- Good evening. Thank you for joining us for "A Feminist Perspective." This weekly radio broadcast is sponsored by the Women's Resource and Career Planning Center, a program and information service of the Dean of Women's Office, 222 Strong Hall. Located in the Women's Resource and Career Planning Center is a large lending resource service, which contains a great deal of information in the form of news clippings, radio documents, magazine articles, research studies, film strips, tapes, and books pertaining to the many aspects of the women's movement. We should like to invite you to come in to browse, or take advantage of the lending service. That's in 222 Strong Hall at the University of Kansas. The materials in the Resource and Career Planning Center are as valuable for men as for women, since sex role definitions and stereotypes affect both sexes. We invite you also to come to this office if there are matters you wish to discuss with someone. Whatever concerns you as women, or about women, is of concern to us also. Tonight, we're beginning a series of five programs on women and careers, and for our guests this evening, we have Vivian McCoy from Continuing Education,, and co-leader of of career exploration workshop for women that she'll tell us about a little later, Jeff Weinberg from the Office of Student Financial Aid, and Marge Marshall, a senior in education, also Walter Smith, the only male Associate Dean of Women that we know of in the United States, who has done some research for this series, and who is joining us tonight to discuss the first of these programs, pursuing careers in midstream. Now, Marge Marshall, whom I introduced as a senior in education, is one of over a million women over 30 on the nation's campuses this fall, at least that's the estimate. A half a million women over 30 are on campuses this fall as students. In the past, I presume, Marge, if we had said you were a senior in education, that what assumptions would be made about you? - That I were 22 years old, and not married, looking. - That's probably about right, I think. The rest of you, think of some other assumptions if one says that someone is a senior in college that are commonly made. What do you think, Vivian? - I think the intention would be that she'd be on the job market as a teacher for perhaps no more than three, or four years, and then lost forever from there on out. - Okay, what assumptions would you make, Jeff? - Perhaps that it was necessary as a senior for her to supplement her income with anything perhaps more than the cost of tuition, that the expenses that she was being faced with were perhaps some living expenses, and the cost of tuition and books. No one would probably dream that there could be dependents, for example, that need help, that there may be daycare expenses that you're meeting, let alone there being facilities present for daycare, on campus, or off. - Well, it wasn't very many years ago that seniors had a very difficult time getting any financial aid, because the assumption was they would very quickly be able to be in the job market, and therefore it wasn't as important to support them as it was the younger ones. - Yes, plus the fact that if you go back 10 years, there wasn't anywhere near as much money available to support anyone. One of the most common misconceptions held by students today is that because of what the newspapers report as cuts in social programs by the Nixon administration, they assume there's less money in higher education. Exactly the opposite is the truth in higher education. The current fiscal year '74 budget presented and accepted by, presented by Nixon, and accepted by Congress has more money for higher education than at any time in American history. That doesn't mean there's money to hand out right and left to anyone that walks by. There isn't anywhere near enough yet. - So you had our hopes up, and now you're- - Yes. - Dashing them. - Isn't it true, Jeff, that realistically, it's almost at the poverty level at which people qualify for aid? - Only as far as government grants, outright grants are concerned. That is certainly not the case if the student is willing to borrow, which I assume we would get to later in the program, but- - That's a good point to clarify- - Yes. - Mmm-hmm. - How about you, Walter? Did you think of anything else that would be commonly assumed if you knew nothing except that you were introduced to Marge Marshall not in-person, but just heard about her, and knew she was a senior in education? - I'd probably assume that she was gonna teach elementary education. I'd also assume that she might not know exactly what life's all about, and there's a good chance that she'd never end up in the classroom anyway. - Mmm-hmm, and a lot of people who get that kind of training didn't really intend to use it even for that three or four years that Vivian was talking about. Another rather interesting bit of information, which I read this morning from a coalition on women's studies is that 1/3 of all graduate students attend school part-time, and that more women than men do this because of financial reasons and family obligations. How does that apply to you, Marge? Are you a full-time student, or part-time, or what? - Yes, I've been able to be full-time the entire career. I just go to school like real people. - Tell us a little about yourself. I mean, when did you come back to school? - I began, let's see, it would be the fall of '70, I think, at Cloud County Junior College, went one year there, and then we moved to this area, at De Soto is where I live, and I went one semester, or one year to Johnson County Junior College, and then transferred to KU. - And do you mind telling us how old you were when you started this- - Well, let's see. - As a freshman? - I'd been out of school 18 years, so- - Out of high school 18 years? - Mmm-hmm, yeah. - Well, that's probably- - I was just double the age. I was double the age of most freshmen. - Well, that's an interesting way of putting it, and we will want to get into what that actually meant in terms of being a full-time student. So in this