In March of 1973 I left Milwaukee for Minneapolis to be trained as a Claims Representative for the Social Security Administration. I lived in Minneapolis for three months until I was sent to my permanent station, the Green Bay District Office. At the time, I was happy to be sent to Green Bay; I had marked in my mind Rhinelander as the least happy assignment, and I had dodged that bullet.
And so I began my career in Federal Service. When I arrived at the office, I was the first woman to be assigned to that position in Green Bay; several months later Joanne Tlachac would return to the office after being promoted to CR from being a Service Rep. We immediately became friends, a friendship that continues to today. I was in training status for three years as I learned the ropes of government service, and as I adjusted to life in Green Bay. Finding my way around Green Bay proved easy for me; Green Bay is a small city that sits at the southern end of the Green Bay. I lived a few blocks from Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers; I’ve never been a football fan, and it seems my life in that small, cold city took the rest of whatever interest in the sport was in me away. I was often lonely in my small apartment in Ashwaubenon, but I made friends and explored that area of the State of Wisconsin while I lived there.
Google tells me that the first issue of Ms. Magazine was published in Spring of 1972. Later that year, I subscribed to the monthly magazine. In my lonely apartment I read each issue as it arrived – cover to cover. The rebirth of feminism in the 20th century had sparked something in me.
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Some time later, the office of the SSA moved to a brand new building in Green Bay. That’s where we worked as my evenings were spent in my small apartment, reading and reading and raising my consciousness (I wish this description was in usage today). Feminists attribute the consciousness of white women as having been affected by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. A rebirth was occurring in many of us. I didn’t know it then, but I would be changed forever.
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Working at my desk in the Social Security office, interviewing claimants, adjudicating claims, I wasn’t aware of how women working as hard as men were underpaid. That was a fact that was entering my consciousness. In my position, I would reach journeyman status and have the same pay grade as the men I worked with. But something in me was coming to life. One day, a the slip of paper arrived on my desk again, several months after it had last landed there. On the paper were the names of all the women in the office, along with dates; every week, a woman was assigned to clean the break room on Friday afternoon.
Hmmmm…
I was ready. I waited for the next time that the paper with assignments would show up on my desk. I waited without saying anything to anyone else, including the woman who was the District Manager’s clerical worker. The paper originated with her and would end up on her desk after we’d all seen our date of service.
When the paper arrived on my desk, I picked it up without adding my initials, which would indicate my acknowledgment. I walked to the front of the office, to the desk that sat in front of the District Manager’s Office. I threw the paper on her desk and said: “I’m a CR. I have the same job as the men in the office. Unless their names are included in this list, until they are given assignments to clean the break room, my name doesn’t belong on this list.”
I walked back to my desk. I’d experienced a “feminist click,” that moment of what was called “consciousness raising.”
I wish I could say that the men in the Green Bay Social Security Office had their eyes opened with my small act of defiance. That didn’t happen. Instead, in negotiations with management (in which I did not participate… ahem…) it was ascertained that the woman who cleaned the office once a week would from now on also clean the break room on Friday afternoons.
One (very) small step for human kind…
