"Upon graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1955, I expected to..."

 
My name is Gay Hartman. When I graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1955, I expected like so many of us, to marry, have children, be a full-time mother. This expectation was really put on me by my parents and I had a grandmother who was a college graduate and in her era that was fairly rare. She felt that that was a great help in raising her five children and so I had this example set for me. I did not think of a job. It was not in my realm of thinking. I did get married a year later. After twenty years of being a full time mother of two children, I was divorced. I had gotten myself, unfortunately, into a difficult marriage, so there was a divorce and I was, at forty-whatever, having to earn a living and I had never worked, so this was a tremendous shock. I lived near Hartford, CT and so AETNA was one of the big employers. I applied for a training program and I was accepted. I was told by the interviewer that it was because I went to Mount Holyoke that they decided to take a chance on me, being the returning woman, and the others in the program had all just graduated from college. So I was the token older woman going to work for the first time. But he made it quite a point about the fact that I had graduated from Mount Holyoke. So I would say I exceeded my expectations because I then worked for many years and am now remarried and retired. But, it put me into the workforce, which I found I enjoyed tremendously, never having expected to find myself there. So it was a wonderful thing that happened, not that divorce is a wonderful thing, but, it made the circumstances unique so that I had to do that. And certainly, my Mt. Holyoke education stood behind me very well. I also had to deal with alcoholism and my experience here and the whole way we were about searching for things and finding out about things. I went to Al-Non, which was great to me and I really dove into that quite thoroughly, which was again another wonderful thing in my life. So sometimes adversity brings you something, a reward that is really very, very unique and very special. So I would say certainly that my expectations and what happened were way far apart. I did do that first twenty years of being a full time mother and I enjoyed that because I felt, I think, that the children benefited. I think it was good for them to have a full time mother. We were all doing it. So for that first period I was very happy with what I was doing. I was really kind of reluctantly though, well, really forced into the workplace. But it turned out to be very rewarding and so I've enjoyed it and I know that Mount Holyoke was a big part of it. It has colored my life always in friendships, acquaintances, in entrees, into things like AETNA and job training, that kind of thing, It has certainly stood me in good stead.