Confessions of a Self-Made Woman

If you are old enough to remember the Phil Donahue show, you may remember the show devoted to folks who graduated from high school in 1965 and college in 1969.  According to Phil, that particular group is the last group of kids raised with traditional American values and social structure and the first to encounter a changed world of civil rights for African-Americans, feminism, and anti-war protests.

I'm part of that group.  I didn't finish college in 1969 because my mother just couldn't see spending the money for college when, after all, I was going to spend the rest of my life changing diapers.  I got my first job at 19 and I've worked ever since.  I'm now approaching my dotage and I've come a long way, baby.  I have a master's degree and I'm a board level employee in a large urban school district.

Here's how I did it.  I worked -- hard!!  I worked full time, raised two children by myself after my divorce when my youngest was four, read voraciously, went back to school when my children were teenagers.  I took a teaching job at an inner city school and worked -- hard!! while going through a master's program.

Oh, did I forget to mention?  I took full advantage of the free public education provided me by the tax payers of Tennessee as a child.  If I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to read voraciously and keep up my academic skills until going back to school was possible.  Oh, and my children were able to go to public schools on the tax payer's dime.  And then there were my parents who frequently baby sat, picked up my children at school, paid taxes to keep the society afloat, and helped out in other ways as necessary.

I had no problem finding or keeping jobs thanks to government policies that enabled business to prosper.  And then, I probably should mention unions.  I never belonged to one but I was able to work only 40 hours a week because of the action of union members that I never met.  My wages, even though I was not a union member, were higher than poverty level because of the pressure that union members elsewhere kept on employers to keep wages high.

I was saved from devastating childhood diseases because back in those bad old days, the government funded research and supported developing vaccines.   Remember the lines at the school to take the polio vaccine?  Did you pay for them?  My children were spared, partially because I paid for their vaccinations but also because the children who they went to school with had been vaccinated.  Those government regulations at work.  Without them, my children might have had to endure seeing their classmates laid low by disease.

I was able to go back to school thanks to low interest student loans.  It wasn't as good an arrangement as the old National Defense Loans of the '60's but some financing was available to me.  Again, those pesky government regulations to the rescue. I drove on roads and bridges built at taxpayer expense.  I had police and fire protection available to me on the taxpayers' dime.  My tuition and student fees were not as high as they should have been because every institution of higher learning I attended received federal funds.

I'm sure I'm omitting many benefits that I've received from the government -- things I don't remember or things I'm unaware of.  But I'm not going to fall into the ingratitude of claiming that I pulled myself up by my boot straps through the force of my will.  My will was certainly present but I don't want to forget that I wasn't able to do it entirely alone.