Ethan James
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he year was 1958. The Iraqi government had just been overthrown and the Iraqi King had been killed. American families had been evacuated from Baghdad. The only people left were military personnel and single people working in the U.S. Embassy. Mitzi Ferris, a young woman from northern Wisconsin, had just been assigned to Baghdad for a two-year tour. When she got there tensions were high. Everything and everyone was under watch. “It was getting bloody. They had killed a number of Americans in the streets,” Ferris recalls. There was
a lot of uncertainty in the country. “Everyone was under tight security” (Ferris). Many people were fearful of what could happen. The small group of Americans working in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad had to stick together to stay safe. Ferris was an outlier in the workforce when she joined the Foreign Service in 1958. She grew up during a time where women were not expected to work. Most women got married, had children and stayed at home to raise them. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1960, only 37.7% of women were employed outside the home
while 83.3% of men were employed. Ferris was a pioneer for women in the workforce especially for the Foreign Service. “From 1961 to 1971, recruitment of women remained at 7% and the rate of promotion was slow” (“A More Representative Foreign Service”). Ferris was working long before it was expected of women. She is a world-wise retiree whose life was transformed by the Foreign Service. Mitzi Ferris grew up in a small town in northern Wisconsin. Her childhood was rather quiet. She wasn’t very comfortable talking to others or meeting new people. She remembers, “I
never got much involved in too many things. My parents were rather strict, they didn’t let me run around or do much.” When she graduated from an all girls Catholic boarding high school, she didn’t feel very comfortable around others, especially men, which was caused by attending the all girls school.
back of my mind I wanted to go”. While working and attending school in Milwaukee, she came across an ad in the local newspaper. The ad stated that the State Department was looking for typists or stenographers.
She landed a job in a local grocery store and kept on with her life. After a while, she just gave up on the idea of working for the State Department. “I never heard anything and thought, well, they forgot about me or else I didn’t pass the test or something like that. So I just sort of let it go” (Ferris).
“I never heard anything and thought, well, they forgot about me or else I didn’t pass the test or something like that. So I just sort of let it go”
When she was in high school she wanted to become a nurse, however the nuns at her school didn’t think that was the best fit for her. During chemistry labs she remembered feeling afraid. After pushing her dreams of nursing behind her, she turned her interest to stenography. She felt she would go on to college to study stenography which would allow her to have a job on the side.
- Mitzi Ferris
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Ferris graduated high school in 1953 and attended a business college to better her skills in stenography. Growing up she had wished to travel. She stated, “I just wanted to travel, see some of the rest of the world. I really wanted to see India. It was kind of a place in the
Ferris quickly jumped on the opportunity, hoping this would allow her to travel around the world as she wanted to do. She went down to City Hall, took an exam and patiently waited for a response. As she waited to hear from the State Department, Ferris quit her job in Milwaukee and moved back to her home town of Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Ferris continued her job at the local grocery store until one day, in the fall of ‘57 she got a call, “They asked me if I could come to Washington, they had a job for me. I said, well I just can’t drop everything and go, you know I have to give my boss at least 2 weeks notice, but I’m interested” (Ferris). They explained to her that the reason they hadn’t called her earlier was that she wasn’t 21 years of age. In the coming weeks Ferris received more information. They wanted her to report in Washington D.C. in January 1958. As January approached, Ferris received a one way ticket to Washington and prepared for her life in the new city.
Ferris recalls the struggles of moving to a new city: “I didn’t know where I was gonna stay at, I didn’t know anyone in Washington.” She found a place to stay at the YWCA and began work at the Department of European Affairs. She became friends with some of the other women who were hired at the same time and eventually a few of them got an apartment together. After six months of working in Washington, each of the women received their tour assignments. They were all assigned to a different country but traveled together by boat from New York City to Naples, Italy, where they split up and each began their first tours. Ferris arrived in Damascus, Syria where relations with the United States had been broken and there was no U.S. Ambassador stationed there. Her daily work revolved around typing up reports to be sent back to Washington. “I worked for 3 months in the embassy and did what had to be done. Then things got worse, we were under Martial Law, we co u l d n ’t g o anywh ere. A fter t h re e m o n t h s, t h ey to l d m e I ’ d been reas s i g n e d t o B agh d ad , I r aq , ” F e rri s e x plain ed.
