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

 
Hi, my name is Mary Lou Judd Carpenter. When I graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1955, My expectations were to go to New York and get a high powered job working for IBM. One of two women in our class, and thirty men trained to be wirers of boards for IBM to make the machines do what the men salesmen told the client they could do. I thought I would do that for a while until I could find a nice, right man to marry and give my life meaning as I supported him,raised my children and found fulfillment through those other people. So I went off to New York and had a wonderful roommate with two then five, and four roommates and went to work at IBM, where, I quickly found out, I was way over my head. The other woman was a chemistry major so she had some scientific knowledge about machines and wiring, boards and computers. It was right after the first mainframes had ever come out and within three months it was clear that I was not interested in studying boards all week long and taking rests every Friday, and maintaining a 95 % average to compete with the men, for whom it was going to be their career. For me, it was just a steppingstone. Killing time. So I left IBM without completing the program and went to New York Life Insurance where I'd also had an offer before I graduated. There, I worked on a project also connected with computers because New York Life had bought one of the first mainframe computers. They were doing a PR piece and I enjoyed working on that, and using some undiscovered but new skills. So, then I succeeded in finding a nice young man to marry and I supported him through law school. I worked at the University of Michigan for the Survey Research Center, which is what your class is about as part of the Institute for Social Research. I loved that job and I had a lot of responsibility, and when my husband graduated from law school, I was making 480 dollars a month. He started with the law firm at five hundred dollars a month so I was making almost what he did. All of a sudden we moved, and I was stuck at home with a one year old child, no job and nothing of stimulus for my teeth to stick into, based on all of those years that I had studied and been active in the community. As a result, I shortly became depressed. I didn't know that at the time, but I know that now. I became pregnant again and I remember thinking "I hope this baby is not a girl, because if this child is a girl, I will never send her to Mt. Holyoke where she will have unrealized expectations" contrary to what a woman's reality was in 1961. It turned out it was a girl and I got over my depression and I got into doing lots of significant volunteer things. My marriage lasted 29 years, but they were not happy years and now I've been divorced 20 years, which have been much better. My daughter did come to Mount Holyoke and she had a very different experience because her world was different. Mount Holyoke, nor my parents ever said "you can't do anything you like, nor can you do anything you want, and so it was not messages I learned at home nor on the campus in terms of' 'what's my expectations.' It was the broader cultural sense that the most honorable thing that you could do was to marry a smart man and raise smart children, and be good citizens. And, so, to go from a very successful college career when I was president of my senior class and I just loved that privilege and honor, within two or three years into a marriage with a not well man and then trying to accommodate myself to somebody else's preferences after I had been used to living fully in my own preferences, was something I wasn't prepared for and did not do gracefully at all. I don't regret those things, but I remember thinking when I was a senior, that I should go to law school, but I think it's good I didn't go to law school because I needed to learn other things, other than just rational heady kinds of things that I can do very well. So, in my life's journey, through my husband's alcoholism and our recovery and then divorce, I learned a lot of different things that I didn't learn at Mount Holyoke which broadened my resources tremendously and for which I'm very grateful. So thank you for listening.