Oral History Program Joyce Morton Christine Cromwell June 21, 2008 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Joyce Morton Interviewed by Christine Cromwell 21 June 2008 Copyright © 2015 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Morton, Joyce, an oral history by Christine Cromwell, 21 June 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Joyce Morton. The interview is being conducted on June, 21, 2008, by Christine Cromwell, at Cromwell’s home. The interview concerns Morton’s life experiences and references to being a woman. CC: What is your date of birth and where were you born? JM: I was born on April 13, 1948, in Aberdeen South Dakota. CC: Who were your parents? JM: My parents were Richard; excuse me, Kenneth Richard Anderson, and Dolores Ione Holdus Anderson. CC: Do you have any siblings? JM: Yes, I had three sisters and one that died before I was born from, I forgot the name of the disease, but she only lived a few weeks. CC: What are some of your earliest child hood memories? JM: Some of my earliest childhood memories… well, I remember, one memory that I can recall is one time we were sitting in the car and we were at my Grandpas house and my Mom’s purse was still in the car. I don’t remember how old I was, must have been like six or seven years old, we took money out of my Mom’s purse and we were tearing it into little pieces and letting it blow out of the window! Some other early memories are remembering my Grandpa and being able to be at his house and playing with my cousins. Another one of my earlier memories is when I was a child, probably about five years old and I was at the 1 park when we lived out in Lead South Dakota. I was swinging on the swing and I decided I was going to jump out of the swing and I jumped out and I came back up and the swing hit me in the back of the head and kind of split my head open and I held my hand on my head and ran home. I showed my Mom my bloody hands and she freaked out and I can remember those little kind of clamps that they put in to fix my split head, which was very uncomfortable because I couldn’t lay on the back of my head. Another memory I have about that same time frame was, my little sister Debby, she was playing with matches and she had lit a match and went and threw it in the garbage. Our garbage was burning! Another one when I was about five too was, my Sister was, she broke her leg and she had this cast from her hip down to her ankle and we shared a bed. I was getting, her throwing her heavy casted leg on me in the middle of the night. One time I recall a memory of a friend and she had some kind of accident or some disease, I think cerebral Palsy, my memory makes me believe that I had pushed her down and had caused her to have this disability. Even though that wasn’t what happened, but I just remember believing that at some time in my life. Remembering things like always having to share a bedroom with one of my Sisters, not ever having a place of my own. Always wanting that and remembering things like moving a lot, while we were growing up because my Dad was in construction work and we would move to different places where he had work. He did cement work and block work and so we would just kind of move different places throughout the state of South Dakota. The only time we left the state of South Dakota was when I was somewhere around the age of like sixth grade, seventh grade. We decided 2 we were going to move and we went through, I remember stopping in Utah and living in some place here in Ogden even. We stayed there for just a short time and then we moved on to California. I can remember the whole family trying to earn money, we went and we were working cutting grapes for harvest. I remember doing that. Because my Dad couldn’t find work in whatever he was looking for, we turned to South Dakota and lived in Sun mica for a while. Another memory I have is when we lived out on the farm close to Boston, my Dad worked as a farmhand and we had a little house all by our selves. We had a pet pig that would follow us everywhere, it would follow us in the house, or I would go out and I would sit in the middle of the pigs trough, which was probably not a good idea, but I did it anyway. You didn’t think about those things when you were a kid. Another good memory I have, when we lived close to Aberdeen when I was in Elementary School, I went to this school that had all eight grades with one teacher. There were only maybe one or two students in each grade and she taught all of us. I remember taking a lamb to school with us one day and it always just bring back that “ Mary had a little lamb” I always think about that when I think about doing that. She was one of my most favorite teachers, Mrs. Wilson, and I remember a big party that she had for us when we went, at the end of the school year with all of us. That was a really good memory, to have that at that time. CC: What was your relationship like with your parents, your Mom and Dad as a child? JM: As a child, I don’t remember ever having a really close relationship with either one of my parents. My mom was a very dependent person, so she didn’t show a lot of affection, not that I didn’t have a good home life and a good life as I was 3 growing up, it’s just that there was not that real closeness that I would have probably liked to have had. With my Dad being so busy and always working, didn’t really have a close relationship with him. One area that really was really hard for me was, my Dad was Alcoholic. He would go off on drinking binges and we would not know where he was, which had a definite effect on me and my life and the kind of relationship we had. CC: Did you have a good relationship with your siblings? What kind of relationship did you have there? JM: I think I had a good relationship, especially with my sister that is just a year and a half