My Grandma Dorothy was a Chicago homemaker most of her life – raising six kids in a three-bedroom house with more grace then I could ever imagine having. But before that she, just like I, left her home in Illinois to pursue work in our nation’s capital. With a high school diploma and two years of secretary school under her belt, my Grandma took a job during WWII as a secretary for the Department of War in the tombstones division.
When I moved to Washington D.C., at the same age as my Grandma had, she was elated. We had frequent phone chats about the sites of the city and where I went shopping and out with my friends, which always included my Grandma reminiscing and wracking her brain to remember her own formative days in the capital. The similarity in my Grandma’s and my “work story” drew us closer together in her final years, and continues to be meaningful to me to this day.
But more than that, in learning about my Grandma’s working years, I gained new clarity around her long-standing value of respecting working women. My Grandma encouraged her daughters and granddaughters to go to college, take on graduate programs and get out in the world. She always made an effort to attend our graduation ceremonies and never forgot to ask us how our jobs were going. My own strong beliefs that women deserve an equal role in a workplace traces back through my mom to my grandma and her days in Washington D.C.
