My Role Model

When the woman who later became my mother-in-law was a teenager, she wanted to be a journalist. Maybe she wanted to be a globe-trotting foreign correspondent like Martha Gellhorn. Her father forbade her, saying journalism was no profession for a lady.

When she told me this, many years after I married her oldest son, I remarked that he was right.

A lot had changed between her teenage years and mine but what had not changed is there are some professions where it is hard to be a working woman.

In my case I had my mother, the doctor, as a role model for my journalism career.

(Margo D. Beller)

I don't know much about my mother's life as a child in western Canada except it wasn't an easy one. She was good in the sciences and wanted to be a doctor. It was not a profession for women then. When she applied to enter medical school there was a quota - only two women per class. My mother tied with another woman in taking the entrance exam and so the university had to let in three women that year. 

Unlike my mother-in-law's father, my grandmother had no problem with her daughter's choice of profession. She proudly told everyone her daughter was a doctor. 

But my mother was continually told she was taking the place of a better man because everyone knew she was going to get married and leave the profession anyway. She proved them wrong but it would come at a cost. 

After getting her medical degree she traveled across Canada to Toronto, where she got a doctorate in public health. She got a job in upstate New York - which required a special law allowing her, an alien, to take a state job. She worked steadily. She and my doctor father married at what was then considered a very late age for both of them. My sister and I are lucky they quickly started a family. When we were old enough to be in school my mother went back to working, this time for the New York City Health Department. By then she was an American citizen.

Years of being told how unnatural she was to be in a man's profession had an effect on her. She told me once she thought I was ashamed of her as a mother. Nothing was further from the truth. But she thrived as a bureaucrat where rules were set and had to be followed by everyone, no exceptions. That made her less than ideal at times as a mother.

When I told her I did not want to be a doctor, contrary to family expectations, I used what I thought was a logical argument - I was doing much better in high school English and writing than in biology where I was required to pith a frog. She bought that argument.

Journalism is the antithesis of bureaucracy, at least the way I practiced it. But as a loud, opinionated woman, unlike the men around me frequently saying the same loud things, I often butted heads with most of the mainly older white men who were my bosses, and that would often cost me professionally. What made me a good journalist made me a less-than-ideal employee. One boss said I was a "lightning rod" for the rest of the staff. He didn't mean it as a compliment.

When I was working and trying to prove myself, I put on my reporter's hat and played the part, just like Woodward and Bernstein. I have asked pesky questions all my life, perhaps because I could not get answers to my questions at home.

Ironically, I became a bureaucrat of sorts when I became a copy chief. Rules of spelling and grammar had to be followed, and I'd often butt heads with reporters who wrote badly, usually in jargon. When questioned they'd say, "People will know what I am talking about." I didn't. Usually a senior editor had to be called in. That caused problems, too.

My mother worked her entire life until the cancer killed her. I worked my entire adult life, despite my own bouts with cancer (I had treatments developed long after my mother died), until my last job ended and I was lucky enough to be close to my "full retirement age" to soon collect Social Security - something my mother didn't live to do herself.

I respected my mother for working hard despite the sexism to get where she wanted to be professionally. That is why I've tried to emulate her. The fight continues.