Interview with Sharon Stanley Click for bio
Sharon Stanley
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Sam Verharen: Hello, my name is Sam Verharen and I'm here with my grandmother Dr. Sharon Stanley. My first question just to start off is, could you please introduce yourself, including your current or former occupation.
Sharon Stanley: Okay, my name is Sharon Stanley, I live on Bainbridge Island and I have eight absolutely gorgeous grandsons. I started working when I was 16 and I'm still working; I'm 82 years old. I'm a psychologist now, working in the field of trauma, and I'm just completed the second edition of my book on trauma that's used in the field of trauma and I just completed the second edition of my book on trauma that's used in universities on a doctoral level. So, that will be coming out in March. So I'm working hard and fascinated by it. And, this is an important part of it, the Vietnam experience.
SV: So my next question is, what is your best memory of living through the 1960s?
ST: Wow, that's a lot of years. Those are formative years. You know, when you first proposed the question about Vietnam to me, I remember standing on the beach in Guam, I was 22, 23 years old, and watching the planes leave Guam to do the first bombing in Vietnam and I believe that was 1965. But I can remember just my heart really pounding and I had your dad in my arms.
SV: So, where did you live throughout the 1960s? And this is kind of a broad question, but what was your occupations during this time?
ST: Okay, so starting in the 1960s, I was a college student, and I had a variety of college kinds of jobs. And in 1963, I cut short my education, and got married, and shortly thereafter left for Guam. So my occupation was mainly having babies for a few years.
SV: And where did you, so before you lived in Guam, you lived where?
ST: I was living in Seattle. After Guam, I moved back to Olympia. And your grandfather was hired as an assistant attorney general for the government of Guam. And then he was hired in Tacoma as, a judge at the age of 29. And we lived in Tacoma. And then from Tacoma, I moved to Victoria and finished my doctorate. And that was 1990. I started in 1990 and finished in 94, living in Canada. And then I moved back to the Gig Harbor area Tacoma area. And then I finished my thesis, worked for the University of Washington for a while and set up their counseling department at the new branch. And then I was asked to go on faculty at University of Victoria so I moved back up to Victoria and started working as a instructor but I also started working with Indigenous people, throughout Canada, so a way I'm lost in the years was, I only supposed to do till 1970.
SV: It's actually great just to provide context. That's great thank you okay, so this is also maybe broad but how has the workplace environment changed since the 1960s?
ST: Well, the workplace environment that I'm in right now is my own home and I could show you what that looks like but you already know so at that time, workplace was always more formal, much more formal, much more hierarchical, and it was it was pretty organized in terms of you expected to get a pension, you were expected to stay there for life once you found your place and then you expected you'd retire at 60 or 65 and have a retirement life. So that all changed after Vietnam.
SV: What do you think made that change? Why do you think Vietnam led to that change?
ST: There were so many different developments, and I think the social development that I noticed most particularly was when I went off to Guam in 1964. Everything was still very stable. When I came back from Guam in 1967, everything had changed. It was basically, for my generation, the people I knew that hadn't gotten married, and some that had, was the beginning of the hippie revolution. And people started wanting to do what they wanted to do. They took a stand. And so many of the young people my age were marching, and they were standing up for what was morally wrong, what they thought was morally wrong about Vietnam. And I think it was the beginning of a shift, what I call psychologically, from a role, R-O-L-E, role-oriented identity, that you took on a role, and you filled out that identity, to a person-based identity. You got a sense of what was right or wrong. You got a sense of who you were. You dressed to express that. And so it was much more of a shift, a radical shift in identity. It changed the workplace. It changed how people wanted to work. It changed jobs, from my point of view.
SV: Yeah. No, and I'm sure it's very, very accurate. So what was your day-to-day life like, and how did that change in the terms of a modern context?
ST: So at what moment in time?
SV: So what was day-to-day life like during the 1960s? And how do you think that the day-to-day has changed in 2024?
ST: Okay. Actually, my day-to-day life, after we came back from Guam, and we came back in, we came back before the end of the Vietnam War. We came back two years. So we came back in 66. And so then '66, through the end of that decade, for me was, I was very engaged with having babies, raising children, and helping my husband start his career. One of the things that I've noticed is that how affluent everything seemed, how much was available in the grocery stores, that was different. It seemed like there was so much more connection with the world rather than in our local area. And, that was the whole Civil Rights era, too. And I, I got a sense a lot of the Civil Rights movement came out of some of the destabilization, Vietnam, and that movement. I don't know, how, but I, I noticed, I noticed so many changes. My life was pretty stable at that time, but so many changes in my class roommates from high school, and people I'd known from college, that hadn't gone into the more domestic kind of role-oriented.
