Education and Career
It has been said that few, if any, First Ladies worked as consistently before their marriage as did Pat Nixon. As she told the writer Gloria Steinem during the 1968 presidential campaign, "I never had time to think about things like that—who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work."
After graduating from Excelsior High School in 1929, she attended Fullerton Junior College. She paid for her education by working odd jobs, including as a driver, a pharmacy manager, a telephone operator, and a typist. She also earned money sweeping the floors of a local bank, and from 1930 until 1932, she lived in New York City, working as a secretary and an X-ray technician.
Determined "to make something out of myself", she enrolled in 1931 at the University of Southern California (USC), where she majored in merchandising. A former professor noted that she "stood out from the empty-headed, overdressed little sorority girls of that era like a good piece of literature on a shelf of cheap paperbacks." She held part-time jobs on campus, worked as a sales clerk in Bullock's-Wilshire department store, taught typing and shorthand at a high school, and supplemented her income by working as an extra in the film industry. She appeared as part of a brief walk-on in the 1935 film Becky Sharp, as well as the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld.
In 1937, Pat Ryan graduated cum laude from USC with a Bachelor of Science degree in merchandising, together with a certificate to teach at the high school level, which USC deemed equivalent to a Master's degree. Pat accepted a position as a high school teacher in Whittier, California.
Read more about this topic: Pat Nixon
Famous quotes containing the words education and, education and/or career:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)