When I started researching material for my book, The French Desk – A Brooklyn Gal’s Journey into Wartime Propaganda, I pulled my mother’s personnel file from the US Department of State to better understand her war work history. Much to my delight, all her previous jobs were listed. As I read through the file, I came to the realization that radio and my mother were not only great friends, as I detailed in Part 1 of this series, but also old colleagues.
Long story short, my mother attended the Katharine Gibbs School right after college because she did not want to be a nurse, teacher or lawyer at that time. There weren’t many career opportunities for women college graduates in the late 1930’s beyond the traditional routes. Even law school was unusual for a woman them, but not unheard of. In fact, the following year, her sister did go to law school right after college. What my mother really wanted to do was get back to Paris and work as a linguist but just how she would do that was not clear to anyone. In 1939, the war was escalating quickly so the thought of traveling to Paris was out of the question at the moment. Case closed.
Her father insisted that all his children be able to support themselves. Like many her age, I think she went to Katie Gibbs not out of desperation, but due to the lack of real opportunity for a smart, college-educated, French-speaking woman. Her stepmother also had gone to secretarial school and had an excellent career as an Executive Secretary before marrying my grandfather. “They’ll figure out you’re smart and will move you along,” my grandfather had said. How right he was! Continue reading “A Love Affair with Radio [Part 2]: The Roots of the Voice of America (VOA)”