“She Was Shamed”: Women Share Heartbreaking Stories Of What The Women Before Them Endured

19.

“My great-great-grandmother on my mom’s mom’s mom’s side left Italy with my great-grandmother and some siblings and ended up a widow in Wisconsin. So she married the uncle of her late husband (who was younger than his nephew) and then left his drunken butt — with something like seven surviving kids, most of them in diapers between the first and second batch of children — on a train from Wisconsin to Vermont by herself. What a journey that must have been! She set up a grocery store, and they lived above it. She only spoke Italian, so the kids had to translate for her. Ultimately, only two girls (including my grandma from the first marriage to the guy she loved) and one boy survived to adulthood. My aunt, born in 1905, went to college. She was a childless but very successful social worker who made good investments. My great-grandma was a well-respected podiatrist in Bangor, Maine. She also went to college and was born in 1900.”

“My aunt made it to 95, so she passed in 2000. She was like a grandmother to me and my mom and a second mother to my grandmother, who disappointed her mother by dropping out of college in the mid-1940s to marry my grandfather. All are interesting ladies. 

My mom, ironically, was class valedictorian in 1964 but never went to college as her parents wouldn’t support her doing that unless she was going to be a nurse, social worker, or teacher (I love my mom, but she is very much not suited to those careers). Somehow, the women on that side of my family were more progressive 125 years ago than now, as neither I nor my mother has a college degree.”

—heatherchristie1