These are the jobs I’ve had in the last thirty years. Some before the war, some after. (When I say “the war,” I mean the Second World War, because if people of my generation were going to die in a war, that would be the war.)
This was the first job: door opener and telephone answerer for a doctor. All I had to say afternoon and evening was: Please come in and sit down. Also: Thank you, but call back at 6:30.
Of all the jobs I was ever to have, that one had the most thank you’s.
Second job: This was an important and serious job for the Central Elevator Company. Six days a week, because the five-day week hadn’t been invented yet. (Working people had heard of it and thought it was probably a good idea but the employers didn’t see how it could be useful.) I typed bills at this important job and I answered simple letters. Nobody gave me anything too hard to do because they could see I felt stupid. I was younger than everybody. They and I thought that meant extreme stupidity.
The fact is, I did make at least one mistake a week. I had to figure out the payroll. Each week I underpaid or overpaid at least one worker. Whoever this man was—usually one of the elevator mechanics—he would be kind and try to help me cover the error. Whoever the man happened to be, he would usually say, “Don’t feel bad, honey. You’ll get smarter. It takes time.”
(I have a friend in charge of payrolls right now. She is in charge of one big IBM-type machine and 12,000 paychecks for 12,000 people. She makes a mistake only once a year or maybe once in two years. Of course when that mistake is made, 12,000 men and women are overpaid or underpaid. Machines do things in a more efficient way.)
Then I was a telephone answerer again.
Then it was 1942, a year that happened before most people were born. I married a soldier and went down South with him to keep him company while he was training.
That was in time for the fourth job. I was a babysitter for a Southern family named Grimm, whose father was missing in action. I learned how to make hominy grits for the babies and corn mush. I have never made them since.
Then I was a 5&10 salesgirl, but not for long. The pay was 35 cents an hour. There weren’t enough hours.
The next job was the best I ever have had. I was the secretary to the fire chief on the Army post and in on all the fires. Most of them were brush and continued all summer in the North Carolina grass. An important part of my job was the ringing of the fire bell at noon. In order to ring it at the right time, I had to call the post switchboard operator at about ten or eleven. I asked her for the absolutely correct time. One day I called her and said, “Elle, how do you know what the correct time is? Who tells you?” “Oh,” she said, “I set my clock every day by the twelve noon fire bell.”
Then the war ended, and everything since has happened very quickly. Life starts off slow but gets faster and faster. I had the following jobs:
1. Secretary to a reinsurance company. They insured insurance companies. Anybody can go broke, that proves.
2. Secretary to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. They raised money to educate black and white Southerners to a little understanding of each other.
3. Secretary to New York Tenants Association, which did just that—got tenants together for more hot water and hotter heat.
4. Superintendent in a rooming house, in charge of linens.
5. Part-time secretary to the professors of zirconium and titanium at Columbia University.
6. Then finally I was a teacher.
But during all those jobs, once I was married and after I had children, most of the day I was a housewife. That is the poorest paying job a woman can hold. But most women feel gypped by life if they don’t get a chance at it. And all during those jobs and all the time I was a housewife, I was a writer. The whole meaning of my life, which was jammed until midnight with fifteen different jobs and places, was writing. It took me a long time to know that, but I know it now.
(mid-1960s)