THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Susan Dranitzke
“I think it’s important for younger women to know about what life was like when I was growing up. My role as an elder is to tell history.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, November 2023
JW: Would you tell us your full name and when and where you were born?
SD: My name is Susan Dranitzke, but my full name is Susan Aloe Samuels Dranitzke. Aloe is my mother’s maiden name, was my middle name always, my father’s name was Samuels, and my husband’s name is Dranitzke.
JW: When were you born?
SD: I was born in 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. Three weeks before the United States got into World War II, which was, I imagine, very upsetting for my very young parents; my father had to enlist and so on. So, it was quite a time. I was alive during World War II until it was over for us, when I was about five years old. And I have memories of what it was like in the war, where we really weren’t involved directly, but how it impacted our lives.
JW: Were you an only child?
SD: No, I was the first, though. My mother had been 19 [for] a month, when they got married and I was born 11 months later. So, they were very young. My father was 22, though.
JW: Tell us a little about your childhood, and what it was like to be born right before, as you said, the U.S. got involved. And your siblings, your ethnicity, what was your childhood like?
SD: I had a sister two years later, and there were only the two of us. My childhood was wonderful. I had a very warm, loving family, extended family. Both sets of grandparents were nearby in St. Louis, Missouri. And ethnicity, Jewish; a non-religious Jewish family. All of us were Jewish, but I think during World War II it was kind of scary to be Jewish. Although they didn’t talk about it, I think they thought Hitler could have won, and what would happen to us. So, we were never a very religious Jewish family, though. We lived in the Midwest, in St. Louis, Missouri. Very Midwestern childhood, very safe, except for thinking about war.
There were dark curtains at night. Everything had to be dark. Blackouts, even in the middle of the country. We had a victory garden, and there were shortages of food. We couldn’t get butter, so, I remember my mother mixing up something white that looked like Crisco with some powdered color or food coloring to make it look like butter. That’s what we had.
The milkman – in those days, people had milk delivered – they must have had gasoline shortages, because I remember the milkman coming with a horse drawn wagon, even in a suburb of St. Louis. I remember that because the horse would have droppings in the street, and we had to sweep it up. I was thinking, “Why did the Milkman have a horse?” And I was thinking, “Because they probably didn’t have enough gasoline or they were trying to ration it.”
I remember seeing my father in uniform, getting dressed in the morning when he was on location in St. Louis, and later went to California. But after that, childhood was lovely. Went to public elementary school, where I could walk to school in my neighborhood, and then later went to high school from 7th grade to 12th Grade at an independent school that my mother had gone to as well. Very humanistic school, although, looking back on it, I realized that there were no Black children. I don’t think I noticed that at the time. And only a limited number of Jewish students. I think they purposely cut that number down. But it was a wonderful childhood.
I graduated from high school and went to college on the East coast, near New York City. I had been to New York quite a few times because my father worked for his father’s shoe manufacturing factory, and they had an office in New York City; in a Skyscraper, the Empire State Building. It was a small showroom for women’s shoes.
Very female oriented family, because of fashion, and because all of my cousins were girls. Except for one boy who actually moved away. He was the only son and that family moved away. So, my grandparents on one side, had five granddaughters and the same on the other side. My grandfather on my mother’s side used to tell the nurse to, “Go back and look again” every time another girl was born and make sure.
JW: Just double check, would you? That’s great.
SD: I was very close to my grandfather. I was the first child on my mother’s side. My grandfather, he taught me how to throw a baseball like a boy, he taught me how to swim, and my father taught me how to ride a bike, which I did a lot. We were free to ride our bikes all over the place. As even fairly young children, we had a lot of freedom.
And let’s see, my grandfather gave me, not expensive, but a telescope, and books on astronomy. My grandfather was an artist and painted, and I painted with him sometimes. He also had a beautiful big rose garden and then a vegetable garden. He was an optician, but that was kind of the least of it. His wife, my grandmother, I was also very close to her and she worked for my grandfather. She was one of the few women I knew that worked.
In those days, in my childhood, from 1941 to 1959 when I went off to college, I hardly knew any women that worked. I knew waitresses and maids and salespeople sometimes, but no lawyers, no women doctors, no executives. It was just accepted that women didn’t have those jobs. Nobody talked about it.
My mother told me that I could grow up and be a nurse or a teacher, and she thought I would be good at both of those. I did do volunteer work at Children’s Hospital in St. Louis. I was a candy striper. I learned a lot there because there were some very poor children, sometimes abused children. I learned a lot as a candy striper. I guess I did that on weekends, but I did have some chance to be with children.
