We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
From Time to Thyme
By Paula Dunn
The idea for this Women’s History Month column has been percolating in my brain ever since last fall when I discovered that the first woman to serve on a Hamilton County jury didn’t do so until 1945.
That’s 25 years AFTER other places in this state!
(For the record, that first female juror was “Miss” Sallie Craig. Hers was actually the third name drawn, however. The first, “Mrs. Fred Heylmann” — her name was Cora — and the second,“Miss” Louise Decker, were excused from serving. Cora Heylmann had a hearing problem and Louise Decker was the Noblesville City Clerk.)
That got me thinking about the progress women have made during my lifetime.
I’m not talking about big stuff, like a female astronaut or a woman serving on the U. S. Supreme Court. I mean just ordinary everyday advances — things we females take for granted now, but were prevented from doing previously, either by law or by custom.
One of the biggest examples is Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which paved the way for girls’ athletic teams. My classmates and I just missed out on that.
When I was in school, there were no girls athletic teams representing the school. Girls’ participation in sports was pretty much limited to sitting in the cheer block in our white blouses and dark skirts, cheering our male classmates on to victory.
When we played basketball in gym class, we were only allowed to use a half court and could only dribble three times before passing the ball. I thought that was pretty dumb then and I still do. How many Caitlin Clarks never got the chance to show their stuff because of rules like that?
Forget STEM, girls didn’t take shop at Noblesville High School . . . that is, until my classmate, Peggy Scott, became the first NHS female to sign up for drafting.
During my lifetime, the title “Miss” began to disappear from news stories and married women started to be consistently recognized as people in their own right instead of mere appendages to their husbands. For example, in later years “Mrs. Fred Heylmann” would have been “Mrs. Cora Heylmann” or just “Cora Heylmann.”
There was still some of that mindset left in the ‘70s, though. When my cousin, the Dancing Librarian, tried to get a department store credit card in her own name, she was denied, even though she was employed and had her own income. Because she was married, she was told she had to use her husband’s card.
(You’d better believe she got her own credit card as soon as she got divorced!)
I had my own experience with sex discrimination. I’ve forgotten the exact year, but some time in the early or middle ‘70s, I went looking for a summer job. (We could do that then because, unlike today, we got a full three months of summer vacation.)
I answered an ad for a pizza maker at the local outlet of a national pizza chain. (I won’t embarrass them by providing their name, but it wouldn’t be hard to figure out since most pizza places in this area didn’t have indoor seating then.)
They informed me that they only hired females to wait tables; you had to be a guy to make pizzas.
I was gobsmacked.
I’m not sure that legally they could have gotten away with that. Legal or not, I could have made a big stink about it, but I decided I probably wouldn’t have been happy working there anyway, so I just walked out.
Thankfully, to paraphrase the old Virginia Slims ad, “We’ve come a long way, baby” since those days.
And yet, when I see stories like the one about the WNBA players trying to attain some kind of parity with male professional basketball players, I realize we still have a way to go.
Paula Dunn’s From Time to Thyme column appears on Wednesdays in The Times. Contact her at younggardenerfriend@gmail.com