Mrs. P

Interviewed By:
Stephanie and Alicia

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The Passages of Time

Throughout our educational experiences our teachers have taught through the use of textbooks, videos, and lectures. Fortunately, this past week we had the opportunity to get a woman's perspective of life in the Twentieth Century. Mrs. P, our interviewee, shared with us her life story and the lessons she learned from her encounters. We discussed four topics that we find to be very important for women today.

Our first topic of discussion was that presently many young women are struck with the notion of being thin, a self-inflicted wrong view that society presents. Mrs. P described how in her youth being 5 to 10 pounds overweight for high school girls was not a stigma that people looked down on. We found this fact to be very shocking, because today in society there is a tremendous amount of pressure on young women to be "stick" thin to look "good."

With over three hundred STDS today, there are a lot of health risks presented to women; when Mrs. P was growing up she said that syphilis and gonorrhea were the major health concerns facing women. AIDS was not known until the early 1980s, so it did not present a problem in her youth. A fact that we found to be interesting was that women and men who were engaged had to take a blood test prior to their wedding to see if they had a sexually transmitted disease.

Secondly, with a fast paced economy today, women are a viable part of the job market. Not only do women serve as secretaries, nurses, and teachers, but they are also corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, editors, and architects. Mrs. P reminded us that when World War II began and men went off to war, women took the places of men in the job market, doing anything to help the war effort. Once the men returned they took their positions back, freeing women to return to the house to do the jobs of a housewife. Following this economics forced  many women to return to the work force to maintain a household. 

The third topic we discussed was that women's educational goals in the past were to receive a proper education, as compared to going to a great school, getting a degree, and becoming successful, as it is today. There is a lot more emphasis on college education now than there was then.

Mrs. P is of German and Norwegian decent. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and currently resides in Rossmoor, California with her husband. She has two children and two grandchildren. She is an alumna of Washington State University.