Ten years ago in 1955, Adlai Stevenson spoke to the graduating class of Smith College. He said:—
“Once immersed in the pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debate for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction; of closing horizons, and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age but what they do is to wash the diapers.”
Back in 1955, those remarks sounded up-to-date and perceptive. But times change. And now that speech is quoted in “The Feminine Mystique” to prove that men are still plotting to keep women chained to the kitchen and the nursery! Ten years from now, times will change again. But I hope none of you now or then will be able to accuse me of being subversive or anti-feminine-if there is any difference today the world is indeed, different than the 1955 world faced by those Smith College seniors.
That class was faced with an “either-or choice,” black and white alternatives.
Marriage or career.
Child raising or a profession.
Femininity or masculine imitation.
Those were false choices then — even though many believed them.
They are particularly false now in 1965. Today part-time job opportunities, new careers, and volunteer roles have come into existence. They eliminate the necessity to choose between marriage or a career.
The first real breakthrough was the Peace Corps. At the beginning we had to make a series of decisions:
Would we dare send young women into the African bush country, the barrios and favelas of South America? Mrs. Bolton, Congresswoman from Ohio said she was terrified. But we decided that the Peace Corps was not just for men. And that decision has struck. Forty percent of all Peace Corps Volunteers are women.
We had to decide would we accept only those volunteers—women or men—who were professionals, specially trained with some rare skill-such as your psychiatric nurses being graduated today. And, we decided—for both men and women alike—not to insist on professionals—and, not to try to make the volunteers into quasi-professionals. We decided to let each volunteer find his own way — or her own way — with the help of the people in the host country. And this method worked.
It was, and is, successful. You don’t have to take my word for it—ask your own alumni:
—Rose Navarro served in the Barrios of Bolivia. The Government cited her for personal courage. She served at great personal risk to control an epidemic of hemorrhagic fever.
—Or ask Venoranda Liton who served in Panama.
—Or Mary Wodarczyck who served in Sabah; Carol Seneniuk, who has just returned from Malaya.
They will tell you there has been revolution or war in each of these countries. There are dozens of roles for women in the Peace Corps which don’t involve a denial of femininity. Of course, Peace Corps girls don’t rely on a phony femininity based on cosmetics and skin freshener and facial masks and astringents—like those schools which specialize in teaching girls how to look attractive, how to look sexy, how to look like a beautiful woman. The Peace Corps relies on a true femininity—like that taught at St. Xavier. A femininity based on warmth, humanity, compassion. This may not be feminism a la 1955. But it is feminism 1965. It is the old fashioned feminism of our pioneer days. It is the ideal of womanhood celebrated in the bible.
And that role is open—open to you now—both here and abroad. Because now, this year for the first time, there is a domestic Peace Corps—VISTA. Already —
—in Appalachia
—on Indian Reservations
—in the slums of New York, New Haven, Chicago. Women—young women—and 81 year old women are serving. When you ask the VISTA volunteers what they are doing, they tell you things like this:
“My children don’t know the difference between green and blue. One child did not know the difference between a turtle and a frog. I’m teaching them that green is the color of grass and that blue is the color of the sky.”
Above all, the VISTA volunteers say they’re breaking through the terrible loneliness—the helplessness—the sense of isolation and futility and despair—that makes poverty in this age of, television and telephones and transistor radios so stark—so incongruous. The pay isn’t very good. Enough to live on—plus 50 dollars a month in the bank to be withdrawn at the end of your hitch.
But the more important kinds of pay come in other forms, like this: “Yesterday the wind was blowing—it was very dusty. I just went home dog-tired but with the feeling—you know—a poor kid smiled at me today...”
Those aren’t the only new chances—the only new roles — new opportunities opening up for young women like yourselves.
But they do illustrates the point—that perhaps for the first time on a large scale there are opportunities for women to play a direct role in the fate of our world—not vicariously, through their children or husbands—but on their own.
