I was reading an article today about the significance of the album, Free to Be You and Me. For me, it was very significant, not because I was already so politically or socially aware, but because I remember coming to understand that it was revolutionary. Suggesting that men and women were being held back from being their true selves, based on out-dated ideas, was revolutionary. I understood that. Plus, the music and the vignettes or skits were fun and funny.
And, on top of all that, it made my mother laugh. Hard. I remember her sitting at the dining room table, sewing our clothes for the next school year and laughing out loud, as my sister and I danced around the living room to the album. Which we did a lot. Really, a lot. I know every word to every song and skit.
The album was also a little confusing to me. Dancing around the living room, I pondered the deeper meaning of the album. (I know I did, because I remember asking Mama about what she kept laughing about.) In order to believe the album was standing up against widely-held beliefs, you had to also understand what those widely-held beliefs were. And the album was arguing that women are, among other things, as strong as men. Women can be as brave, hard-working, courageous, and smart as men. For the album to be advocating that idea, someone must be saying that was not the case. I remember thinking: that must mean someone thinks women are not all those things men are. Not just someone. A lot of people.
So, I am rambling on about Free to Be You and Me because when I look at pictures of my great-grandmother Jean, and certainly my own mother, I get the feeling they thought they were as strong, smart, hard-working as any men in their lives. They just did not always act like it, for various, complicated reasons. That seems like an important thing to me. Unfortunately, I do not have either one of them to talk to. So, I am taking a guess here.
I think Jean Andrewenia Riddell Marr knew she was every bit as capable and smart as a man. She worked on a ship, as a single woman at the age of 27. She must have worked on the ship after she met my great-grandfather because they got married right after she left her job on the ship, as “Buffet Girl.” Here’s a picture of her from Grandma’s album, where she seems pretty young. She is with her sister, Margaret and Margaret’s daughter, whose name I have not discovered yet. (Jean is the one in the middle with the attitude.) It is followed by her Certificate of Discharge from her work as a “seaman.”
I tried to find out more about the Prince of Wales ship, thinking I might find a list of the crew, or at least some description of what “Buffet Girl,” might do. All I could find was information about the ship itself. It was put into service (I have no idea when it was built – how long did it take to build one of those ships?) in 1888. It shipped people and goods between Douglas, Isle of Man, Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool in the UK, until 1915, when it was “purchased by the admiralty for conversion to a netlayer and commissioned as HMS Prince Edward.” Then, it was decommissioned and taken apart in 1920.
While I assume that “netlayer” and being decommissioned in 1920 bears some relation to World War I, I have not looked it up yet, to verify that assumption.
This is a model someone posted of the ship.
Jean married Nelson in England, in 1913, after being discharged. Three years later, they were in Arizona, with a baby, my aunt Ivy.
I could be making this up entirely, but I wonder if Jean, who had traveled and worked on her own, until she was 27, could have been the catalyst to go to America. Maybe after spending time with Nelson in the Isle of Man, she said, “No way am I living out the rest of my life in this tiny place.”
And maybe Nelson agreed, because he wanted to be with her. Maybe she knew they could make a go of it in the United States, because she knew what she was capable of.
I will never know.