, the audio was put through Ottter.ai. and then was manually edited within Google Docs.

Bibliography: 

Kessler-Harris Alice. “Women Have Always Worked: A Concise History.” University of Illinois Press, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctv80c9ht.8, Last accessed on 4 March 2023.

McCarthy Helen. “The Rise of the Working Wife.” History Today, 5 May 2020, https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/rise-working-wife, Last accessed on 1 April 2023.

Pew Research Center. “Modern Parenthood.” Pew Research Center,” 14 March 2013, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/modern-parenthood-roles-of-moms-and-dads-converge-as-they-balance-work-and-family/, Last accessed on 1 April 2023.

Pew Research Center. “Women and Leadership.” Pew Research Center, 14 January 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/01/14/women-and-leadership/, Last accessed on 1 April 2023.