Women's Work and Marriage

I don’t know very much about several years of my grandmother’s life. She may have left home around the year 1913. I know she traveled with her Aunt Rea who was only a year older than she. The two young women were best friends. She traveled by train, and out west, she saw little scrubby bushes she could not believe were sage brush. She had read about it in Louis Lamoure novels described as growing higher than a man on horseback. Those little scrubby things did not live up to her expectations. She and Rea stayed at a bed and breakfast and dined with two handsome and charming young men who turned out to be Catholic Jesuits. She lamented that all of the good looking men were priests! She said she worked at the May Company as a phone switchboard operator. It must have been fun because she seemed delighted with that time and fond of the Company. At some point, she must have begun teaching. Now that I think of it, it is strange that she didn’t talk of the 15 years before she met my grandfather. She must have lived her life according to the standard rules for teachers of the time:

You will not marry during the term of your contract.

You are not to keep company with men.

You must be home between the hours of 8 pm and 6 am unless at a school function.

You may not ride in carriages or automobiles with any man except your father or brother.

You may not dress in bright colors.

You may under no circumstances dye your hair.

You must wear at least two petticoats.

Your dresses may not be any shorter than 2 inches above the ankles.

It was typical of the time that women who became teachers would end their teaching careers when they married. She met Joseph Donahue, a miner from Mackay, Idaho, at a St Patrick’s Day celebration. They made a good match. She was mostly Irish with red hair and bright blue eyes. He was full Irish, his father and uncles coming into America from Canada where their father had come to from County Meath, Ireland. They married on June 28^th, 1928. She reluctantly gave up teaching. She had her first son in March of 1929 and her second son a year later. Their births were so close that for a few weeks each year, they were the same age.

 

Joe continued mining, silver mining, and she lived in the mountains with him. She talked of packrats stealing her hose or stockings, audaciously running across the cabin floor. They started out in Mackay but somehow ended up in Hailey, Idaho near the famous Sun Valley Ski Resort. She gave birth to my mother on the kitchen table in a little house they were staying in in Hailey. The story is that Joe came into a big payout from a mine he was working, and before he came home from the mountains, she had used the money to buy a house, a log house, in Hailey. This was very bold for a woman. She was not a meek, quiet woman. She had opinions; she would argue. Joe and Lucretia were a fiery Irish couple!