We’ve come a long way, baby!

Kathleen Anderson writes The Sage Connection in The JOLT.

Around 50 years ago, I worked for a class A department store in California.

I started as a sales clerk and was quickly promoted to assistant department manager. Three months later, I was given my own department with four different buyers to satisfy.

Three months after that, my departments went to number one, in a chain of 13 stores, and never dropped below number three there-after.

Quarterly reviews were given by the divisional manager who came to each store to walk the floor and observe your displays, inventory and sales. At the end of my first year, she asked me what my goals were.

The next steps on the management ladder were assistant buyer, buyer, store manager, and divisional management.

I replied my ultimate goal was to become a buyer. She looked me in the eye and said, “That will never happen. You have four children. Buyers have to travel. Children need their mothers at home.” I was stunned. I explained I was married and had reliable child care but she didn’t budge.

I received three raises that year and was told to keep my mouth shut because all the other managers only got one. When I requested a transfer to a store in Washington, I got it, even though the company had discontinued the policy. But it was understood I had hit the glass ceiling.

Around five years later I met a woman who became one of my best friends. I was back in California and she was from New York. After graduating from college, she had landed a  job as a poetry editor at McCall's magazine. Although she was an excellent writer, she remained a poetry editor there and later at The Saturday Evening Post, after being informed that only men knew what women wanted to read.

She introduced me to Gloria Steinem. Not in person, but as someone who was one of the women leading the feminism movement at that time. And although I never became a card-carrying feminist or burned any of my bras, I followed the movement with interest. Sometimes I disagreed with their comments or methods, but listened with an open mind.

A few years later I met a woman who had been one of a team of eleven who wrote copy for Walter Cronkite’s newscasts. Along with everyone else on the team, she had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that they would never disclose that Walter didn’t write his own copy for as long as he lived.

A published author came to interview me for a new book she was writing, and I interviewed her for my column.

She also shared that in addition to the non-disclosure, she had been suspended by CBS for wearing a pantsuit to work – even though she was never on camera. She was given a three-day suspension. By Day Two, many of the women at CBS picketed outside their headquarters. By Day Three women from NBC and ABC had joined their picket line… and by Day Four all three stations announced women not appearing on camera could wear pantsuits to work.

It has been my great pleasure to meet many powerful women in my lifetime. By powerful, I mean women who refused to give in to societal pressures or give up their values.

A lot of women in the past, made possible what today, the younger generation takes for granted. It does my heart good to see Hollywood titans and others, whether because of wealth, political or other influences. taken down for their inapposite behavior.

We’ve come a long way, baby! Keep up the good work.

Kathleen Anderson writes this column each week from her home in Olympia.  Contact her at  kathleen@theJOLTnews.com or post your comment below.