When I graduated from college, my major was psychology, and I also graduated with a license to teach elementary school. So, I knew I had that, whereas a lot of my friends who graduated, if they were going to work, they were secretaries. Mostly in New York, because the school was only half an hour from New York and it was easy to go into New York City by a train that cost about $0.25. Trains ran every half hour. In those days, New York was very much like the television show Mad Men. That show about the advertising world, where the women really were all the secretaries and it was hard for any of them to become more powerful in that world.
JW: So, your mom didn’t work?
SD: My mother didn’t. In fact, my grandparents on my father’s side, the one that ran the Samuel’s shoe company, making DeLiso Deb’s high heel shoes, sold in most department stores, anyway, they told my mother when she married my dad, they did not want her to work because it would shame the family for her to seem that my father couldn’t provide for her. That was kind of the thought of the day.
I think she was kind of depressed a lot of the time and it wasn’t until I was maybe in high school that she started doing some real estate work. She had gone to dress designing school in Chicago for about a year and was quite good at it, but she couldn’t continue. She even designed her wedding dress, but she couldn’t continue doing that at the time. Later, she did do very well in a number of things but it took a long time. People weren’t working. My best friend’s mother was a first-grade teacher.
JW: That was unusual.
SD: Yes, it was. Well, the teachers that I had were all women. I think children thought that women were quite powerful because their teachers were women until you got to high school, and then there were men teachers. So, at least in my high school, there were about equal number of [male and female] teachers, and a man principal in both cases, high school and elementary school. I think even though we don’t think about that then at the time, it does seep into your system somehow.
My mother made sure she would tell me things, that if she would curl my hair with big curlers and it hurt, or a Toni Home Permanent in those days, to make your hair curly, she would say, “It hurts to be beautiful.” And she would tell me, not to let boys know that I was smarter than they were, not to beat boys in tennis if I was playing tennis with them.
So, I was glad I had my grandfather who was competitive and didn’t go along with all of that so much, although he didn’t say it. I just listened. I think that’s what she grew up with, and knew that most women were encouraged to get married because there were so few jobs for them to do and it was a way to survive.
JW: You wonder what came first, the few jobs or the principle of the day that women don’t work.
SD: Of course, we had plenty of women help at the time. The only Black people I saw in St. Louis, which is right on the Mason Dixon line, were maids on the street corners waiting for the bus. I mean, those were the Black people we saw. The schools were segregated, and there was a Black school as they called it in those days.
If we passed and saw this sort of dilapidated building in a place in our town where you wouldn’t have gone very often, there was a school, and I would ask about the children in the play yard, and they would say, “That’s where the colored children go to school.” I didn’t think much about that until we traveled south on the train. Everyone went by trains. There were no planes yet and when we’d go on the train, or in the car, there were signs for White only; for drinking fountains, for bathrooms.
JW: You saw those?
SD: I did. And I would ask, and my mother would say, “Oh, no, you can’t drink on that one. It has a sign that says colored only, or White only.” And that was very shocking. My parents didn’t like that either, but that’s how it was. There were a lot of issues besides women issues.
JW: So, you went to college and graduated around ’64. When did you learn about the women’s movement?
SD: I got married a week after graduation, and my husband and I went to Italy for a year to teach school, because we wanted to travel, mostly. We taught in an Italian American international school in a cloistered convent. It was a wonderful year. When we came back, I tried to get a teacher’s job in New Haven where my husband was in law school. I interviewed at the public school system.
Actually, the superintendent interviewed me to be a teacher, and he asked me if I was married, and I said, “Yes.” I think he saw I had a ring on, and he said, “I can’t hire you because you’ll just get pregnant, and then you can’t work anymore.” So, I didn’t like that. I told him, “I wasn’t planning to get pregnant” but there wasn’t the birth control pill yet. You could do some birth control, but it wasn’t quite the same. So, I got a job at the Yale Child Study Center, which turned out to be much better in the long run because I learned a lot there.
JW: What was the Child Study Center?
SD: The Child Study Center was a huge building in the medical school of Yale. In our section of it, they were training psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers, and they were learning about normal children. There were one-way mirrors that were in our classrooms. We were teaching mainly children of the faculty, and students’ children, and there would be people looking through the one-way mirror, looking at us.
I also taught in a group of autistic children or atypical children. And that one, there were times where I would be invited, or asked to take a child in front of a huge class with bleachers and so on, of medical students, and talk with a child who had autism or whatever, in front of all those people. I was really pretty young then, but they gave me a lot of interesting things to do.