younger than me, Gloria. We have a really, probably a pretty close relationship, we always did things together. There were several years between me and my other two sisters so that we didn’t have as close of a relationship as I did with my other sister. CC: How do you feel being a girl affected your childhood relationships? JM: I don’t think of it as affecting my childhood relationships that I had. I don’t see that it made a difference whether I was a girl or boy the types of relationships that I developed. I was kind of a very quiet, shy child and very responsible. CC: Can you tell me a little bit about your transition from childhood to Womanhood, your teenage years? JM: My teenage years, I think I had a hard time during my teenage years. Part of it was due to the fact that I was an obese child and an obese teenager. That had a definite effect on the kinds of, being able to have good relationships with people and close relationships. I remember one of the things that I really depended on 4 when I was in high school, which was a very important part of my life, was working on school plays and being in the Drama Department. I did mostly backstage work with make up and costumes and that kind of thing. That helped me develop some relationships with people. Being able to have contact with people of my own age. Because I didn’t have a lot of real close friends when I was growing up, this was my way of having relationships with kids my own age. What was the question again? CC: Your transition from childhood to womanhood. JM: I just don’t really recall a difficult transition; life just kind of went on. I went from Elementary school to Junior High School and I know I had some periods of depression when I was in early years of Junior High School. I managed to make it through that, but I can recall that time frame and feeling not accepted, not as good as anybody else, or accepted as a person for who I am and wanting that really desperately. CC: What type of relationship did you have with your mother? What kind of influence did she have over you? JM: I didn’t really have a really close relationship with my Mom. She was always there, she was always at home and that, but as far as a relationship where you could go confide in her, we didn’t do that. She didn’t give us a lot of advice, she didn’t help us work through our issues we had as we were growing up. So I just feel like I , I mean I cared about my Mom and I loved my Mom but I don’t feel like we had that kind of close relationship that I really would have loved to have had. 5 CC: During this period what kind of relationship did you have with your Sisters, did they have any more influence? JM: Just my sister that is next to me, we did lots of things together. During my teenage years, we always did activities together, especially church activities. It was at that time in my life her and I both joined the Mormon Church and that became a very positive influence on both of us and who we grew up to be. And the kind of lives that we are able to have today, I mean relationships with my other sisters like I said before, wasn’t really close because there was a lot of difference in age. CC: What do you feel are the most important events in your teenage years? Did being a woman affect these events or your perception of them? JM: The most important events in my teenage years would probably be the events around joining the church. That was a very positive and good influence on my life and where I went from there. Probably also being involved in Dramatics and plays in school were important events in feeling like, feelings of accomplishment with those things. School was always very important to me and making good strides and accomplishments in school was very important and a positive influence on my life. The teachers that I had, especially my Dramatic teacher, she had a lot of good influence on me. CC: You said you didn’t have a real close relationship with your mother, she didn’t give you much advice, so from whom or where did you learn what was expected of being a woman as you were growing up? 6 JM: I think I learned it mostly from watching other people. I think the kind of relationship my mom had and what she presented as being accepted as a woman and also through the church. The Mormon Church has really high expectations of a woman when it comes to family and raising your children and those kinds of relationships. Where you fit in the relationships in your family, with your husband and a mother and a wife and that. CC: After high school did you go to college? JM: Yes, I went to college. I graduated from high school in 1966 and I started college at Northern State College there in Aberdeen South Dakota. I was able to go one semester. Then I dropped out for the second semester because of financial reasons, my parents were not able to afford the tuition. Then I went and worked for a semester then I applied, actually I think it was a year and a half, after a year and a half is when I had to stop for a semester. Then I applied to go to college at Brigham Young University in Provo Utah. I was accepted there and went there until I graduated in 1971. CC: What was your major? JM: My major kind of changed from time to time. I stared out, my first major I started out was Speech Therapy, I was going to be a speech therapist. I worked really hard and what changed my major from Speech Therapy was an instructor or a teacher that I had. I worked so hard and she was just not very positive towards me and positive toward the things that I did and so I got a little perturbed about it and decided “I am not going to do this.” Then I changed my major to Clothing and Textiles in Merchandising and that’s what I graduated in was that. Then later on 7 in my life I went back to college again and got a Bachelors Degree in Nursing and am currently getting a Masters in Nursing. CC: What was your parents’ opinion of you going to college? JM: My parents were glad that I did, but they didn’t, neither one of them really went very far. My mom went to 11th grade and my dad went only to about the 8th grade in school. So to them it wasn’t an important thing that I go to college. But to me it was important. CC: Do you think if you had been a boy they would have encouraged you to go into college a little more than they did? JM: I don’t know if that would be true because we didn’t have any boys in our family. So there is nothing to see if there opinion is different. CC: You said you went to BYU so you had to move away from home, what was it like being out on your own for the first time? JM: Actually that wasn’t really the first time but, there were a couple of summers that I was away from home and had to be on my own basically. I liked being on my own, it gave me some independence and I was able to make decisions for myself and probably become more of my own person. I like independence, I like being able to do that. I think sometimes we are too dependent on other people in how we respond or what we do in life. Instead of depending on our own selves and what we want. CC: When you were out on your own did you run into any type of prejudice, like getting a job or finding a place to live due to the fact that you are a woman? 8 JM: I have not really ever run into that problem myself. I guess the kinds of jobs I did have were basically filled by women anyway, like I had some sewing jobs or basically jobs that women applied for. Or I had jobs dealing with office work which was another area that women were more prevalent in getting jobs. So as far as jobs I didn’t. The only thing that I find that I have run into in my life about being a woman, they don’t think a woman, especially like if you are going to get a car fixed, or anything to do with fixing a house or those kinds of things, the opinion is that you don’t know anything; that you are not really capable of making those kinds of decisions and doing those kinds of things. CC: You said you were attending school now, getting your Masters. Can you maybe relate how some of your experiences are different or similar this time going to school to when you were younger? JM: This time going to school, although going to college was important to me, this time it is very important. It makes me feel like a more independent person, somebody that will be looked up to, because I accomplished going and getting my Masters. I am more dedicated to it, I feel that it is much more important for my future. When I was younger it wasn’t so much that I would go to college and think about my future and the kinds of jobs that I might get. At that time it was this is part of the process of life and that your main goal was that you were going to meet somebody and get married and have a family and you didn’t have to worry about it so much as education and your future job market. CC: Speaking of family and marriage have you ever been married? JM: Yes, I have been married one time. 9 CC: And when did you meet your husband? JM: I met my husband after I graduated from college the first time in 1971. I met him while I was working in Salt Lake City and we happened to go to a conference and I was sitting on Temple Square in Salt Lake there and he walked up to me and, the most famous line you know, “have I met you somewhere before?” That started our conversation and I found out that he was in the military he was sleeping in the car. So I decided that I had a friend and I would take him and he could stay at my friend’s house. Our relationship went from there. CC: What was it about him that attracted you to him? JM: I think what attracted me to him was my need to be taken care of. Because women are supposed to be taken care of and him taking over kind of. I took him to my apartment and I was trying to fix a meal and I was going to clean up and he just kind of took over and told me to sit down and he would do this. CC: How long did you know him before you got married? JM: We met in April and we were married in July of the same year, so it was a very short relationship. He was stationed in Texas and I was in Utah so we probably spent a total of about two weeks together. CC: What was your family’s opinion of him? JM: My family hadn’t met him before we got married. He had visited with my mom on the telephone. I don’t know if they really had an opinion they didn’t verbalize a strong opinion about yay or nay about this person. I think their opinion was that girls get married and they have families. They didn’t question my judgment about it being such a short relationship or anything. 10 CC: What was your perception of marriage and being a wife before you got married? JM: My perception of marriage and being a wife was, marriage was what we were supposed to do, you got married and you had a family that’s how we grew up believing. That was most important in life. CC: How did you think a wife was supposed to behave and kind of things might be in store for being a wife? JM: A wife was supposed to stay at home and take care of a family. She was supposed to take care of the house and do all of that kind of stuff. So that her husband would go out and go to work, that was his role and earn the money, and the wife was supposed to stay home and take care of the home and the family. CC: Did any of these perceptions or views change after you got married? JM: No, I don’t think. Basically they didn’t they actually I think my views have changed since I got divorced more so than while I was married. Always had that same thought that my responsibility should be at home and taking care of my family and my home and my husband. CC: You mentioned that you got divorced, what kind of challenges have you encountered since your divorce? JM: Challenges of being alone, raising kids on your own and making decisions on your own. You have nobody to be there to help make decisions about daily life, about your future. It’s all up to you as an individual person. CC: Being divorced, how has your perception of family and home life changed, or has it changed? 