Six weeks after the Allies celebrated the victory of World War 2, Juanita Lee Hansrote delivered twin girls, Joan and Jean, in the Western Maryland Regional Medical Center. Shortly afterwards, her husband, Edward Charles Hansrote, returned home from stateside military service. Together, they began their life in conservative, union-heavy, 50,000-person Allegany County, Maryland. Edward, his father, and his six brothers all worked for the railroad, earning salaries and benefits solid enough to allow them a sturdy foothold in the standard of living of a quintessential middle-class 1950’s family. My grandmother, Joan Bloom, led a life fundamentally different from mine. Raised by rigidly religious parents and expected to follow in the housewife
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It was her first experience in a big, loud, liberal city, and her encounters with new cultures and people changed the way she saw the world. In the ‘60’s, the women’s movement became a huge factor in her life, leading to her participation in more and more demonstrations, soon including those for racial equality and opposing the Vietnam War. She met her first husband in college and got married at 21, after which she dropped out and moved to Washington DC, where she was a medical secretary for 17 years. She was divorced in 1979, and three years later married Sheldon Bloom, a lawyer from Brooklyn worked nearby. His nearly-adult daughter would become my mother in …show more content…
She prides herself on her work, her family, and her BMW z8 convertible. At 73, her and my grandfather live in a retirement community (even though they both still work), and they spend the summers back in D.C. to escape the repetitive restlessness of living in a small town. When I ask her about the victories of the women’s movement today, she’s hesitant to be optimistic. Joan worries that the fights of the women’s movement were never actually won, and that the victories they had are being slowly eroded by the social and political climate in the country today. I see my grandmother become more and more concerned with social justice, and her experiences growing up in a tightly constrained community make her all the more determined to be part of a more free world. I think she’s worried that life will go back to they way it was for her as a child, an environment which she has been trying to be free from her whole life. She has a background with which I can not relate, but that I see clearly as a driving force for her in the ways she continues to change and improve herself. She goes to church occasionally but never enjoys herself much, and more and more she embraces things she never could in her youth. She speeds through the mountains in her car, goes to the beach as often as she likes, and walks through museums and health-food stores that her sister back east would scoff at in equal
It was her first experience in a big, loud, liberal city, and her encounters with new cultures and people changed the way she saw the world. In the ‘60’s, the women’s movement became a huge factor in her life, leading to her participation in more and more demonstrations, soon including those for racial equality and opposing the Vietnam War. She met her first husband in college and got married at 21, after which she dropped out and moved to Washington DC, where she was a medical secretary for 17 years. She was divorced in 1979, and three years later married Sheldon Bloom, a lawyer from Brooklyn worked nearby. His nearly-adult daughter would become my mother in …show more content…
She prides herself on her work, her family, and her BMW z8 convertible. At 73, her and my grandfather live in a retirement community (even though they both still work), and they spend the summers back in D.C. to escape the repetitive restlessness of living in a small town. When I ask her about the victories of the women’s movement today, she’s hesitant to be optimistic. Joan worries that the fights of the women’s movement were never actually won, and that the victories they had are being slowly eroded by the social and political climate in the country today. I see my grandmother become more and more concerned with social justice, and her experiences growing up in a tightly constrained community make her all the more determined to be part of a more free world. I think she’s worried that life will go back to they way it was for her as a child, an environment which she has been trying to be free from her whole life. She has a background with which I can not relate, but that I see clearly as a driving force for her in the ways she continues to change and improve herself. She goes to church occasionally but never enjoys herself much, and more and more she embraces things she never could in her youth. She speeds through the mountains in her car, goes to the beach as often as she likes, and walks through museums and health-food stores that her sister back east would scoff at in equal