Mom's Retirement Speech

The speech my mom gave to her office today:

This is a great time for me to retire.  I’m 66 years old and I’ve had a great career.

I have a couple of memories of my employment history that I wanted to share. 

I graduated from college with a degree in Spanish and started looking for a job.  At that time the Employment section of the newspaper had the job adds segregated by sex.  The men’s jobs were on one side, and the women’s jobs were on the other.  I remember my mother saying, “Look on the men’s side;  that’s where all the good jobs are.”     That was the year that the National Organization for Women (NOW) was organized, and the following year NOW began petitioning the EEOC to end sex-segregated ads.

I did find a trainee programming job at Metropolitan Life insurance Co.  They gave a logic test every day to those who walked in off the street, and trained those who passed the test.    Since an Employment agency had sent me, I owed the agency 10% of my first year’s salary (salary $100/week, $5,200/year).

Later, when I was married, and moved to Ohio I had to look for another job. 

I went to National Cash Register (NCR).  On the wall near the employment office were the usual signs about employment rights that have to be posted.  As I was looking at them, a couple of guys came along, and I explained I was looking for a programming job.  One of them said, “We couldn’t hire you, because women aren’t allowed to work overtime, and we need people who can work overtime.”

Then I went to an employment agency in Ohio.  Employers were hesitant to hire a young women who would just turn around and get pregnant, so the employment agency woman who interviewed me asked, “Are you “on The Pill?”.    (It was just two years prior to this that birth control pills were made available by prescription to married women).  I said, “yes,”  and the woman wrote,  P I L L S  all across the top of the application.  [Birth control pills could not be prescribed for unmarried women until 5 years later.]

I did find a job in Ohio from an ad in the paper. (I don’t remember if it was a sex-segregated ad.)   Again I had to take the logic test.   I was the only woman in the programming shop for 2 years. 

My first two weeks on the job at Arlington I was sent to IBM Assembly Language School.  I had to study ahead of time, and pass a test before the class started.  I came in to Arlington the previous week to pick up the books to study.  I always remembered how they had given me the books and sent me to school before I had even one day on the job. 

These incidents seem like a long time ago, but, believe me, it was really just like the blink of an eye.

So, things have changed during my career.   Programming was the perfect job for me.  And I appreciate the opportunity I had to find a niche on the PRISM  team as the mainframe systems were phased out.