Mom’s birthday is in a couple of days. Had she lived she’d be ninety-eight this year. Mom was born at Misericordia Hospital in Manhattan on November 6, 1926. She was born a mere six year after a woman’s right to vote was ratified in August of 1920. Mom’s father died on her fourth birthday and her family was taken in by a kindly aunt and uncle who gave my grandmother, Mom and her two year old brother a place to live. That was in the days before there were Social Security survivor benefits and if it hadn’t been for Uncle Bill and Aunt Mae I don’t know how Mom’s family would have survived.
They did survive however and Grandma, Mom, her brother, Uncle Bill, Aunt Mae and their two children who were born eventually lived in a walk up on 90th Street in Jackson Heights. Uncle Bill and Aunt Mae also took in a couple of cousins who’s father had a serious drinking problem and couldn’t or wouldn’t care for his two sons. Ten people in one apartment in Jackson Heights. The children all went to Catholic schools in the Queens and Manhattan. As Mom was nearing high school graduation Grandma told her the only way she could go to college was to earn a scholarship. My grandmother was a stenographer in the New York City court system.
Mom came home to Jackson Heights and applied for a teaching job but was turned down because she wasn’t a coach. Nowadays’s Mom would be able to sue for discrimination but in 1947 women had few rights. A Jesuit seminarian who lived upstairs in their apartment building encouraged Mom to apply for a Masters program in mathematics at Fordham University. She was accepted and worked her way through Fordham in one year enroute to a Masters degree in Mathematics. Surely she was employable now. Alas, she was no coach and she was once again denied employment on the basis of her sex. D’Youville College offered her a position as an instructor and Mom returned to Buffalo to teach for the Grey Nuns who were the folks who ran the college back then. Mom taught college mathematics for four years. During that time she met my Dad. They got married in 1951 and I was born the following year.
They had relocated for my father to complete an internship. When they returned to Western New York for my father to setup a dental practice Mom elected to work as his dental assistant and forego a teaching career. It’s doubtful that a married woman with an infant son and another on the way would have been hired to teach anywhere in the early 1950’s. Those rights were denied women into the early 1970’s. My father’s health declined in the early 1970’s and he eventually died. Even though Mom had been a cosigner on a home mortgage with my father she was denied credit in 1973 following his death to obtain housing for our family. Women couldn’t seek credit on their own until the following year in 1974.
Mom voted for Hillary Clinton eight years ago and I’m sure she would have cast a vote for Kamala Harris this time too. Mom knew well the trials and tribulations of women who were long treated as second class citizens in a country where all citizens are guaranteed life liberty and property by the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution. Women got the right to vote eighty-four years ago with the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution but we’ve never elected one president of the United States. Let’s hope that changes this year.