Notes In Time

On those rare occasions when a trip to the city includes a visit to an art museum, I've learned to take what is offered me in those echoing galleries as a gift. I unwrap that gift slowly, expecting only that the artists' works will surprise and delight and challenge me.  

Nancy Spero's "Notes In Time"
Museum of Modern Art, New York City

And thus it was Nancy Spero's "Notes In Time" grabbed my attention, stopped me and continues to wind its way into my thought weeks later.

The artist was from my parents' generation. She was in her late 40s when she created this massive work in the 1970s. At that time, I was a young woman, a young woman who, even then, resented being referred to as a girl.

As a female child in the 1950s and 1960s, I carried with me all of the expectations of being female in those times. Even the high school guidance counselor (a man, of course) suggested to me that a girl should choose something like secretarial work, nursing or teaching - something to get you through until you married.or to fall back on if, God forbid, your husband were to die.

I'm the young woman who went off to nursing school after high school, the old-fashioned kind based in a hospital. It was made very clear from the very first day we sat in the classroom in our starched blue and white uniforms that the nurse's role was to be "handmaid" to the doctor - and the doctors were, of course, all men. Did we really have to stand up every time a doctor came into the room? It was my first hint that perhaps Guidance Counselor Patterson had steered me in the wrong direction.

Spero has described "Notes In Time" as shocking. And to me, indeed it is. Shocking to see the images scattered across the panels and read the words. But she also describes it as celebratory. And to me, indeed it is also a celebration - a celebration of the opportunities that unfold for women today and, at the same time, a celebration of women who refused to be imprisoned in the constraints of society in their times.

My mother first went to work outside the home when I was well into elementary school. We were a large family and living on the income of my father's six-day-a-week job in addition to odd jobs he took in his spare time, became impossible. Watching my mother going to work every day in a man's world as a linotype operator, I assumed that she got that job only because her father and brother owned the newspaper. 

But when did I learn that my mother was, instead of the stereotype of the boss's daughter, a competent, hard-working, respected part of a team? That she stood side-by-side with those guys in their ink-stained Carhartt's and donned her own printer's apron. She sat in front of the towering linotype for hours at a time, her fingers flying across the keys, then depressing the casting lever that would result in a hot line of type coming down the chute into the tray. She made the transition from letterpress to offset printing. She managed the mailing list and the weekly distribution of the press run. She was even given the title to match her skills -  Mechanical Superintendent. And, indeed, she was my role model as I became the next boss's daughter at the newspaper after walking away from nursing school.