SV: And you think that was Vietnam that did that? It kind of destabilized?
ST: Well, it sure looked like that to me. Yeah. It destabilized so much. I think the campus, protests, Kent State, what happened there and, that there, there was just a it was a revolution of a sort from my point of view. Although, I mainly saw it from, like, from the point of view of the TV and newspapers. And I remember your dad seeing pictures, horrible pictures. They'd never show them now, and what was going on in Vietnam on the TV. He was born around '64, so he was there, and he, as a young child, watched a lot of that devastation on TV. We didn't really know how bad that might be.
SV: Yeah, definitely. Do you think that affected being a mother and being a child during Vietnam?
ST: I do. I think there was an unrest that happened. In fact, I think what's really interesting, Sam, is this book I have that changed my life, Trauma and Recovery, was written by a woman named Judith Herman, who was at Harvard. And what she did is she gathered all the data of the trauma of the Vietnam vets and their experience. What she was able to do is see that that was similar for the children and the spouses of the Vietnam vets, that the Vietnam vets came home with that trauma, and immediately their wives and children had that same trauma. So she showed how the domestic abuse and the violence in the home that rose exponentially after the Vietnam War was directly connected to the returning soldiers. And we were living in a community in Tacoma where there were five military bases. And so we saw all of the violence that was going on. There was a suicide epidemic in the schools. There was a huge psychological impact from that war.
SV: Wow, that's super interesting. So this is kind of a switch of topic, but what was your favorite band to listen to during this time?
ST: Well, the Beatles, of course. And, Sam, I got to see the Beatles.
SV: Oh, yes. Yeah, that's right. Where did you see the Beatles?
ST: Well, when your grandpa and I were coming home from Guam, it was a three-day journey, actually a four-day journey, because there was a there was a strike, the airline strike, and so we had to hole up in the airport in Honolulu. They wouldn't let us go out and stay in a hotel. I had two babies, and so I had to walk all around the airport with these babies, just as exercise and keeping them going, and the Beatles were marooned also in the airport, and so every chance I got, I'd go by and look at them. A couple of times, I'd say hi, and they'd say hi, and that was about the extent of it, so.
SV: That is such a great story. What shows did you watch during this time?
ST: Wow, that's a good question. We didn't have a TV. Yeah. We had a TV, and then we didn't. The news always. So it was in the 70s, we didn't have the TV. They always turned the news on, because everything was so unstable. I remember wanting to know what was what, and now as I go back, I remember it was mainly children's shows I watched at that time.
SV: Really? What kind of children's shows?
ST: Oh, puppets and, um, I wish I could remember the names of it.
SV: Oh, that's okay. My dad always references TV shows he watched. He loves his 70s TV shows. So you mentioned you didn't own a TV during a the 70s. Why was that?
ST: Well, I just did not like the influence on my children that I saw the TV had. Then Michael came home from school. One day, my mother said, 'I think I need to report you for child abuse,' and I said, 'Why?' She said, 'He said because we don't have a TV, and I can't enter into the conversations at school.' So anyway, I think we relented later in the 70s and got the TV. But yeah then I think everyone wanted to watch it all the time cause we didn't have it for a while, so it was forbidden fruit. But it was in a different area of the house that I usually inhabited. I was usually upstairs and we had a big TV room downstairs.
SV: Do you feel the media had an impact on the way you viewed the world during the 1960s
ST: Oh yeah the news did.
SV: Why do you feel that the news had such a profound impact?
ST: I think it goes back to the whole idea of trauma. I think hearing and understanding what was going on in Vietnam and the violence -- I think there was some kind of violence that I was exposed to that made me realize how horrific trauma was. I think it was talking to men who came home, my classmates. You only went over to Vietnam for a year, but there were so many damaged lives of people I knew. The young men, and now I'm reading the book by Kristen Hanna called The Women, which is about the women of Vietnam. So that topic has always fascinated me. But I think the impact of the trauma of the whole era is something I'm still trying to sort out, and its effect on me personally.
SV: So do you think that that has changed today, news and its influence?