This may be a mixed blessing. It takes away an alibi — a rationalization for doing nothing. Today there’s no excuse for being preoccupied with the pseudo-feminisms. Tomorrow I’ll dance in a veil of Arpege.
The alibi used to be: I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know what needs doing. I need special skills and graduate training. I can’t do anything because that means a long-term commitment to career—a sacrifice of family responsibilities, and a rejection of womanhood. That line of defense is gone now. Gone for good. And I say: Good riddance!
New jobs—important jobs—desperately urgent jobs are opening up. Some pay! Some don’t. And let me make it clear: “Peace Corps” and “VISTA” are not the only places you are needed. Here’s a different example:
Out in Oakland, California, a young woman, 22 years of age, heard about a mother and her six children who had been taken off of welfare. She went directly to the mother. She looked around, and she asked questions. She found out that the roof over those six children’s heads had burned down because of faulty wiring. And the welfare people had cutoff their check—their bread and water—heat and electricity, because, without a roof this family was living in illegal housing!
That young woman couldn’t stomach that! Like Esther in the Bible, she went down on her own initiative with that woman to the high authorities and demanded justices. She found out what it was like to be poor — to be shunted around from person to person. But she didn’t give up. And that modern-day Esther pleaded her case with these somewhat unbiblical words: “What legal basis do you have for withholding the check?” She pleaded the case, and she prevailed. The family was put back on the welfare rolls.
And then there was a man—a man 61 years old from Brownsville, Texas—totally blind! But he couldn’t prove he was blind! The Social Security administrators wouldn’t believe him and he couldn’t convince the doctors that he was totally disabled—even though he was blind, arthritic and tubercular. For four years his case dragged on. For four years, until a courageous woman, a volunteer, took that blind old man by the hand. And together they went down to the courthouse to seek justice. But they found what the poor often find, that their case is not important enough for a court or a judge or a lawyer. It had been remanded to a “hearing examiner.” Finally, after three days of hospital testing by a battery of doctors, out came the conclusion that there was no work that this man could do, and that he was entitled to total disability pay, dating back over four years! Yet, before he got a cent of that money, a vocational rehabilitation expert ran through a list of 1,500 jobs trying to find some place for the man. But he couldn’t, and finally four years, later the man got his money. And it took a woman’s persistence to get the results!
Those women did not betray their femininity. They acted as advocates for the poor. As interceders for the helpless and the downtrodden. Those were women who did credit to their sex—and to this country!
The work of such volunteers is not limited to one individual woman working with one individual, poor person. On December 19, the Washington Post published this story: “Washington-grade school principals, who were told Thursday to make sure every needy child gets a free lunch, added nearly 400 children to the program yesterday.”
“The fact that some needy children were not receiving free lunches was brought to light by school volunteers. They found hungry children in some schools getting in line to receive the lunches of those who were in the program, but were absent that day.”
“One official admitted, privately, that some principals had not been as aggressive as they should have been about putting needy children on the free lunch program.”
Four hundred children, hungry and unnoticed are now getting the free lunches which Congress and the nation intended them to get. Once again, women got these results. It reminds me of those lines inscribed on a pillar in the Dane John Field in Canterbury, England:
“Where is the man who has the power and skill, to stem the torrent of a woman’s will?” And then there is Venice—I don’t mean Venice, Italy—with all its canals; but Venice, California, with its canals—canals that were dug half a century ago in a little corner of Los Angeles County. That Venice—like the one in Italy—was intended to be a fashionable resort area! Those canals in California have bridges just like the ones in Italy. But the water in these California canals reeks of garbage. The health authorities in Los Angeles were able only to keep the algae under control. But today in Venice, California a total antipoverty program like the ones in Detroit or Chicago or Atlanta or Pittsburgh has started, and managed almost entirely by women volunteers. Here’s one report I got from that project. The scene was the living room of a dilapidated slum house.