respect, you're not typical of this half million women over 30, because, well, at least you're typical apparently of 2/3 of them, because they're, they, 1/3 are going on a part-time basis. Let's begin by talking about how this decision is made to seek the necessary training. Why do women enter, or change a career in mid-life, let's say between 30 and 60, or 65? I don't know how many at 65 do, but let's use 30 to 60. Why do they do that? What motivates a woman to decide to enter, or to change, or to reenter a career that she's left a long time ago? - If I may interject some of my experience in counseling, I would say that I find, of course, a whole spectrum. I find women who have perhaps found the obligations of home are receding, and that they do have time, and they do begin to see opportunity, and time to get back to what perhaps was an earlier love in terms of a field of work. For some people, they might've had the experience of having been in the market, and found that that was not for them. And so, the second time around, like the second time round in any experience, people wanting it to be, to really take this time, and also their feeling of maturity, taking that maturity to the experience, and realizing that now I really want it to be a reasoned choice. So these are, you know, these are the two extremes. Then of course in many cases, it's sheer necessity. There are, out of the 32 million women in the market working, there, certainly more than half of these women are working out of sheer economic necessity. And so, all the more reason for them to have something that is going to be not only satisfying, but compensating them to the extent that they can support their family well. These are some of the experiences I have encountered. - Now, you're talking from a general perspective of having talked to many women, and we have a very interesting office on the campus that you're connected with, and I'd like for you to tell them a little bit about where you got this perspective, and what you really do. What is this office? - Well, Emily, we have a counseling service, both giving educational and career counseling out from the Extramural Independent Study Center in the Division of Continuing Education. And basically we encounter there women interested in exploring, or reexamining their lives in terms of getting back to school, or getting into a field of work. In some cases, they have no connection with the university at all. In other cases, they are coming in, taking coursework with us, or planning to come on campus. We see over a period of the year, either in-person, we see in-person, or we write to them, or we speak over the phone to about 3,500 women a year with questions of the sort. - And if a woman has questions of this sort, lest we forget it, later on, what should she do? - If she were in town, she could call us of course at 814-4792. She could always write to me, Vivian McCoy, Division of Continuing Education, Annex A, University of Kansas. - Mmm-hmm, right, regardless of what stage she was in, even at the beginning- - Regardless. - First thoughts on the subject, or if she has a pretty good idea what she'd really like to do, I take it that you get them at all stages. Is that right? - We do. - Marge, would would you mind telling us what was your motivation for entering college at twice the age of the average freshman? - Well, I'd always wanted to go to college. I liked school, you know. I'm one of these professional scholars, if I could be, but of course, I raised my family. And then when my youngest got into school, we needed a supplement to my husband's income, you know, the cost of living. So I took a job at the courthouse in Cloud County, which is a very nice job. I really enjoyed it, you know, and you know, a prestigious job, but it didn't pay very much. Here, I was gone five days a week, all day long, you know, and at the end of the month, I took home $185, and that was after I got a raise, you know, and that's just not very much money. So I began to think, you know, if I could get into college, and get some training, then I could spend that same amount of time, or perhaps a little more as I find out in elementary education, then I could bring home a lot more money. - How many children do you have, and how old are they? - We have three. Our oldest just got married, so he's away from home, and he's only 19. I'm not all that old. Then Janet is 16, a senior in high school, and our youngest David is a fifth, excuse me, fifth grader. - Mmm-hmm, so they're all gone for a long periods of time, or a long enough period of time for you to pursue other interests. Have you gentlemen run across additional motivations to the ones that Vivian and Marge have talked about, on the part of women who are so-called out of phase, although I think that's very much changing, isn't it? - One perspective that perhaps some women don't know about is that there is a market for maturity. I would hate to think that there, and I know that there are, women who would think because they were over 30 that they could not compete with a 22-year-old college senior who's graduating with a bachelor's degree in education. Two of us, Vivian and I, are products at one point of the University of Kansas, and we both taught in the public school systems in Lawrence. Vivian was one of my practice teachers in the- - That's right. - At one point. - And it was fun. - And she was an over 30 woman returning to school, and as one who hired teachers, and have talked to those that do hire them both in the public schools and in junior colleges at one point before coming to KU, I know very well that there are many school administrators that look for maturity. If the woman has been out in the world working, she does have something that in many instances the 22-year-old woman graduating just doesn't have yet. And this should be a motivating factor, it would seem to me, for the over 30 woman who wants to return to school. It may be exactly the opposite in some minds, but it certainly should be a source of motivation. - And yet we all know women who feel they can't compete. - Yes. - And