ST: Wow, that's definitely changed, where there's so many alternatives now to the news. In those days, there were three major news sources, ABC, NBC, and CBS. And in those days, they told pretty much the same story. And they would get the one story that came from the government or the military generals, and that same story then was the story. Now there's so many stories from so many perspectives about the same experiences. And I think it's radically changed our culture.
SV: Do you think that's a positive change or a negative change?
ST: You know, I think there's been some positive aspects to it. But I think it has profound changes that we don't even know about yet. And I think the most profound change is the way we get news now and I think TV started it. But now with the internet, and the way it's so close at hand, every minute of the day, every minute of the night, what the research is showing is it's caused people, first of all, to have far less face-to-face connections. And so there's much less social engagement, which means much less strong mental health. Because the number one criteria of strong mental health is social engagement. So the day-to-day fy face-to-face encounters are down, for most people around 60%. And face-to-face encounters have a radically different three-dimensional effect than the one dimension. And they also have the experience of being in the same room, they can actually measure the energy going between people. And so sometimes it's nice to be around energy that's healthy and vibrant and vitality. But a lot of times, it's nice to have your sanctuary and your privacy. So you're not picking up on other people's energy or vibes. So but positive or negative, how do we stay embodied? And how do we trust our embodiment to tell us what's true? How do we get our do we get our facts from out there? Or do we get our facts from our heart? What's true?
SV: Yeah. So I know this answer, but did you have children?
ST: Yes, I did
SV: And if so, with whom did you have them with?
ST: I had them with Arthur Verheren, Jr. I had four
SV: Do you feel what was expected of a mother in the 1960s is different from that of today?
ST: Radically, radically different yeah I often am very grateful for the opportunity I had to be home with my children until they became school age and then when they became school age I became a school teacher so i had the opportunity to be there in their in their growing up. I think a lot of young mothers today don't have that opportunity and I think there's a grief that they carry and a grief their children carry.
SV : Why do you think that has changed?
ST: You know I've studied that some and how the economic world has radically changed. In the days that I was a young mother you could buy a house we bought a beautiful three-bedroom two-bath house with three acres brand new for seventeen thousand dollars your grandfather's salary was something like twenty thousand at the most but you know today a house like that would cost at least in the area I live in four hundred and fifty five thousand and somebody making a hundred thousand a year is doing good. So if you want to have a house and you want to have bedrooms for your children and if you want to feed them nutritious food you're going to need at least two incomes. You know it's just radically different economic system in those days food was food was so much less expensive and and you know it was much more taken for granted that you would put in a garden and you would grow and and there were many less things to spend money on you know. I made all all my children's clothes from pajamas to play outfits little indian suits and now so i was making a lot of their toys you know and I was making a lot of their toys. It all changed the whole commercialization uh changed what people needed and then I changed too.
SV: Do you feel what was expected of a wife in the 1960s
ST: It was different radically different right there was a role and what we have today is still that role that needs to be fulfilled but also the identity issue but yeah you weren't really a person you were doing something you were told to do and and you promised to obey when I was getting married and the catholic church that I was married in had very strict requirements for what it meant to be a wife,
SV: What were those kinds of requirements?
ST: Obedience. If you were asked to do something, you did it. I couldn't get a credit card, I couldn't have anything, I couldn't buy things in my own name. There was no... I had no rights to say no to purchases, large purchases. There was there was not an equality; it was definitely a hierarchical role in the family and it was a moral, religious, and legal. It was it had always been there, and there was a part of me that was a that was a a little more rebellious, and I know I saw that in my mother too, you know. And there was more I wanted out of life once my kids got in school. That's why I started becoming a school teacher, and then it was 10 years before I didn't turn my check over to my husband; I always thought I could keep my own check and keep any money from it so he got to decide what was purchased and when it was purchased and what we spent money on. I didn't have that control.
SV: Wow, that must have been really hard to grapple with.
ST: It was the way things were, and so to think of it being different then, you felt ashamed because you weren't fitting in; you weren't belonging, and so it could create a lot of problems. And I think that's what I'm trying to do, especially; it would create, it would create...as everything changed, and as things moved from the authoritarian to much more of a mutuality in relationships. As things changed, people didn't want to give up their power that had power. People wanted to hold on to their ability to control and to get what they wanted when they wanted to it with a smile, on every level.
SV: Do you think there's still work to be done today?