“There was a women—her 1964 yellow Thunderbird parked outside, with black leather upholstery, bucket seats, and all the trim—dressed in a black silk suit—with a bouffant hairdo—solid gold jewelry, sheer, seamless stockings, I. Miller shoes—Do you know what she was doing? She was saying to a girl in a faded cotton dress, with dyed red hair, piled up on top of her head—would you like me to pick up your sister from kindergarten?
“Sprawled on a lumpy couch across the room was a tall, well-built boy—18 years old—a school dropout. He had been lucky. He had found steady work delivering fish for one of the main wholesale fish dealers. Lent was coming, and a peak busy season had just begun. But that boy had left work early, and his job was in danger because he had severe pains in his chest. And this woman with the Thunderbird was asking him:
“Do you mean to say that when you went to the doctor down the street and told him how your chest hurt, all he did was give you a penicillin shot and charged you eight dollars? Why don’t you let me drop you off at the health clinic a few blocks down the street and let them, give you a checkup? And then we might look into sick leave or workmen’s compensation.” This woman was called a “Family Agent.”
I don’t know whether you would call these women volunteers or career women. And I don’t think it matters one bit. They are paid two dollars an hour to defray transportation and baby-sitting expenses. These volunteers all have college educations. They are married and their family duties prevent them; from carrying full-time jobs. But they work in teams, dividing the work between them. Each is assigned special responsibility for two or three, or even five families in poverty. According to one description, a family agent is “A friend who knows her way around our culture! She aims to teach the members of the family to stand on their own feet and to prepare them to accept the responsibilities of first-class citizenship.”
The point is that women like these are desperately needed—needed now.
It is possible to work at politics—without being a suffragette
—To work at the office—without giving up marriage and children
—To work in the world—without wearing black flat-heeled oxfords, thick service weight stockings and bulky mannish suits with lots of shoulder padding.
And finally, let me make it clear, nobody is looking down at these roles. Nobody is calling them inferior. Nobody is saying in a patronizing way—oh, those women are just a bunch of do-gooders.
These women are taking on the toughest jobs that this society can offer.
They’re rushing in to do a job where—to paraphrase a line—men fear to tread.
Not only that—they bring something special to jobs like that. In terms of empathy, of warmth, or compassion—women make men look like amateurs.
They bring to the task an intuitive, almost mystical kind of understanding of words attributed to St. Vicent De Paul:
“Before you go out and help the poor You must first beg their pardon.”
Today, it is truer—and more important than ever before. For the War on Poverty is not a way of making people comfortable in poverty. It is a nationwide endeavor to get 35 million Americans out of poverty—once and for all.
Yours is the first class to graduate since War Against Poverty was authorized by Congress. The first class to graduate since the domestic Peace Corps was founded. The first class to graduate since local antipoverty programs have begun to get going all over this country. The opportunity is present as never before. And the issue is no longer—
—marriage versus career.
—femininity versus service.
The real issue—the only issue is will you take that first step or will you hang back? How many of you will—stay at home?
—in the security of your parents’ homes
—in the assured social status that comes with marriage - -in the constant busyness, even exhaustion, that comes with running a house and raising children—
How many of you will join Peace Corps or Vista or Papal Volunteers?
How many of you will join Project Headstart right here in Chicago this summer?
And how many of you will back off?
Before you seal off your heart—before you take the easy way—recall to mind the words of St. John in the Apocalypse where he quotes Our Lord as saying:
“I know of Thy doings and find Thou art neither cold nor hot! I would Thou wert one or the other! Being what Thou are, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, Thou wilt make me vomit you out of my mouth!”
I’m sure you women of St. Xavier are not lukewarm. For to be lukewarm in this time of crisis—to abstain, to play it safe—is worse than to err.
It is worse even than simply surrendering to the feminine mystique. More fundamentally—ultimately—it is to reject all that your four years have prepared you for—and all that this ceremony, this commencement really means.