There was one woman resident who was pregnant, and she got very pregnant and kept on working there. And then at the very end of my time there, I got pregnant on purpose, planning, because there were only three months left of law school. So, I was able to work until two weeks before our daughter Elizabeth was born at the Yale New Haven Hospital.
In those days, men were not allowed in the delivery room. It was very new to allow them even in the labor room, which my husband was able to do, but not in the delivery room. Three years later, by the time our son was born when we moved to Washington, D.C., he could come in the delivery room.
So, things were changing. The birth control pill came out. I think it came out around the time we were in Italy, because I remember my mother writing me a letter there saying, “Be careful of that birth control pill, because they’re saying that women are getting blood clots in their legs. So, be careful.” And I said, “The Food and Drug Administration would never make that mistake.” I was so innocent.
JW: It was a pretty high dose in the beginning, and I took it too.
SD: Yes, it was. And my mother was totally right. I did end up taking it after a while, but that’s when things started to change, I think. When it was easy to get the pill. When Roe came into being. That’s when I started feeling a change. Women seemed to be getting more power at that point.
When you ask when I aware of the women’s movement, that was in college, when my psych professor, who was a male, assigned Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique book. It was brand new and we all read it. There were lots of discussions, and that was the beginning of some eye openers for everybody, I think, who read that.
JW: Do you remember your impression or anything?
SD: Well, I felt that I really became much more aware of the kinds of things still accepted. That men were going to flirt with pretty girls, like, if you’d walk down the street in New York, and men, even building a building with a whistle on the street, things like that. You had to just keep walking. My mother just said, “Just keep walking. Don’t look.” That kind of thing.
That was the way it was. There was no Me Too movement. There was no Roe, there was no Title IX. All of that hadn’t happened yet. And that’s how it was. Secretaries had to get coffee for their bosses and do whatever they asked them to do. So, that was all different. But anyway, I did like that book. Things really started to change more and more, just gradually.
And then we moved to Washington. I had been busy working almost up until my daughter was born, and then came to Washington. My husband immediately had a job as a law clerk for a judge. He was not home and I was sitting with this baby all day.
I’d been in the Child Study Center where we even studied infants sometimes; there was a famous woman pediatrician there who was very interested in babies. Not many other people were, but we got to see what she did with babies and what she learned. One was a study about infants in institutions, by the way. About how damaging that is to children to be left in a crib, even if they’re clean. That they need attachment with a few people, not staff that’s going around.
Anyway, we moved to Washington, and I was on Capitol Hill, which was near the courts, and some of our friends from law school were also there. So we had a few friends, but they were all working. We went to a party one night, a cocktail party at someone’s house, and people would ask me what I did, and I realized after a while, everyone was lawyers. There were even some women lawyers. Although when my husband was at Yale Law School, there were only six women law students.
Today, there are probably more women than men in law school, I think. But in those days, boy, they made it hard for the girls. I attended a few classes, and they made it tough for those kids. One became the president of Georgetown Law School. Not right when she graduated, but eventually. So, they were really smart. But we were at this party, and people would say, “What do you do?” And I said, “Well, I’m a mother. And, I did teach nursery school and preschool and kindergarten.” And then they would turn around and walk away. It was kind of disheartening.
A neighbor of ours was a Swedish woman who had been a flight attendant for Pan Am. She had two children, and she had been asked to stop. She was fired because she got pregnant. You couldn’t work, I mean, at all, even when you didn’t show yet. As soon as you were pregnant, as soon as they knew, out you went. Later, there was a lawsuit, much later, against Pan Am for that. And now I know, she’s still a friend of mine, she’s 85, and ever since that lawsuit, she’s been able to fly free anywhere, and so can her family.
JW: So, your consciousness was raised. I think I will put it that way.
SD: Right.
JW: But I know you teamed up with other women at some point.
SD: Yes, I did. First of all, there were consciousness raising groups in our neighborhood, and women met alone, together. Husbands were either not home, or told to stay upstairs. We talked about all of these things that we were feeling, and reading, and so on. While I was doing these consciousness raising groups, my husband wasn’t home very much because he was trying to stop the Vietnam War and working with conscientious objectors, while I was working or going to consciousness raising groups.
I also was against the war, and we did march for that, too, quite a bit. That really helped, I think. Helped change a lot of things. Women started talking to their husbands and asking them to do things that men didn’t do as much. Men didn’t take care of babies and didn’t get up in the middle of the night when babies cried, or children were sick, that kind of thing. So, we started changing a lot of that. Just small things like that.
