With Many a Winding Turn, Girls Inc. Celebrates 50Th Anniversary!

Girls Inc., Celebrates 50th Anniversary!

With Many a Winding Turn

by Edward C. Truax

Consider this month’s cover story on Girls, Incorporated (formerly Girls Club of Harrisburg) a sheath which contains a two-edged sword, which for the past five decades Girls, Inc. has been teaching young women to get a handle on. This is important because those often diametrically opposed stories of changing times, expectations, opportunities, and aspirations of the feminist experience are the makings of great novels as well as great tragedies.

The following text is a quick read, or overview of those times, events, and social conditions which Girls, Inc. has quietly, yet dramatically, dealt with.

The B-52 Bombers and flying fortresses rolled out of the World War II factories and into the air space above the nations where mad men had risen to political power, and thus, required being driven into surrender through military defeat. As the massive fighters took flight, a famous brand was found inside their tail sections. It read, "Kilroy Was Here." The name of a weld inspector, marking his quality control inspections with his name, became famous. Yes, Kilroy was there, and there, and as the joke went, damn near everywhere. But so was Karen, Cathy, Janet, and Jane.

Women donned the heavy protective armor of industry and "manned" the war-making machines of a nation summoned to full industrial footing. Able-bodied men had been harnessed and sent off to fight and die by the millions. Thus so...necessity became the mother of invention. Women were, or so it would seem, reinvented. They were called to the casting of steel, mining ore, driving trucks, and generally giving birth to what President Eisenhower would later call, the "Great Military Industrial Complex."

When victory was won—when Johnny came marching home again, hurrah, hurrah, etc. Kilroy kept his job. But Karen, Cathy, and the rest lost theirs. The need to reintegrate the returning G.I.s back into the labor force had driven an official policy of job preference based on sex. Additional biological factors such as the obvious implications of reunion must also be mentioned, i.e. the desire of many women to take up homemaking. At any rate, the widespread employment of women in the trades of industry stopped. Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said you can never go home again. Because home the women either went, or were sent.

Communities such as Levittown soon became habitats for the newly formed families. They were being built, assembly-line style, across the land at the rate of thousands per week (affordably priced for the working man). Consequently when it was said that a woman "wanted to take up homemaking," it was not a carpenter’s job on a construction crew the phrase implied. Rather, they were to labor at giving birth to what social scientists would soon be calling the baby boom.

This massive shift from an agricultural to an industrial-based economy remains unprecedented in the history of human civilization. Only the captivation and forced enslavement of peoples can compare to this dramatic shift in demographics. The repercussions, a million fold or more, touched almost every facet of society. To ease the shake, rattle, and roll of the fabulous fifties, and to help redirect culture, role models, images and examples (some as plastic as Barbie® dolls) were created for girls. The Ozzie and Harriet show might be among the leaders in name recognition, but the reprogramming of society was everyplace you could put up a billboard.

Meanwhile, As the World Turns, All My Children, and General Hospital rolled in and out of syndication and women for the most part took to their roles as housewives. The votes which were cast during this time were a clear message of... Don’t rock the boat, keep up the status quo.

Remembering that, "the hand that rocks the cradle" rules the world, lends credence to a mother’s need to nurture a child in the early formative years. The practical application of this truth is a "preferred condition" when all things are Waltons’ Mountain peaceful and in place. Yet at times our worlds get rocked unexpectedly. When that happens, women suddenly raising children alone lacked a level economic foothold upon which to raise children. The modern nuclear family contained an embryonic flaw nurtured by an innocent society. Girl Scouts sold cookies, Boy Scouts went hiking. Male students were required to take metal and wood shop in school, and until recently girls were relegated to home-economics and banned from participation in little league baseball.

At this point we are on the same page. We could go on forever about those chrome-plated kitchen days, when housewives were mockingly depicted by the likes of the Rolling Stones who would have had us believe... "Went running for the shelter of their mother’s little helper" (tranquilizers), "to help them on their way through every trying day." Yet to do so would be to damn with convenient and shallow cliches.

This time was an awkward, if not unfortunate, transitional period in our economic development. Maybe the very fact that we could continue into redundancy without someone standing up and saying "Stop" needs in itself to be considered. What history shows, and what we should keep in mind, is that those women who were or are lucky enough to be enjoying the gifted days of child-raising without an official career are not second class women. They raise a family without punching a time clock, keep a home without earning a dime, and clip the coupons in order to stretch the family dollar...Well done. Damn well done! Conversely, our coworkers who return from maternity leave and continue to be bread winners as well as bread makers are not splitting or dividing their life, they are simply doing twice as much and burning the candle at both ends.

People are as diverse as the sky is high, dreams and aspirations are not molded, they simply blossom. If the first story is tragic, it is so because the women of post World War II America were gently exiled from jobs which many might have liked to stay with and enjoyed, if not needed. Thankfully more of our population is beginning to understand the career woman when, speaking about our contemporary workplace, whether they be young mothers or girls able to be mothers. They will constantly defy stereotypes. When society coins a buzz word or phrase for a social condition which can be used in polite company, it is a sure sign that we have stopped lying about its existence. "The glass ceiling" is what we want to call it when daughters grow to adulthood in a world where signs reading, "No girls allowed" are officially banned. Terms like "soccer moms" and "latchkey kids" are misguided. Both suggest either limitations or disadvantages. Neither is necessarily true.

Keep in mind that when most of the world lay smoldering in the ashes of war while America’s industrial base was left intact, this preeminence allowed the luxury of illusion. We were not only the chaperon of newly established democracies, we as a nation were also the sole source supplier of finished goods for the newly established capitalistic nations. Even our former Communist adversaries were catalysts of our industry. The fear of a Third World War kept the lights running late at defense plants from Maine to Alaska. Now the world is at peace, the financial relief anticipated by the winning of the Cold War is now being sucked up by the debt of waging it. Corporate downsizing has created new cottage industries... Retraining of labor to service sector jobs, and replacement of former executives who are being pink-slipped out the corporate door. The rock solid health and retirement packages that were originally used to entice and attract workers are now vanishing altogether or straining the net income of working men and women by ever-increasing co-pay plans. Just as the shock waves of the post World War II industrial boom rocked America to its soul and changed our collective culture, it has happened again. The truth is that now America is in a state of relative economic decline. Manufacturing jobs are going to Third World nations, as evinced by the near extinction of "made in America" labels.

What is redemptive about our present condition is the resiliency of our spirit, regardless of those daily news reports which blast us with the latest altitude reports on Chicken Little’s falling sky. This is why a cover story such as this was debated among our staff and given a green light. Girls, Inc. is a little known beacon of light and hope to a new generation facing challenges unique beyond description. In summary, it can be said that while Girls, Inc. did not write the book on womanhood, they taught the girls who wrote the story. They coached the players who ran the race. And while most of us are looking forward to some hazy and unexplained ideas about "new world orders" and "building a bridge to the next century," the folks at Girls, Inc. are turning around and asking with an outreached hand...Who needs a little advice, self-confidence, and training? Our bet is that if a new world order is going to be worth having citizenship in, if a bridge to the Twenty First Century is indeed to be built, we are going to need all of our people trained, sober, confident, and enfranchised. That, more than anything, is what Girls, Inc. does. That is why their fifty year story of achievement honored our publication by appearing on the cover.