that's the point, I believe, that you're making. Obviously, not everyone goes into education, nor should they. We want women to pursue whatever career they're really interested in. But none of you I take it knows of any reason that a woman could not compete adequately with the typical undergraduate student in the classroom. - I would say, Emily, that the experience is that the women coming back are so highly motivated, and they really have learned the discipline of handling, you know, many complex scheduling problems, and they do very well. Marge and I were talking about something beforehand that I think, if I may interject, it does apply. I was reading this last weekend about aptitude tests in terms of what do they predict? And the conclusion was that they only predict speed of learning, not level of learning. And I was sharing with her something that I've found this summer. I'm going to school myself, and all of a sudden at my advanced age I learned that I could do statistics, and I wanted to go out in the parking lot, and say, "Hey, world, I can do analysis of variance." And the point is I was absolutely petrified until, you know, I made this breakthrough, and I guess what I'm saying is that these things are happening. You know, the motivation was there, and I took the time to learn it, and you know, this happens time and time again with women coming back. - Vivian, why do you think that so many women really believe that, that their rate of learning has slowed up, that it would, why did you believe that you couldn't, that you might have difficulty in learning statistics? - Well, I think, you know, some of the research that I have done about when girls stop studying mathematics and sciences is at the point of junior high school, at which they decide, perhaps because of the stereotypic roles that they may go into, and finding job openings, they don't go into the sciences. They don't go into math-oriented schools. And so, they don't pursue. I took no more math, you know, than high school geometry. Never had any college math before, really. So I say, you know, something about my, I preselected myself out of the market of training for this kind of background by not taking these courses at that time. - Now, you didn't really of course, but it seemed to you that you'd preselected your- - Yeah, I realized, you know, the expectations of what fields I could get into pretty much told me that this was not something to pursue. - It would be very interesting to pursue, although we won't have time this evening to do it, but there is a puzzle as to how women's education really fits their lives, isn't it? It's because education, as it was set up, really was with the assumption that people would go straight through, and for a long time, of course, this has been available to the woman who wanted to do it, if there were no barriers that prevented her from wanting to, and we are going to be dealing in a later program in this series with more specifically with what these barriers are. And Vivian has brought up one, which is excellent, that if you stop studying something in junior high school, or even early in high school, you really have preselected yourself out of thinking in terms of certain fields. Actually, it's not impossible to learn those things later on, but our school system's not set up to make this very easy to do. Well, what kinds of rewards are people, or women who are returning to to school really looking for? Marge mentioned the one, money. And certainly, it probably is foremost. Vivian has mentioned it too, that the state of the economy is such that, and probably always has been, whether we're going through a depression, or very affluent times, one can always, a family can always use more money. But there certainly must be some other things, because we see this happening to women who really don't have a financial problem at all. So could we talk a little bit about what other kinds of rewards people are looking for? What are they expecting now? - I hate to get into the act again. I think I'm talking too much, but certainly the self-affirmation is important to all of us, and I've been a housewife, and I have been a mother. And you know, so there are glories to that role, but I also know that there are many days when you already know that no one is affirming you in that role. And I do think there comes a time when you need this affirmation, and beyond that, I think we are achievement-oriented. I think, you know, achievement in the sense that to see something done well, again, affirms us, and I see this in women coming in, you know, women who will have the wherewithal to not need to support themselves. But you know, this is very important to their sanity. - And there are some of course who are not even looking forward to actually entering the job market as a way of earning a living, and are still doing exactly this. Walter, you started to say something. - Well, it was certainly right along the same line, and I think of many examples of women that have come to our office, or come to us privately to talk about they just don't know what they're doing with themselves, and they really want to have some reason for thinking that they're worthy in this life. And so much of our self-worth does come through the marketplace, and they're not in it, and they wanna become part of it. - And Jeff, when they come to talk to you about finances, do you find very many women who are sort of apologetic, as if they're sort of maybe asking an improper question about using up resources? - Yes, although before I answer that, something came to mind, previous discussion, a bit personal. My mother was a housewife for 30 years, and a few years ago she had had enough of bridge clubs, and book review clubs, and housework, and she decided to go into the business world. And last year, my father had to make her vice president of the family firm, or of the family business, but she isn't the president yet, but- - She may make- - She took it for 30 years, and- - Good for her. - She worked her way in, and has a very different outlook on life today than she did. So