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Transcript
My name is Sister Margaret Carney. I’m a Franciscan Sister, and I grew up in Pittsburgh here in the Hill District on a street called Ellers Street. I became a Franciscan Sister and teacher, and I taught here in Pittsburgh, and I taught in Philadelphia. And then I started in fifth grade and ended up teaching at the college level. Well, the neighborhood I grew up in… We would just say at that time “I’m from Oakland,” and what was really interesting was we were living in our grandfather’s home. I’m old enough that this was just after World War 2, so people didn’t all have their own homes, so families lived 2-3 generations in one house, so I was in my grandfather’s home, and our neighbors on one side were Greek, and our neighbors on the other side were Italian. And the interesting thing is that, like the grandparents or even the parents were immigrants. I mean, they had come from the other country, and they spoke the languages, and they had those customs. My father worked. My mother was a homemaker, in the old days, you know, the at home Mom, and I was the oldest, and then there were four more after me. So there were 4 girls, 1 boy and my youngest sister was very severely… We would say disabled mentally. She- they didn’t expect her to survive even one year, but she did, and kind of, like, once we knew there was always going to be something different with her, we just accepted it as kids, so we worked on teaching her to walk. When people said “No, she would never walk” she walked, you know, and so that also, I think, made us aware that everybody might have equal dignity, but everybody doesn’t have equal ability, and you can still learn from that person who doesn’t have the same abilities, and you can learn by helping them. My first role models were in my family. My own mother, who is a woman not in good health, but who taught me that it wasn’t by words, it’s by watching. Like, she’d be on a committee to organize a breakfast or a meeting, and if she had somebody who is giving her a hard time, instead of being nasty, or you know, she would really be kind, and she would say to me, “You don’t gain anything by treating people badly.” She was a big role model. And then I had an aunt who lived in the house with us. She never married, and she worked in the court system here in Pittsburgh. So we learned from her about being a professional woman, you know, who went out every day on the job and had to dress and, you know, work with all the judges and clerks and the courts and stuff like that. So in my family, I had great role models, and then when I became a sister, I mean, we had women who were heads of hospitals, head of school, highly educated. Some of the jobs I had… first, I was a teacher and then I worked for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh to help communities of sisters get their needs known better to the Bishop. I mean, in the Catholic Church, the leaders tended, in those days, to be all men. So I got a job where my job was to be the voice of the women. And then I was put into administrative jobs in my own religious congregation, so your, you know, the old fashioned term will be Mother Superior. We don’t use that language anymore, but working with all of the work that our sisters would do in hospitals and schools. And then I went to teach at the college level at Saint Bonaventure University, so… and there, I got to be part of a lot of organizations where I could be helpful to younger people. I’ve had lots of opportunities to do that. I served for 13 years as a college president. And when I had that job, the men in the top jobs were all men, and I managed to change that by inviting more women into those when there was a vacancy recruiting women, so that our top administration was even of men and women. I’ve helped a lot of younger women in college find their way to keep going with their education or find a scholarship or find an open door for a good job somewhere. So, in a way, I’ve had a privilege because of the job I was in. I knew people, I knew opportunities, and I could match people and opportunities, which was pretty cool. I think women themselves first need to look in the mirror and say, “If I want to help advance how women are treated, wherever that is, what can I do? How can I be responsible to educate myself and to find the path and to get in with the right people so that I’m helping create this solution?” But you have to be real intentional about that. It doesn’t just fall into your lap, you know, you have to say “I’m going to take responsibility. What kind of smarts do I need? Do I go to school? Do I read? Do I join organizations? And who are the people that have similar goals and that I can get in with them and learn from them?” And sometimes, that gives me a big boost.