Personal Narrative: My Interview With Elly

I interviewed my maternal Grandmother, Eleanor Snyder. Elly was born in 1942 in Winthrop Massachusetts, a small town on Boston’s North Shore. She described Winthrop as a “pretty tight knit middle class community.” In the year 1960 Elly was 18 years of age. She attended Winthrop High School and graduated in 1959. There were 100 kids in the graduating class. That same year she went on to college at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst and she graduated in 1963 with a degree in elementary education.
Eleanor graduated college at the age of twenty-one and said that everyone that she knew during that time was married, and it was very uncommon that people would get divorced. She explained during this time period career opportunities for women were somewhat limited. Upon graduating from college, most women became either a schoolteacher or a nurse. She goes on to explain that while most people she knew went off …show more content…
My grandma mentioned that many of the people that she knew in the sixties were married and in the course we learned that seventy-two percent of women were married during that time period, and only six percent of women and eight percent of men aged thirty to thirty-four were single. She also mentioned that in the sixties she never could have imagined that women would have put aside starting a family for work like they have come to do, and the course teaches us that, as of 2008, the rate of women and men that are still single has more than tripled and that number has continued to rise.
Similarly, my grandma said, “The divorce rate in the sixties was low. People stuck with poor matches and unhappy situations because there was a stigma about divorce, and did not have nice things to say about people that got divorces.” She said that this was something that she really knows about because just a few years after moving to Miami and getting married she got divorced in