Stereotypes Of Working Women

My grandmother, Sarah Nowak (nee Choate), was only 19 years old when she married her first husband Joe Mike McKinney in 1958. Joe Mike was an engineering student at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas, so Sarah dropped out of community college, where she was previously enrolled, and worked as a secretary to help pay for his tuition. Although women did not have careers, it was not uncommon for them to work while their husbands were in college. “It was common in our day for women to help their husbands through school,” she said. After Joe Mike’s graduation, my grandparents moved from Lubbock to Andrews, Texas, a small oil town where Joe Mike worked as a petroleum engineer for Exxon. Sarah would spend the next sixteen years raising her two children, …show more content…
Despite the passing of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, there was a substantial difference between the earnings of men and women because it did not cover the jobs that the majority of working women filled: domestics, agricultural workers, executives, administrators, or professionals. Moreover, the stereotype of the 1950’s-style housewife still persisted in society, pressuring working women to not only be successful in the workplace but at home as well. “The ideal woman has now become the concept of the super woman, who is expected to complete all the tasks of an ideal woman of the 1950s while maintaining the career goals of the modern woman.” On top of this, women were still discriminated in the workplace due to their gender,despite this being made illegal by 1964’s Civil Rights Act. In the first five years after the the Civil Rights Act was signed into a law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received fifty thousand complaints about gender discrimination. However, my grandmother was fortunate enough to not experience this level of inequality. Firstly, the real estate industry employs significantly more women than men, and women often make more money than men in sales. Sarah also attributes her experience to her particular field, saying,”I’m sure that if I had gone to work, and worked really hard, in a company like Exxon, I’m sure I would have felt injustice, but I didn’t experience it personally.” Also, a realtor’s salary depended on an individual’s sales, so there were almost no issues with unequal pay in her field. So, in terms of gender discrimination and unequal pay, my grandmother’s experiences diverges from the established historical