Well-Behaved Women

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

A lot of teachers went back to work last week–a majority of them women, in my district, at least. In an ironic turn of events, many national league sports teams refused to play in legitimate and admirable support of racial equality in this country. The sports protesters made headlines. Almost no one noticed the teachers, many of whom faced very real risk to the health and safety of themselves and their families. Why the disparity? Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said it best, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

My dad’s mom was widowed twice before she was forty. Left to raise her own four boys and the youngest step-son of her second husband, she moved to Las Vegas from a small town in Nevada so those boys could go to high school. Buying a little house near the downtown in the 30’s, she rented rooms to men working on the Hoover Dam project. She did their laundry, fed them a meal a day, and cleaned their toilets. As a child I watched her feed paper towels through her ringer washing machine because she never threw something away that she could find a way to use again. Down the street from her house, Las Vegas’s population exploded over the years from the gambling industry.  Only a block from the famed Fremont Street, she sold that modest home she had paid for with the work of her hands and died a wealthy woman.

As a young mother in Kearns, my neighbor had her sixth child when her husband was made Bishop of our ward. He was a first generation American; his parents had migrated here from Germany. In the old country men weren’t involved in the details of household life. I can remember a young married dinner party at their house where he admitted he never did the dishes. The other men in the room shamed him into cleaning up before we went home.

One Sunday morning I saw his wife carry a screaming baby from Sacrament meeting. Her four-year-old and two-year-old trailed after her. There were tears streaming down her face. I slipped out behind her. She told me how she hated Sundays because her husband spent the whole Sabbath in service of her neighbors and friends—a task she admired and supported. But it meant that she was left alone to bath and dress and ferry the children to church. She wasn’t sure she could handle it much longer. Even as she sobbed out her story, her eyes scanned the foyer for any sign of ward members. She didn’t want to embarrass her husband. I loaded her and the children into my car and took her to the McDonald’s drive thru. We sat in the parking lot and had breakfast. Not an “approved” Sunday activity perhaps, but a therapeutic one for both of us.

I did daycare for another friend in the neighborhood. A single mom, she’d moved in with three children and went to school for a couple of years to become a dosimetrist, a job I never even knew existed until she did it. She worked with cancer patients in the arena of radiation therapy. A couple of years before, she’d gotten interested in the field because her second son—less than 10 years old—had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Then only a few months after that, her husband abandoned her; he’d had an affair with the Relief Society President in their local ward. I could not imagine where she found the strength to get up everyday and go to work.

This week I got a text with a couple of pictures of friends who are sisters and teach in my school district. They were dressed to the hilt–as a penguin and a pig, rolling down the halls of their high schools on children’s scooters, laughing as they went. One teaches calculus, the other teaches chemistry and physics. Not only is the subject matter these two teach challenging, their daily contact with students could expose them to a life threatening disease—one of them has already survived breast cancer. Truth is, there hasn’t been a lot of laughter for anyone at the starting of school this year. But it never occurred to either of these women not to “show up”. They rise each morning and go to work like hundreds of thousands of their colleagues across the country. “Well-behaved women” may not make history, but their courage changes history every day.