Contents
The revolution
By Tina Griego
It took less than a month for Malissa Murdock to decide she could run her boss' office-design company better than he could. So she offered to buy it.
A year later, after she smashed all the sales records, he asked her if she still wanted to buy the company. "I looked at him and said, 'No, I do not, because I have just formed my own company, Malissa M. Stephenson Inc., and personally, I will be your worst nightmare."' Nine years later, Murdock's company does between $500,000 and $1 million in annual sales, employing 10 full-time and five part-time workers in Denver. Her old boss? The last Murdock heard, he had closed his Colorado shop and moved to California. A century ago, Murdock's story would have been unimaginable in Colorado. She is black, and when she started her company, she was 32 and single. Today, Murdock's story is the story of thousands of Colorado women. Almost half the people working in this state are women -- perhaps the greatest workplace change of the 20th century. In 1998, 60 percent of women 16 and older were working outside the home. Today, women own two of every three new businesses in the state -- the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the nation, according to a Women's Foundation of Colorado report, Status of Women and Girls in Colorado. Today, Murdock goes to meetings with her briefcase on one arm, a diaper bag on the other, pushing her 15-month old-daughter in a stroller. "I just got tired of people telling me what kind of house I could live in, what kind of car I could drive, when I could go on vacation, when I could go to the bathroom," she said. "I want to determine my own destiny." It is a long way from the days of Emily French, whose 1891 diary paints a bleak picture of working women in Denver. After French's husband left her, she was forced to work as a servant.
"Oh Dear, so hard, washed all day," she added the next day. The 1900 census counted 30,000 women and 200,000 men in the Colorado work force. The state was home to 23 female dentists, 553 female music teachers and two female carriage drivers. But more than one third of the working women in this state were domestics, and another 7,000 called themselves servants. It took war to open doors. Oleta Crain came to Denver during World War II. A teacher with a college degree, she ended up cleaning bathrooms. "I wanted to study theology, but it was very segregated at the time," she recalled. "If you couldn't sing or play football, forget it. I saw a notice in the newspaper about interviews at the Remington Arms factory. All the women I knew at the time turned the job down because they wanted us to clean restrooms. I said, 'I believe I'll go out there.' And I did. And I got the job. "It wasn't much as far as work goes. When the white women came in, you would clean after them, wash the floors and the toilets. Also, we could wear slacks -- the other women had to dress up. They worked hard, too." Crain became a lead inspector at the plant, picking over bullets to find defects. "It was what we called a good job," she said. "It was certainly the best paying job I had ever had." At the height of production, 10,000 women worked at the Denver Ordnance Plant, now the Denver Federal Center. Farm girls. City women. College students. High school dropouts. Soldiers' wives. Teachers. All looking for a rare chance to make a man's pay. It was the largest female work force ever assembled in the Rocky Mountain region, said Marsha Goldstein, a board member of the Colorado Women's Coalition who has written extensively about working women. Alice Borodkin, editor and owner of the Women's Business Chronicle in Denver, remembers women steelworkers shopping at her father's New York store during the war. "They would come in and open up wallets, and they had nothing but cash and grease up the armpits," she said. "But as soon as the war was over, they had to go back to the Ladies Home Journal, not telling your husband how your day was until he told you how his was first." That didn't happen in Colorado, Goldstein said. Unlike many women in other states, women here kept working -- thanks to the federal government. The government moved so many offices here Colorado became known as the Washington of the West. Helping run it were women. But women weren't in charge yet -- or even close to it. "During the '50s, my father used to work out at the Federal Center at the Bureau of Reclamation, and they had these big secretarial pools, just rooms full of women typing and rooms full of men telling them what to type," she said. Women have made progress in Colorado since then, said Linda Meric, Colorado organizer for 9to5, the National Association for Working Women. "But there is still a lot to be done. There is a significant gap in wages. The top levels of management still have very few women. Women are still the majority of low-wage workers and temporary workers." A typical woman in Colorado earns $157 a week less than a man -- about 75 cents for every dollar a man makes, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. The institute compared men and women of the same age and education who worked full -time. Although more women are working here than ever before, most are still in what have been considered traditional "women's jobs" -- teachers, nurses, bookkeepers, secretaries, sales reps. More than 70 percent of Colorado teachers are women. Most nurses are women. Just 17 percent of white women work in executive and managerial positions in Colorado. Only 7 percent of black women and 10 percent of Hispanic women hold the same jobs, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. "When I started out in 1976, my first client told me that I could be a bookkeeper but not an accountant, because no man would ever take my advice," said Carolyn Romero, past president of Colorado Business and Professional Women. Romero became the first female partner at Karsh & Co. certified public accounting. "We are way ahead of the curve from the standpoint of women opening businesses," she said. "But you have to ask why, what's going on? I think it's twofold. One, we have a wonderful climate in Colorado that says we need business, period. It doesn't matter if it comes from women, Hispanics, whites, who cares? "But the second is that women in Colorado are still facing problems within the corporate world. To succeed, to have a lifestyle that you want, to take care of family, the feeling is you have to go out and do it yourself, form your own business." Crain, the would-be preacher, left the Denver Ordnance Plant and became the first black woman in Colorado to join the military. She enlisted as a private during World War II and retired 20 years later as a U.S. Air Force major. 'Women have gone from being a corporal in the Army to being a general," she said. "Women are everywhere now. You can see them in all walks of life. Every time you turn around, there is a woman there doing something." Now 85, Crain retired this year as regional administrator for the U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau. "All my jobs, I loved," she said. "And I worked 59 years."
July 25, 1999
Colorado Millennium 2000
is a yearlong project by the Denver
Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4
and the Colorado Historical Society |
