This week’s entry is an epilogue that feels more like a prologue, sparked by the phrase “women and children first” that came up when I wrote last week, when I said “…it’s not always women and children first. On the contrary.”

While the recent theme of the blog is clichés, and this week’s is ostensibly the law of the sea code of conduct expression in the title, let’s call it what it is: a thinly veiled forensic accounting of memories of my mom that are fewer and less accessible four decades since she died.

Last week I posted about the gender wage gap, and it made me wonder about my mom, and how she would have grappled with the pandemic as a single mom if this had happened when she was still alive in the ‘70s.

Mom was unconventional and struggled for many years to find full and fulfilling paid employment, in an era when it was customary for women’s aspirations to focus on homemaking rather than work outside the home. But I don’t remember her self-identifying as a feminist.

When I ponder the question, “was my mom a feminist” I make a reservation for a pity party, table for one, as I wish that it wasn’t a rhetorical question that I was trying to invent the answer to. (Sorry for ending on a preposition it just sounds way too not vernacular to say to which I was trying to invent the answer.)

Trying to piece together whether or not she was an out or closeted feminist from a jury made up of her own personal patriarchy is even more suspect than relying on my adult filtered take on a precocious nine-year old’s view of her mom. It’s the paltry reconstruction I can pull together from impressions of my mom from the fallible memories of childhood, buttressed by the jaded views of the only people who have on occasion spoken to me about her since her death in 1981: her parents, her ex-husband, her brothers, and her son.

My mom was a square in the beat era, a Minnesota transplant to the Bay Area, living in the Haight a decade before it was the epicenter of edgy. She got there by bus from a Navajo Indian reservation where she had been teaching, until the inebriated father of one of her students got too handsy and she beat a hasty retreat for points west.

When the only place you’ve ever lived is Winona, Minnesota, and your heretofore longest trips were to Wisconsin and Iowa, flinging all your worldly possessions into a VW Beetle and hitting the open road to New Mexico is a pretty bold move. And when it goes tango-uniform, instead of returning home with your tail between your legs, you get on a bus bound for San Francisco, well, that all seems more worldly and adventurous than I remember my mom being. What a badass!

In my reenactment of the critical juncture in my mother’s life when she graduated from college and had to decide what to do next, and ended up high tailing it for New Mexico – which could only have been slightly less alien than Mars – it was because she chafed at the career path she had been relegated to by my grandparents.

She had wanted to be a journalist, but my grandparents thought that was unseemly for a woman, or unrealistic, or both. It was already no small feat that they were willing to send her to college at all, as it was of little use or interest to anyone else in our family (who have been very successful without it).

But mom was different from her family, she was bookish and keen, and to their credit, her parents made college happen for her. However, the caveat was that their largesse would only be extended for studies in subject matter suitable for women: nursing or teaching. Journalism was off the table. She went with teaching.

I had a similar experience with my grandparents three decades later when they co-signed the loans that made it possible for me to go to undergrad at pricey, private GWU. They were staggered by the amounts involved. They couldn’t understand why I would pay so much to go to school “just to be a secretary.” I couldn’t understand why they thought I would be a secretary rather than someone who had a secretary.

Mom was not well-suited to be a teacher. It was abundantly clear the days she would come home from substitute teaching a silent, shriveled shell of herself. She’d head straight to the wing-backed chair with the standing lamp positioned above her shoulder and lose herself in a novel for the rest of the evening, oblivious to everything else, while I made myself a bowl of cereal for dinner.

As a teacher, mom finagled a way to work in school libraries, and unlike teaching, that was in her wheelhouse. We were living in Madison, Wisconsin in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a three-hour drive from her home town that was still close enough to to access the support she was ashamed to need from my grandparents. She was studying library sciences at the University of Wisconsin. An emerging discipline that dealt with data management and other non-soft-skills stuff. Maybe not feminist per se,  but non-traditional and non-conforming to the gender norms laid out for her.

The night that my mom died in a car accident in a deluge of rain she was driving back from Wisconsin Rapids, 100 miles north of Madison, where she had just been hired to teach *and* be the school librarian. It must have been vindicating for her, after being perennially un- and underemployed to have gotten a full-time job in her professional sweet spot and put her on a path to becoming a full-time librarian. More immediately, we’d be able to leave the housing project we were living in and get off food stamps. She was going to flip the script on being a welfare mom and finally get back on a path to self-sufficiency.

Was my mom a feminist? I think she’d say no, but I say hell yeah! She may not have been burning her bra, but she wasn’t Phyllis Schlafly either, even if she was politically conservative. If she were alive now, I don’t think the pay gap would sit well with her even if she wasn’t subject to it when public school pay scales are based on education and tenure, not gender.

A brave and wise woman, from a political party that was decidedly not my mom’s, famously said that women’s rights are human rights. My mom, who saw injustice up close and personal on the Indian reservation and in the projects, would have endorsed that, even if she didn’t comfortably or prominently take on the feminist mantle.

What would she have thought about the 2016 and the 2020 elections? I’m afraid that even in my wildest re-imaginings, it’s hard to create a scenario where she wasn’t one of the Hillary haters. But after four years of President Trump I bet she’d be ridin’ with Biden, and even if mom never adopted “San Francisco values” I’d like to believe she would be on board with a strong female VP candidate with Bay Area roots, who, like me, was shaped by the single mom who raised her.