My mother, Elizabeth (Betty) Frink, was born on September 8, 1932. In that year, the United States held its third presidential election with women voting and sent Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House. She grew up in a working class Irish neighborhood outside of Boston. Ma was a figure skater. She never learned how to cook or bake from my grandmother, who worked professionally as a cook in various workplace cafeterias, and held a fabulous reputation as a preparer of meals and desserts. Betty grew up playing baseball with her brother and his friends, and listening to the Red Sox on the radio with her father. She liked to tell of the time she took her parents’ car on a whim and drove to Rochester, New York, with her friend, Carol Meuse, driving through the area we investigated today. From early in her childhood, my mother never intended on a traditional role as a woman in America.
Ma skated for the Boston Skating club, with people like Dick Button and Tenley Albright. You might remember that Tenley Albright skated to the first Olympic Gold Medal in figure skating for an American woman. My mother went to the Ice Follies. In a practice session, Ma fell and tore the cartilage in one of her knees. Now, she would have arthroscopic surgery and be back skating in six weeks. In 1950, doctors told her she could never skate again.
Betty decided to join the newly formed United States Air Force and became trained as a meteorologist. She was stationed in San Antonio for a while and the Rantoul, Illinois, where she met my father. Tenley Albright won her Olympic Medal, finished her schooling, and became a physician, which continues to be a male-dominated field but in the 1950′s was a rare thing indeed.
Tenley Albright
Would my mother and Tenley have been able to accomplish what they did without the efforts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott? One never knows, but surely the women at the Seneca Falls conference that came up with Declarations of Sentiments changed attitudes in many people immediately, and through women who came after them , eventually resulting in women’s suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment. Attitudes changed enough that these two women who were born before World War II felt they could succeed on their own, with their own careers. The genesis of those ideas were rooted in the Seneca Falls conference.
Mark has shared a lesson with me called “A Gift of Age.” Each student must interview someone at least fifty years old and, using that interview, must write a narrative of that person’s life and concerns. It is often the most treasured assignment that the child ever brings home. It even gets some parents to repeat it with their own parents. My son questioned my parents and I learned much I hadn’t known before. With what we investigated today, I could expand that to interviewing a woman over fifty in order to relate difficulties women continue to have in the workplace. A lot of these ideas come up inadvertently, but with more pointed discussion, we surely can bring them more to the foreground.
My mother never shied away from a challenge and always felt should could do almost anything. I need to go back to my son’s “Gift of Age” essay on her and re-read it, just like many of the parents of my students must do all the time.