her clubs meet in the evenings now. The bridge clubs that she had formed herself over the years, they all start meeting in the evening. So it was very interesting. - Most of those things which interest a great many people, men and women alike, of course, people do discover are available at other times, even if they do work. Do you people read "Hagar the Horrible" in the funny paper? Well, they had a very good cartoon yesterday with Hagar pounding the table, and saying, "The trouble is women don't know their place anymore," and his wife, what's her name, do you know? - Probably Brunhilde. - At any rate, she has thrown him out of his, off his throne, and has sat down, and said, "This woman does," which I guess really illustrates the fact that women's place is wherever each individual woman wants her place to be. - The most typical reaction, I think, to a woman who may be considering returning to school, to higher education, would be to think there just isn't enough money. And as I said before, this is not a bad year. And if the president's proposals are accepted for fiscal year '75, there's going to be well over a billion dollars available in aid to higher education in the form of loans, and grants to students for our 1974, 1975 academic year. I think the greatest mistake that students make who have been out of school for awhile is to assume that there just is not enough money for me to go back to school, and they should not make that assumption in this day and age. I think the very least they should do is to give the university a chance, and many simply do not. Whether we're talking about the need for tuition, say five, $600, or tuition, and room, and board for the single woman with no dependents, say $2,000. The university just needs to be given a chance. For example, this very week, we are now mailing our financial aid applications for loans and government grants and scholarships to those who have requested such applications for the 1974, 1975 academic year beginning in August of '74. And any woman who is interested in returning to KU in August of 1974, whether she's made the decision definitely, or not, should correspond with the Office of Student Financial Aid here on the campus, and request the application forms, and at least let us see what we can do. She'll hear from the office sometime in March, April, May at the very latest, in plenty of time, hopefully, to give her a chance to make alternate plans if necessary. But we need to be given a chance at the right time, and this is the right time. - Do you find that the headlines in newspapers are a little bit misleading and discouraging in terms of what the actual facts are? - Yes. - So you're suggesting that anyone who is even interested go ahead and inquire? - Yes. - You may find that there's something which fits your situation. Obviously, you would engage also, as all of us would, in some financial counseling with people. Sometimes they know of one kind of financial aid, and go for that, whereas there may be some other way that would be better in that particular situation. But we have very little time left. Of course, as I pointed out before, this is the first of a series of five on women and careers. But I would like for you to talk just a little bit about how you get information if you're interested in pursuing even the preliminaries of discussion with anyone. Vivian has already pointed out that she is available and has some other help. We've told you about the Women's Resource and Career Planning Center. Jeff has told you about the Financial Aid Office. We would like to think that wherever you started, we could get you to the right places for the particular thing which you want to discuss. Many people ask how you get information about a particular career, and the training that's required for it. Walter, you wanna comment on that? Suppose you had an idea about a particular career, but you really didn't know too much of what went into preparing for it. What would you suggest? - Well, if you were in the Lawrence area, I certainly would suggest that you come in to the Women's Resource and Career Planning Center, where we have a large number of books, and pamphlets, and so forth giving information about these various topics. I'd also suggest that the on November 6th through 8th that the Commission on the Status of Women has a career week program. Particularly on November 7th, there will be a fair sort of set up where people can come and talk with practitioners, women can talk with practitioners in the various fields, so that they can find out what kind of opportunities are open to them. But I think through Vivian, or through our office, those will be two good resources for women. - And Vivian, what can they find in your place? - Well- - Besides you, which is the most important resource. Our human resource is the most important, of course. - Well, Emily, we are a unit in the Catalyst Network of Counseling Centers, which does have its own information about specific careers for women, as well as information about coming back to the job market, or going back to school. Then we do a SRA occupational briefs, you know, on a good number of jobs, as well, beyond that, we have information about certain placement opportunities in civil service. And specifically, we are offering for the first time this fall a workshop on career exploration. And it begins tomorrow night at 7:30 in the Union. It will allow women to look at themselves, look at their families, look at job opportunities, and schooling opportunities, and we hope that it's going to be an honest exploration. - Our time is unfortunately for us over. We appreciate very much our panelists joining us, Vivian McCoy from Continuing Education, Jeff Weinberg from Student Financial Aid, Walter Smith from the Dean of Women's Office, and Marge Marshall, a senior non-traditional student in the field of education. And we hope that you'll join us again next Monday for "A Feminist Perspective," and continue to do so during this, the month of October, when we will be dealing with the subject of women and careers. Thank you for joining us.