ST: Sammy, that's a big part of the work I teach is how damaging the patriarchy is and the way that patriarchy came out of colonialism which is the source of so many of these wars. But that patriarchy upholds colonialism. And you know, working with indigenous people, that's where they would shift the balance of power that kept indigenous peoples' societies beautifully structured. And so it would become much more patriarchal that's when the violence would begin and the ability to take over. So the work I'm doing particularly between its interesting we were doing a lot of work a couple weeks ago up in Alaska working with groups of women about how to have a mutuality with their partners, vulnerability to domestic abuse that's still rampant in cultures that are trying to heal from colonialism, and that's what Vietnam was trying to do.
SV: Heal us from?
ST: North Vietnam had just gotten freedom from the colonialism in France, and the United States didn't like that. And just like the United States doesn't like the presidential candidates we have right now and want to see the patriarchy established firmly as a religious evangelical certainty. And I think, in fact, my new book that I'm reading right now is 'The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory' Uh, American, evangelicals in an age of extremism, and I think we need to go there and look at what that's about.
SV: Yeah definitely. My Zoom, I think is running out of time, I'm gonna have to start us a new meeting because I don't have a Zoom plus, but we can just go until it stops.
ST: If you want to keep going, great.
SV: Oh no, yeah definitely. I have tons of questions.
ST: so I'd love to finish the answer to that one too.
SV: Totally go for it I'm sorry.
ST: I know that's okay, I'll let it come back so you'll go ahead and make the shift.
SV: So do you think that the expectations towards beauty standards for women have changed? And even men.
ST: You know I think that the split in our culture around this extremism. We've got the split between the male and female. We've got the split between like the women that live on the island I live on don't get their nails gelled; they don't often, it's a sign of freedom if there's no makeup on. There's a natural look for some parts of the culture that consider themselves highly educated and well-traveled; then there's a different beauty standard for women who are remaining wha I think of often as subservient and need to please men, so there's that patriarchy and mutualism. And I think the gender changes that are happening in the world today is really ways to find different ways of expressing who you are on that spectrum from needing to have those standards of beauty to needing to feel healthy and real and alive, you know, and not try to alter things that are natural so I don't know if that makes sense but I see it, I see it as a class issue.
SV: That's really interesting. Yeah, I know, totally do you think it was.
ST: One more caveat yeah uh the very high upper class just can do it in much more expensive non-visual ways. Ways like faceless, mm-hmm, uh, but my experience is women who are secure in themselves. It's not usually their issue of how to look beautiful.
SV: Do you think it was the same in the 60s?
ST: Oh no, I mean, in the 60s, you had to look a certain way. You had to wear... I actually had a class in high school on how to apply makeup, yeah, yeah.
SV: So what was the way that you had to look?
ST: Well, the hairstyle - The 60s was all about teased hair and lots of lacquer. And it was about the right color lipstick. It was about eyebrows, weren't interesting except you had to have them plucked. You could use mascara, and rouge was used, and... You needed to be tan in the summer.
SV: Why do you think that there were so many rules towards women?
ST: To keep them in control, the only way patriarchy will work is if women are in control. And patriarchy and colonialism, which often has gotten connected with capitalism, it's not the same thing, has gotten so interwoven in some aspects from my point of view that it's all tied together. I mean, just look at the ads you see on different venues like what you see on one magazine might be radically different than another magazine but who are you appealing to in those magazines? The very wealthy or the very disempowered.
SV: How did it feel to watch the Civil Rights Movement unfold in the 1960s?
ST: ...
SV: How did the Vietnam War affect you or your community?
ST: ...
- Title:
- Interview with Sharon Stanley
- Date Created:
- 2024-09-14
- Description:
- I interviewed my paternal grandmother who was a married housewife during the 1960s. We covered topics ranging from Vietnam, to gender and household roles, and even religion. We also discussed the media, and its impact on her life during this time.
- Subjects:
- Vietnam jobs workplace gender roles motherhood music media politics
- Location:
- Bainbridge Island, WA
- Latitude:
- 47.64402621
- Longitude:
- -122.5443005
- Type:
- text
- Format:
- record
- Preferred Citation:
- "Interview with Sharon Stanley ", The Long 1960s - 2024 Fall, Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL)
- Reference Link:
- /thelong1960s/items/stanley.html
- Rights:
- In copyright, educational use permitted. Educational use includes non-commercial reproduction of text and images in materials for teaching and research purposes. For other contexts beyond fair use, including digital reproduction, please contact the University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives Department at libspec@uidaho.edu. The University of Idaho Library is not liable for any violations of the law by users.
- Standardized Rights:
- http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/