For this assignment, I interviewed my grandmother. Her name is Rebecca Bibby and she was born in 1924. (All answers are typed out in full sentences and translated from any slang or shorthand that she used)
Q: How old were you when you joined the workforce and what was your job?
A: I really started working as a child. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. It was normal for children to start working little jobs at about 10 or 11. I would have a lot of different jobs. My uncle had a farm, so I would be in charge of picking the crops like collard greens and yams. We were a poor sharing community, so whatever one person didn’t make or grow was given to them by the next house and so on. My uncle put me in charge of delivering yams and greens to other houses and bringing back sugar or flour or something. When I was 14, I got a job washing dishes at a diner in town. My uncle sent me to New York to live with my daddy when I was 16 and I worked at his car shop when I got here.
Q: What was it like when you started working?
A: For a long time, I didn’t get paid because it was my daddy’s shop. It was more like me working off my room and board. When I got older, he gave me a few dollars here and there. Eventually, I ended up getting married and became a homemaker until my husband and I ended up separating. Then, I had to get a real job to survive.
Q: What was your first official job?
A: My first job was in 1971 at Berkshire Fashions boxing handkerchiefs. I got the job through one of my friends, Janice Lieberman. She was the secretary. I told her that I was looking for a job because Joe and I had separated and she asked her boss to hire me. Eventually, I started doing some bookkeeping and once my bosses found out that I was good at it, they made that my official job.
Q: Do you feel there was a pay gap between the women and the men in the company?
A: At that time, we weren’t concerned with a pay gap. And it wasn’t so much a pay gap. Men and women, at least in Berkshire, didn’t even have the same jobs. The women were secretaries and did clerical stuff, where the men were in high management positions. We didn’t think anything of it. We were just happy to have jobs that paid us.
Q: How did this affect you?
A: I don’t think that it really did. Like I said, I was just happy to have a job. You have to understand that it was hard enough for a woman to get a job that wasn’t cleaning up after someone or minding someone’s child at those times…let alone any job that wasn’t off the books. But for a BLACK woman, it was even harder. This around the time we were still fighting for civil rights. White women didn’t have the same difficulty finding work. We didn’t care about being treated differently because we were women. We weren’t being discriminated against or shrugged off because of our gender. It was the color of our skin. So I was lucky to work for a white man who wasn’t racist toward me. That was what I cared about.
Q: How do you feel that the workforce is different for women today?
A: From what I can tell, women have it a lot better these days. They can hold high positions, get paid a lot more, and even own companies. Am I saying that everything is fair between men and women? No. You can’t unteach the way people are programmed to look at one anther. Women may never get to be equal to men. But they have it better now. We have a woman as a Vice President for God’s sake. I just hope that men stop seeing women as inferior playthings and take them more seriously.
