Before Clinton, the women who fought for a better future closer to home
As Hillary Clinton formally becomes the first woman to win a major-party presidential nomination, I am flooded with gratitude for my mother and my grandmother, the sort of humble women whose shoulders Clinton and so many who have broken barriers stand on. They are women denied opportunities by the conditions of their times, but who nonetheless fought for a better future for their children.
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At the turn of the last century, my grandmother Margaret Lynch, a first-generation immigrant, attended Hunter School in Manhattan. Its motto was Mihi cura futuri, or "Mine is the care of the future." She fulfilled it, just not in the way she had expected.
She studied to be a teacher, learning German, French, and Latin. But circumstances and society had other plans. Her mother, who had sent her to Hunter, died suddenly. Because my grandmother was the eldest girl, she took her mom's place caring for her father and three siblings. It wasn't fair that she had to quit Hunter to fill a traditional female role, but she did so, without giving up. She made sure her descendants knew about the value of an education as the next step after Ellis Island toward prosperity.
Most influenced, I think, was my mom, Elizabeth Desposito. She was so insistent that my siblings and I attend college, we didn't even know it could be a choice.
That's probably because she didn't get a choice. Mom grew up a few blocks from Queens College but never thought she could go because, in the 1940s, poor girls didn't go to college. Although Mom was a stellar student, Jamaica High steered her to secretarial classes. Those skills came in handy when she put my father through college.
Society's rules changed in Mom's lifetime. Ms. Magazine sometimes made it home in a grocery bag. And, in spite of the mayhem of five children, Mom held on to her unyielding intellectual curiosity. She was always reading a newspaper or book, often out loud to us. J.D. Salinger, Truman Capote, and Joseph Conrad were among her favorites. She immersed herself in the Kefauver and McCarthy hearings and later immersed us in the Watergate hearings.
After setting us on paths to higher education, Mom became the only one of her four siblings to go to college. She chose Queens College in her old neighborhood, the school that had once been beyond her reach.
I wish my grandmother could have known. She would have been so proud. Mom's graduation was a leap forward on the family journey from Europe, through poverty to the middle class and past unfair gender traps. My mom and her siblings were so pleased with the family's progress, they regaled the young with tales of their upbringing that often started with "We were so poor . . ." They put cardboard in the bottoms of worn-out shoes to keep little feet from touching cold pavement. When the bill collector came knocking, they hid but, of course, giggling broke out. The moral was always the same. They were poor, but they worked and sweated their ways to the American dream and passed it on to their children, including the girls.
My grandmother and mother set a course for our family to follow. Now, there are a couple of Ph.D.s, school administrators, business owners, executives, a lawyer, and yes, Grandma, lots of teachers. And, the next generation is winding up college.
The women who came before us, who lived in times when only little boys could dream of becoming president, share a little in Clinton's day here in Philadelphia. It is a leap on the timeline of sacrifices generations have made to climb past the roles that forced Margaret Lynch to quit Hunter and Elizabeth Desposito to wait so long to go to college.
I bet every family has stories of women reaching beyond what they were told they could have and making sure their children did better. Hillary Clinton's triumph belongs to her, for sure, but it also belongs to women loving enough to change the rules for all their children.
Mihi cura futuri.