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MY: So I came back to Cypress after my sabbatical and there were, some other things I did at Cypress, was I tried to initiate a women's -- one of the things I noticed about some of my students, older students who were coming back to school in the 1980s as a result of the women's movement, when their children grew up and they finally didn't have anything to do. And I started a half-unit course called Women in the Community which was taught, it was a lecture course once a week, and I asked -- by that time I had quite a large group of women who were professional women. So I asked, women who had become a lawyer and a doctor, to come and talk to the women who were trying to come back to school but they were afraid to because they felt a little bit strange going, becoming a freshman. You know, they were thirty-five and the students are eighteen years old, and they feel out of place. And so I thought that if some of these women could be encouraged to come on the campus to come to this lecture, to hear older women talking about their experiences, and that many of those women also went back to school and got a Ph.D. or whatever. And so the first semester I had, I think I used up all my friends, every week, to come and lecture. And at the end of the semester I had the women write evaluations, and I was kind of devastated because half of the women wrote that it was very discouraging, because there was just no -- "Now I'm thirty-five years old and if I went to medical school I'll be fifty by... and these women are just really high achievers, this woman is a lawyer." And they just felt like there was just no way they could achieve the kind of things -- and I thought oh, I made a mistake. So the following year I called around and found a group of women who became paramedics, who went back to school and did, and got real estate licenses, who, kind of made, makeovers -- "Well, I've been home for fifteen years as a housewife and mother, just right out of high school and I haven't done anything with my life and I want to, now what do I do? My kids are in high school right now," and so -- and then many of them just didn't feel like starting from scratch and becoming a doctor, you know, surgeon or whatever. So that was kind of an object lesson for me. I thought ooh -- I don't know why I didn't think of that. When I read the first paper, it said, "I found this course to be very discouraging," and I thought my God, it had the opposite effect of what I thought it was supposed to do. And so, and there was one woman who was a great swimmer in high school, and she raised her kids and she taught them how to swim and everything, and they had a home with a swimming pool. So she started a swimming school, and so I had her come. And then there were a couple of women who started a housecleaning business between the two of them, and they went to various women's houses. We Do Anything, I think they called themselves. "We do anything; we'll clean your refrigerator, we'll clean your garage or whatever." And they got a very -- of course they would be wonderful today. A lot of professional women, working. Of course, they now have professional cleaners, but they were so, they were so cute, that's a kind of sexist expression but they came and they were just wonderful. And then some of the feminist health clinic women came and talked about how they came to do that. So that was a very eye-opening experience for me, because you don't have to become a professional. You can fulfill your life with whatever interests and talents that you have, and so that was a very successful year.

<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.