11 JM: It’s not so much that my perception of what is important about home and family and that, it’s that it’s different because it has to be different. As a single person you have to work, plus you have to take care of everything. You don’t have anybody else there to take up any of the responsibilities. You are just one person and you are doing everything. You don’t do things as well as one person. I think when there are two parents working together and sharing in decisions and doing things together, makes things easier. CC: Do you have any children? JM: I have five children, three girls and two boys. CC: How important was having children to you? JM: It was very important to me. When I first got married I wanted to get pregnant right away because I wanted to have a family. I wanted to have kids; I wanted to be a mom. CC: From where do you think you have gained this sense of family and children? JM: I think the most came from, actually from my religious beliefs. How important family is, that’s what it’s all about, that is what life is all about. CC: Did the decision to have children influence your career choice? JM: Yes it did. I think I had graduated already with my Bachelors degree before I got married. I got married not too long after I had graduated, so because I wanted a family, I wanted children, I did not really pursue my career. I felt my career really was to be at home and to raise my family. The degree that I had in Clothing and Textiles which I would have been a buyer is some department store or for some company. I never ever pursued that at all. 12 CC: Do you think being a woman influenced your parenting of your children? JM: Definitely, I think women have a different way of dealing with children than men do. Not that men aren’t caring just women, have that softer, gentler, caring approach that… I don’t know I think motherhood a lot of times to a lot of people, just comes natural. Because that is what we are raised to be, mothers. CC: Where did you learn your parenting skills? JM: Well I would guess most of my parenting skills that I learned came from my parents. You know, and other people in my life. Mostly my parents, but influences from people that I have known growing up, some of the people that I knew when I was in college when they were parents. The aspects of religion had a lot to do with it too in what kind of a parent I am. CC: How do you view your life today? JM: I view my life today as very positive. I have had a lot of ups and downs in my life. I am proud of myself, I have accomplished a lot in my life and I am proud of the accomplishments I have made and the kind of person I am today. I am very independent, I know I can do whatever I put my mind to do, that’s basically what I am doing with my life right now. It’s kind of hard when you are alone, sometimes. But you got to be happy with yourself and what you are doing and who you are. CC: Is this the same view you had of your life ten years ago? JM: I was divorced ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was kind of really was not quite as self confident in myself in what I could accomplish and what I could do. I was probably about, I have been divorced for almost fifteen years now. I had gone 13 back to Nursing School and accomplished that but, over time I have developed more confidence. I didn’t feel that way so much back then. CC: Is this the same type of view of your life that you had thirty years ago? Or how is it different? JM: Thirty years ago. No, I think I view life differently today than I did thirty years ago. Because I have seen myself as a more independent woman and thirty years ago I viewed myself as someone who should be married, take care of the family and take care of your husband. That you stayed at home, you didn’t go out and be in the work force, education wasn’t that important for a woman at that time either. To me, education is one of the most important things that we could do as women to better ourselves, to obtain and accomplish those things we want in life. CC: What is your view of women in general in today’s society? JM: Women in general, I think, women are still very dependent, they want to be taken care of. Although there are a lot of independent women out there that have accomplished a lot in their lives. I still think society sometimes make women as second-class citizens, that they aren’t as capable as men are, especially in the work force. I personally think that women are just as capable as men in whatever they choose to do. CC: Reflecting on the fact that you are a woman, what do you like about being a woman? JM: What do I like about being a woman? I just like being myself, I don’t know if it really has a lot to being a woman or whatever sex you are. I like who I am and I don’t know if it really actually has to do with the fact that I am a woman or not. 14 CC: What don’t you like about being a woman? JM: I don’t like sometimes how society looks at women and doesn’t always recognize their accomplishments. That’s probably the main thing. CC: If you could change one societal view of womanhood for future generations of women, what would you change? JM: I think I would change the fact that, society needs to look at women as important and capable individuals. They don’t look at them as second-class citizens sometimes and that they are a very important part of society. It’s important to be a mom and a wife and all of that, but there is also another side to that, it’s important to be an individual and develop yourself and do those things that you want to in life too. CC: Thank you. JM: You’re welcome. 15