When I talked to my husband about this interview today and I mentioned the consciousness raising, he said, “Well, be sure to say that I learned to always put this toilet seat down.” I just thought it was really funny because I know he was just kidding, but it was true. He did. He started helping a lot more, and later, he helped by staying home while I was getting a master’s degree in education. A lot of the classes were at night and weekends, and he stayed home with the children. And also, he helped me pay for that, too. So, there was no discussion. He never said no about any of that.
There was another group that I heard about. I was still home with one child, at the time only one, and when she was about one, I think, I went to a meeting about starting a daycare center because I realized that we didn’t have any childcare. In my neighborhood, we had a babysitting co-op for nighttime. People helped each other at night sometimes. Nobody had any money to pay for sitters or to pay for nannies or anything like that. So, we helped each other, and we had little playgroups in the daytime, but we couldn’t work because we just didn’t have enough care.
We had a wonderful group form, and because I was an educator, I decided to be part of that. There were about seven women, and we met a lot with our children playing all over the floor at different people’s houses. There was a lawyer, two social workers, a political person; somebody who eventually was on the city council here in D.C.
We had a very mixed group of people. And we came up with a plan that we were going to have a school that was racially and economically integrated. We wanted daycare, but we wanted it to be a mixed group. And that was one of the reasons we lived in the neighborhood that we did. We moved here, because it was integrated.
We didn’t want poor Black kids and more middle-class White kids. We wanted children who it was obvious had scholarship money, or it was paid for. The way the mission of the school was, was we had about a quarter of the children who were Black and middle-class and could pay, in another quarter, White, like that. And then there were poorer or less able to pay White children and Black children.
So, it was all equal. In each class, there was a head teacher who was White, and an assistant teacher who was Black. In the next classroom, I had a head teacher that was Black; we mixed it up so there weren’t all White head teachers and Black assistants.
I was in charge of hiring, and of curriculum and grants. Helping with the grants anyway, because we had other people doing that. But I raised money in various ways. I won’t go into it all now, but we were able to get enough money to make a school for 100 children. We had four or five classes from three-year-olds through five-year-olds.
I’m still friends with people that I hired to be teachers, and people who were volunteers there. Everybody pitched in, and the school ran for 25 years. There were no daycare centers when we started. The only daycare centers we had in this country were during World War II.
You may know this, but when women started working in factories because the men went off to war, the women took very big jobs working, and made a lot of money. Much more than they ever would have made. Then, when the war was over, they had to go back to being waitresses. That was Rosie the Riveter time, but those daycare centers all closed. They were mainly on the West coast in California.
What happened was, the government had some films that they had in movie theaters. We didn’t have TVs early on, but I guess you’d see it in a movie theater, that it was patriotic for women to stay home with their children, and that that was the best thing for children. It wouldn’t be good to have somebody else taking care of them and all of that.
But anyway, we were able to rent space in a church. A local church had a big huge basement, and some classrooms for Sunday school upstairs that we used for our school. We had fabulous teachers, and we had a mixed-race board of the school. I was on the board, and it was one of the happiest and best things that I ever did in my lifetime. I was just so pleased with it, and as I said, I’m still friends with a lot of the people that were involved in that.
There were two other daycare centers that I started, two other kinds of daycare centers. One involved fathers helping. We made sure that fathers had to put in the same amount of time that mothers did. So that was called, All of Us. The first one was called Capital East Children’s Center, and the last one was called Wee Care.
JW: That still exists, doesn’t it?
SD: That still exists but the name is now, I think, Hill Preschool. But there wasn’t even preschool. Public schools in those days didn’t start until kindergarten, and they were half day. So, it was really hard for women to work. And of course, poor women, poor Black women, all had to find grandmothers and aunts and other people to watch their children. I mean, it was much different and much, much harder. But this school tried to address that. We had cooks, we had federal money, we had private money. Not that we were really rich, but the lawyer we had; did you know Judy Wolf? Do you remember her?
JW: No.
SD: Well, she was a woman attorney and she was on our board and part of this group. And she made things happen. She would take something to one part of the D.C. government to get permits or whatever, and when they were slow about getting the permits and getting anything passed, she would stand there until they did it, and then she would carry it across town to the next place that had to sign off on it by hand.
