She Had a Family, Too

In June of 1963 the United States Congress passed a law to which women’s rights groups had rallied toward for over a hundred years. The Equal Pay Act made it illegal for women to be paid less than men for doing the same work. A year later the Civil Rights Act passed and, thus, made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

In the years following the passing of the Civil Rights Amendment, black men started making their way into factory jobs that, previously, they wouldn’t have been considered for if white workers were available for hire. About this time, one thirty-something divorced mother of four was cutting her own path. Barbara Eastman was taking 856 hours of training at the Hawkeye Institute of Technology in Waterloo, Iowa to learn the basic skills required to be an apprentice machinist.

On June 25, 1967 the Sunday edition of the Waterloo Courier, the local newspaper of the time in that area, had a front page story telling of arms reduction talks between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin. A smaller headline and article dominated page 33 of the Sunday newspaper.

The internal headline read Barbara Eastman Has Man’s Job. A photo of the apprentice machinist, on the job at Apex Tool and Die where she had been employed for three months, accompanied the story. Barbara was quoted as saying that, following graduation of the tech school, she sought work in a small shop, such as Apex where she might enhance her basic skills with the rounded experience of doing different work on different machines each day. She didn’t want to limit her future career potential by knowing only how to turn out identical parts from one machine in a mass production environment.

Barbara insisted that she not be given preferential treatment over the men in the shop because of her gender. Nonetheless, there were times when her petite 5’ 1” frame required that she seek assistance from a co-worker. This was no different than a man of small stature needing help with a task. Size can go the other way, too. There are times when a large person can be at a disadvantage where a small build or small hands might better fit a task. The differences simply shouldn’t be about gender.

Even with the proper training, it wasn’t easy for a woman to find a job in what was traditionally a male vocation. Barbara made applications to nearly all of the machine shops in the area where she lived. She was laughed at in many of them for seeking a “man’s job.”

One might wonder why people want to break away from traditional roles. Barbara’s motivation was the basic human value of family. Like many men, she had a family to support, too. Traditional “women’s jobs” didn’t provide the income that she needed to do that as a single parent.

Some years later, Barbara took her experience gained at Apex Tool and Die on to another opportunity at Waterloo Industries. As she had planned, the diversity of Apex gave her an advantage for that change. She worked for time as a tool and dies maker and later transferred to press operator in order to get onto the day shift.

Three of Barbara’s four daughters followed the path that she had cut into factory roles that were dominated by men. Daughter Lee Ann worked alongside of her mother as a machine operator for several years at Waterloo Industries in the nineteen-seventies. Oldest daughter Donna worked at J.E. Millet Company where laundry hampers were manufactured.

Margaret, the youngest of the four who is employed at John Deere as a foundry worker, says that even for the improved acceptance of women in factories, it still hasn’t been easy. There will always be those that want to make it hard on others but her mother and women like her definitely made a difference for the generations to follow. On a more personal level, Margaret says that her mother taught her how to deal with the difficult people.

It is one thing to legislate societal change. It is quite another for the population that is entrenched in tradition to execute on the change. Regardless of how morally right that it might be over the long run, people resist change.

Barbara Eastman, later Barbara Eick when she remarried, and others like her braved the tangle of thicket and thorns to cut through virgin brush. The path is still not without occasional perils. It is, nonetheless, there to open the way.

You won’t find the name of Barbara Eastman in school history books. Nonetheless, while the ink of many famous names was drying on pages of history, Barbara and hundreds of women like her were making the history. For those efforts, the generations to follow live a different life than their parents and grandparents before them.