I am what I am.

I am the product of the eras that I have lived through. Women in the 1950's were supposed to learn to cook, to clean, and to rear children. They learned how to sew and bake, how to plant a garden, and how to can the fruits of the garden. Many of them did not work outside the home and kids were used to having their mothers home after school. I watched my mother and grandmothers do all of these things. Was this the path I wanted to take? I was too young to know and as a child, I never thought about it much. It was simply the way life was.

In the 1960's, so many events were happening all around us...and women began to change. I saw it happening. Rock and roll music was beginning to emerge as a major art form. People were using drugs as a way to expand their minds and to have experiences they had never had before. Women chose to experience all of these things and to begin to take more control over their bodies and minds. The new wave of feminism across the US was very exciting and I began to think about myself in terms of the new feminism. After all, I was a teenager during this time...and impressionable.

Feminism was a term I thought about many times. Was I a feminist? I certainly thought that men and women should have equal opportunities for jobs and that they should be paid equally. I did major in a typically male-dominated field...science. Why? 1. I guess it was because even though my parents had never gone to college, they always told me that I could do anything I wanted. and 2. I was sincerely interested in my major...microbiology. I wanted to do something fresh and interesting. Was it male-dominated? Yes. But I never felt that my professors were discouraging any of the women in my classes. We were treated exactly the same.

The birth control pill was perfected in the 1960's and for the first time, women could experience the freedom to make the decision not to have children or to control the number of children they wanted to have. Of course the pill was not without controversy. The Catholic Church was against it. And women could choose to have more sexual freedom because they no longer had to worry about becoming pregnant. Our morals changed. We could choose to have several sexual partners and to not have babies. Wow! This fact certainly shaped my life...not in a bad, promiscuous way, but just to realize that this was truly a freedom for women.

The Viet Nam war affected all of us left behind in the US. In the late 1960's, the first of the men who went off to Viet Nam began to come home in boxes, to have their funerals as victims of the war. Chucky Hartlage's older brother was one of the first from Adams to come home in a box. It was so sad to realize that Chucky would never have his older brother to talk to again. We all felt the family's pain. The rock music of the Viet Nam era affected me. It was sometimes hard to listen to. The words hit me like a brick and even now, when I hear those old songs, the memories flood back to me. The war protesters I saw on TV also affected how I felt about myself. I wanted to join them, but because the violence was a part of what they were experiencing, I could never bring myself to do such a thing. In my heart I knew they were right. The Viet Nam war was a terrible thing.

The 1960's were also a time of racial violence. It was ingrained in my mind that we were all equal, blacks and whites, and my mind wrestled with the violence I saw on TV. After all, I think there was only one black family in Adams at that time. The mother was a teacher and we were taught to respect her. We didn't see them as different; the family did all the same things normal white people in Adams did. Why were blacks in Alabama and Mississippi different from us? It made no sense. I remember being horrified over the violence in the south and being so impressed by Martin Luther King Jr. He seemed to be so gentle and his speeches moved me.

All of the new ideas and the events of the 1960's shaped me into the person I am. I am fiercely independent, free-thinking, unconservative, nonconformist in many ways, and just as good as any man.