Thanks to Ruth Harriet Jacobs, lately I’ve been thinking about that question. Who is Ruth Harriet Jacobs, you ask? She’s one of the women I’m profiling in my book about women growing older in the generations before the Baby Boom.
Ruth Harriet Jacobs was born in 1924 in Boston. She described her childhood as tough. Her father was abusive, her mother died when Ruth was only ten, and she spent her adolescence shuttling between relatives, most of whom could barely make ends meet.
Ruth refused to let that hard childhood define her. She talked her way into a reporting job with a Boston newspaper soon after high school graduation. After eight years as a reporter, she was forced to leave the paper due to a problem pregnancy, but she eventually managed to attend college, earning a bachelor’s, a master’s and at age 48, a Ph.D. in sociology. Specializing in gerontology, Jacobs taught at Boston University and Clark University until she decided to pivot again, leaving her secure faculty position at age 63 to earn a living as a writer, independent researcher, and public speaker. She traveled all over the northeast speaking to older audiences in senior centers, retirement living communities, and lifelong learning programs as well as health care providers who worked with aging adults. She wrote nine books including Be An Outrageous Older Woman, Older Women Surviving and Thriving, and ABCs for Seniors: Successful Aging Wisdom from an Outrageous Gerontologist. As her book title suggests, Ruth was a colorful character, and I wish I had known her.
Jacobs’ book Women Who Touched My Life: A Memoir (1996) was perhaps her most personal work, and it’s the book that got me thinking about the people who have touched my life. Ruth said, “Many people believe that if you came from a dysfunctional family, if you had a rotten childhood, then you’re doomed to have a rotten rest of your life.” She told a reporter that she had written Women Who Touched My Life to show that “intervention from other women who I call godmothers—not the kind of godmothers you get at a religious ceremony, but godmothers you get in life—women who come along and altruistically help you” can change the course of a life. She wrote about aunts, camp counselors, and her eighth-grade teacher who told the struggling student Ruth, “you are a writer.” The teacher helped Ruth believe in her own abilities and to see herself as a writer. As she said, that teacher “changed my life.”
Unlike Ruth, I grew up in a supportive and encouraging home, but I also benefitted from the many people—men and women--who changed my life by nudging, pushing, or pulling me in the direction I needed to go. I could name a dozen or more people who changed the course of my life, but I’ll just mention two.
There was Mrs. Graves, my middle grades science teacher. I was a quick learner, and I learned to read and do addition and subtraction easily. I scored well on the standardized achievement tests that we took each spring. I was smart, but alas, I was also kind of a lazy student in elementary school. I usually wanted to finish my work quickly so that I could go back to reading the latest book in my stack. If a subject took more than minimal effort, my grades were pretty mediocre. That was definitely true in science.
Mrs. Graves was a demanding teacher, and she gave us weekly quizzes. At the time I thought she quizzed us to torture us, but I now realize that she wanted to be sure that we mastered concepts before we moved on to the next chapter in the textbook. I rarely studied for my quizzes, preferring to scrape by with what I could remember from class. I also didn’t enjoy science as much as other subjects. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could do well in the class, and I certainly wasn’t making much effort to find out. I was consistently scoring C’s and D’s.
My parents weren’t happy with those quiz grades, but Mrs. Graves was more unhappy. She badgered me, telling me that I needed to study more and that I could do better. I finally grew tired of her nagging. One week, I took my book home to study for the quiz. Before the enactment of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), teachers often instructed students to exchange papers and grade each other’s work. The teacher would then call our names, and we’d self-report our scores while the teacher recorded them in her grade book. The day of that quiz, when Mrs. Graves called my name, I practically shouted, “One hundred!”
She looked up from her desk and narrowly gazed at me over her half glasses. She said, “And THAT, young lady, is what I thought you should be scoring. Keep up the good work.”
That episode changed my outlook on being a student. I began to study regularly. I took more pride in the quality of my work, and my grades showed it. I’m not sure I ever would have become the kind of student who could have gone on to be a college professor if not for Mrs. Graves.
Then there was Shirley. Shirley worked in the human resources department at Bryant University where I worked in alumni relations, my second job out of college. After six months, I became eligible to enroll in the retirement plan at Bryant. In those days before email, I received notification of my eligibility via an interoffice memo on actual paper. I think it instructed me to make an appointment with HR to sign up. I ignored it.
When I had been working there about seven months, I received a phone call from “Shirley in HR” requesting a meeting with me. My heart pounded. I didn’t know much about organizations then, but I knew that a call from HR often signaled that you were in trouble with a capital T. I felt a little sick when Shirley walked me in and sat me down at the little round conference table in the corner of her office. She said, “I noticed that you have not signed up for the retirement plan.” A wave of relief washed over me, and I replied that no, I had not. “I just can’t afford to have part of my paycheck withheld right now,” I said.
Shirley said, “You can’t afford NOT to.” She whipped out a piece of paper and began to explain it all. She showed me that my retirement contribution would be pre-tax dollars, and that my retirement contributions would reduce my tax obligation meaning that the actual out-of-pocket withholding every month was not quite as much as I had imagined. She showed me that Bryant would match my contribution, up to a certain percentage, effectively giving me a raise and doubling the amount that went into my retirement account every month. And then, she explained the magic of compounded investment earnings, showing me that even a conservative investment would grow exponentially over the years. I signed up for the retirement plan that day, contributing just enough to get the full employer match. With her simple intervention, Shirley changed my life, prodding me to start saving for retirement in my mid-twenties instead of later “when I could afford it.”
We think of “changing lives” as requiring grand gestures, but more often, life changing interventions come in the form of everyday deeds: the act of kindness from a stranger, the person just doing their job but doing it mindfully and with dedication. Shirley, Mrs. Graves, and many other people changed my life. If we’re lucky--and most of us have been--more than one person has changed our lives for the better. And like Shirley and Mrs. Graves, although we may not be aware of it, we probably change lives as we do our work and go about our lives.
Ruth Harriet Jacobs also changed lives, modeling the women she wrote about in her memoir. In 1998, she told a reporter for the Brandeis University alumni magazine, “I help people work on themselves. It’s just so thrilling to me to think that here I am, 73 years old, and [my message] can be all over the United States from my living room, on a radio talk show. When I did a workshop recently, I almost cried because there was a woman there who came from a distance. She had heard me on the radio about five years ago, and she said that it had changed her life. She had gone back to school and earned a master’s in social work, and was now working with older women, because of what she heard me say on the radio…. It is so gratifying.”[i]
What about you? Who are the people who have changed your life? And next time you wonder whether you are making a difference in the world, I hope you’ll think about those women and about Ruth Harriet Jacobs and Shirley and Mrs. Graves.
Coda: Ruth Harriet Jacobs died in 2013 at the age of 89 after decades of education and activism among and on behalf of older people.
[i] “Ruth Harriet Jacobs, Ph.D. ’69,” Brandeis Review 18:2 (Winter 1998): 51-2.
Photo of Ruth Harriet Jacobs from Wellesley Centers for Women Online: https://www.wcwonline.org/Earlier/outrageous-older-woman-ruth-harriet-jacobs-1924-2013