Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Neither a Baby Boomer, nor of the Lucky Few

I took my first breath on earth only a couple of years before the baby boomers. But then, this has to be my karma. Any house I have ever lived in, including the present one, has been situated in between two counties. No kidding. I always lived on the dividing line.

The generation just before the baby boomers is called either the silent generation or the lucky few. I resent both monikers. We were neither silent nor lucky. The people who were born in the same year as me, in no way, should be included with the silent generation. My peers and I, especially the females, took the flak from the earlier generations while opening the doors to boomers to do what they did for the world.

After grade school, I attended an all girls’ school, during my junior high and high school years. From my class, 88% went on to higher education, whereas earlier generations either had quit high school or married right after graduation and most, at best, had gotten married in the first year of college. When I was in high school, we would sit around and discuss literature, philosophy, and our place in the world and what we could do for the society in the future. Surely, there were other groups of girls in my classes whose major worries were centered about clothes, boys, prom dates, actors or whether Elvis was a more charming heartthrob than Pat Boone, but even those gals had their serious sides, as we had our fun sides, too.

My generation of people --women or men-- agreed that the ruling crown had to be worn equally, and economic freedom and freedom of thought should apply to both genders and all races. I have always appreciated my peers and the baby boomers for their courage and drive to make a better, fairer society for every human being. This took a lot of courage and fighting.

During those years, only nursing and teaching was seen to be fit for a woman as a profession. Surely, there were families with keener foresight who encouraged their female offspring to reach higher, but I am talking about the general consensus. Even after I was married, I received disapproval and sometimes hostility from the earlier generations, as a second-class citizen female. “Of course, dear, you’ll do everything in your power to keep a decent house and make your husband happy. Why bother going into the men’s business?” Most people who said this or something like this to me were mostly other females of the earlier generations. Men didn’t even bother to address those issues. I am not talking about a far away in the boondocks understanding. This was Long Island, NY, during the mid-sixties. It was a time when Betty Friedan and women like her were considered to be freaks, trying to break up the sacred family structure. The earlier generations didn’t realize that this short-sighted, one-sided structure had to be destined to change for the better.

In short, this is what I loved the most about my generation: we dared to think and to talk among ourselves so we could eventually push a positive change on a society that had enclosed itself inside a steel-walled box of stale thought.

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Prompt: What did you love most about your generation growing up?