She just stuck with it until we got it. And we got it going pretty fast. It was quite a group of women. Unfortunately, some of them are long gone. I mean, they died; we’re all old now anyway. So, that was my main involvement besides marching for all kinds of women’s rights.
JW: Well, I see your buttons. I want you to tell me about those because obviously there were some marches and other things involved.
SD: There were. We went to a lot of marches, and fortunately a lot were close to home because Washington, D.C. was kind of a center.
JW: People on Capitol Hill.
SD: Yes, that’s right. We did go to Congress at times, too, because it was so nearby, and talked to various representatives or senators. I was not a leader in any of that but I went to everything and brought my daughter along, and later, my son and husband. We all would be there, and friends. But my daughter remembers it well from the time she was little until today. She still does. We’re all at it again.
JW: Well, tell me about $0.59 cents. Let’s go through them. What was $0.59 cents?
SD: $0.59 cents was because women did not make as much money as men for doing the same job. So, we only made $0.59 cents for every $1.00 they made, and we were trying to let people know that. A lot of people didn’t even know that that was happening. They didn’t think about it. Women just accepted it, I guess. But we should have. We should make the same amount for the same kind of job.
JW: Mobilize for Women’s Lives.
SD: Yes, that was in the 1980s.
JW: Women’s Equality for Women’s Lives.
SD: Right. And this is the hanger that we should start getting out again, I think. Because abortion was illegal. I knew many people, not many, but a friend of mine in college had an abortion. She had to stand on the street in New York and be picked up by a car and taken blindfolded somewhere, probably in New Jersey, to some place on a mattress with no sheet and have an abortion. Luckily, she was okay from it.
My mother took my sister to Canada for an abortion when she was quite young, 15 or 16. I didn’t even know about that for a number of years. My mother had a friend who was a doctor’s wife who didn’t tell her husband she was pregnant again, and asked my mother to take her to downtown St. Louis to get an illegal abortion.
My mother had to leave her on a street corner and came back and was all worried about her. She was okay, but her husband never knew. Being a doctor, he would have been afraid. It was what’s happening now where Doctors could get in big trouble if they did an abortion. So, women didn’t have choice over their body, reproductive health. And that was very hard.
When I was engaged, I went to a doctor on Park Avenue that someone told me about, an obstetrician, gynecologist, and asked for a diaphragm. And that doctor sat behind his big mahogany desk and shamed me. “You are not married. I cannot give this to you,” that kind of thing. I said, “I’m engaged.” And he said, “Well, you can’t have this until you’re married.” And it was terrible. I hope that we don’t go that way now as far as the pill and all of that.
As far as what I’m doing now, I’m not actively working other than working to get the vote out. Especially for independents that are unsure what to vote for, and writing postcards. I’m in a group, Seniors Taking Action; it’s a group that writes postcards. And every week they have another speaker online, even Corey Booker.
I don’t know if it’s out of Colorado or New York. It’s mainly women, but there are men in it too from all over. And it’s the seniors trying to do something about the vote, about elections. We’re going to also target anti-violent gun restrictions. That’s the next thing. Right now, we’ve been working on Virginia. Today is the vote for the state legislature of Virginia. That’s a very critical vote.
JW: Now, you vote in Virginia, right?
SD: I do. That’s another thing I did, was change my residency from D.C., where we still don’t have statehood, and our vote doesn’t count that much because it’s already a very democratic entity; I won’t say state. And my vote counts in Virginia. We have a cabin, as you know, in the Shenandoah. So, that’s where we vote. And that feels good. Even though our little county is pretty conservative, it still counts for all of Virginia. And we do door to door canvassing.
JW: Today is a big important day, whoever is listening to this. It’s election day in Virginia. So, thank you for voting there.
SD: It is. Not just voting, but going door to door too. The Democratic Party in our little county out there in the mountains, they have pinpointed people who might change their mind, or are Democrats who just might be a little lazy. “Well, what does it mean?” “The state legislature isn’t that important.” Something like that. So, we knocked on doors, we’ve gone around and had a very good response.
JW: Oh, that’s great.
SD: Yes.
JW: Well, as we close, is there a closing statement you’d like to make?
SD: I think it’s important for younger women to know about what life was like when I was growing up, and that I think it must be a big shock to them to not have reproductive rights as easy as it was. So, I guess my role as an elder is to tell history. And I think this is such a good organization to do that, so that young people know what the world was like.
Having a vote for even the most minor thing, even a school board vote as we’re seeing now, is so important. So that we have a school board that allows freedom of books, and teachers freedom to teach what is real and important, and that one or two parents can’t just change things around.