Baghdad became a huge turning point in Ferris’ life. In living and working with other American women, Ferris became very good friends with Anna Elkington, who grew up in central California. Elkington recalls, “She worked in the economic office. I worked in the political office. There was no proper embassy building. It was a collection of houses along the street near the main building which was also
the Ambassador’s residence. I remember we’d have to jog down the street to the
economics office or vice versa to come up to the main office. In the summer time your heels would stick into the tar it was so hot. Mitzi and I were roommates for a while because after the coup d’état the embassy had a lot of contracted houses and the families had been evacuated from the country because of the coup d’état. Although they still let staff members come. They had all of these beautiful houses so Mitzi and I had this house in Baghdad to live in. It was really very, very nice for us”. (Elkington) The next person Ferris met in Baghdad was her husband, Paul. They both were from Wisconsin and met at the local swimming club due to their mutual love for swimming. They returned to the States to be married. At that point Ferris was required to resign from her position 3
in the Foreign Service. As a married woman, she was only allowed to work as a dependent. All future travel was now determined by her husband’s job with the State Department. In today’s world, in the State Department, women are no longer subject to these same rules. Because Elkington never married she was able to continue her career in the State Department. She went on to spend twenty-five years in the Foreign Service and traveled the world. She and Ferris stayed in touch over the years via letters and in person. “That’s the lovely thing I think about the Foreign Service. You may not see your colleagues over 4
the years. But once you meet them again it was like the time just melts away and you just pick up where you left off in a way,” says Elkington. As a married couple, Mitzi and Paul spent the next 14 years traveling and having children. Their first two sons were born in Nicosia, Cyprus. Their next two sons were born in Rangoon, Burma (now known as Myanmar). From there, they moved to Mogadishu, Somalia and Ferris was pregnant with her fifth child. Their first daughter Anne tells the story: “My parents were living in Mogadishu, Somalia and conditions were such that
my mother was not going to be able to deliver me there. So at 8 ½ months pregnant they put my mom on a plane and flew her to Nairobi, Kenya in order for me to be born. Today you would never put a woman on a plane 8 ½ months pregnant, that’s just not something you would do. But in those days that was in the mid 60’s she wasn’t going to be able have the baby in the conditions that they lived in, in Somalia there just wasn’t a reasonable hospital for that. She had me in Nairobi at an American hospital there and they flew me home at 3 days old. My mother having been raised very strict Catholic wanted me baptized before she got on the plane and there were no priests around to do that so she had the nun baptize me in the sink. We flew home back to Somalia to where my father was. My father found out I was born by teletype they radioed from the embassy in Nairobi to the Embassy in Somalia and the teletype said, “It’s a girl, it’s a girl, it’s a girl!” My dad had four boys, he was expecting either he was
gonna keep his polo team or he would have a basketball team. He got to keep his polo team of four boys. Anyway when we flew home my mother then had me properly baptized by a Catholic priest. Somebody once said to me, “So you were baptized twice, the first time didn’t take?” That was the story of my mom and I give her a lot of credit because her she was a married women having to fly by herself pregnant, have the baby by herself and then to turn around and bring the baby home by herself. That show’s a lot about the character of my mom”. (A. Ferris)
that we came home on to visit. It was going to be just a place we could go to, so we could stay in our own place. It was sort of a hardship to get used to everything again. When we lived overseas, the one thing we had was a servant or a couple of servants to help either take care of the kids or do your shopping or show you where to go because in a foreign country, you don’t know where anything was. Then when we came back to the states, we had to do all this ourselves. It was easier in a sense because there was no language barrier or we sort of knew the area but After a sixth child was it was still strange because we had been away for so long, there born and a tour in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the family were so many people we didn’t know”. (M. Ferris) returned to northern
Mitzi Ferris is now 82 years old. She spends her time volunteering, attending church and staying active with water aerobics. Mitzi has many fond memories of her time spent in the Foreign Service, traveling the world. She and Anna both had extraordinary lives during a time when women were not career-focused or a big part of the working world. In many ways they paved the way for future generations of women.
Wisconsin to stay. The transition back to the United States was very difficult for Mitzi: “My circumstance had changed because I had a family to take care of. Paul didn’t have a job right away. He didn’t know what he was going to be doing. It was just a lot of chaos in a sense because we tried to get settled as fast as we could to get the kids in school. We bought this cabin up in the woods in northern Wisconsin on one of the trips
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Works Cited “An Online Exploration of Diplomatic History and Foreign Affairs.” A Brief History of U.S. Diplomacy, www.usdiplomacy.org/history/service/repre sentative.php#women.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2017.
Elkington Anna. Personal interview. April 18 2017.
Ferris, Anne. Personal interview. 14 April 2017.
Ferris, Mitzi. Personal interview. 21 February 2017.
Ferris, Mitzi. Personal interview. 25 April 2017.
Toossi, Mitra, A century of change: the U.S. labor force, 1950– 2050,
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https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf. Ac cessed 17 Mar. 2017.
Bio Ethan James is a junior at Mountain View High School who also attends Freestyle Academy. He is currently learning Digital Media and Design at Freestyle along with taking English. Some of his recent work includes a comic and several webpages that can be viewed on Freestyle’s website. In his free time he plays video games and works with Photoshop.
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