In the late 1960s, at the age of 22, Jan Chapman left her hometown of Traverse City and headed to southeast Michigan to find work. Despite the civil rights progress of the ’60s, she recalls discovering a culture still heavily favoring men, in which opportunities and expectations for women were much lower than today. As a capstone to Women’s History Month, which ends today, we asked Jan to recall those early years in her career and reflect on the changes that she witnessed in the years that followed. She also explores how she, as an individual working in small business, did her own part to improve women’s lives and opportunities during the course of her career. [As told to Jeff Smith]

Jan Chapman: I have always had a love for radio, so I when I was young and first looking for work, I got a job with Les Biederman in the traffic department of WTCM, in Traverse City. I scheduled all the commercials and programs for the next day.

In a couple of years I decided to check out the bigger world and moved to the Ann Arbor area and tried to get a job in radio there. But downstate, nobody in radio would hire me. To pay the bills I got a job cleaning in a condo complex. One nice thing about cleaning apartments for me was that I met my husband there, he was doing the yard maintenance and going to Eastern Michigan University.

I had a friend who was waiting tables and I told her if she ever has a customer from a radio station, give me his name. And eventually she did. The gentleman owned a station serving western Wayne County that played country western music. He got me an interview with the sales director, and that guy told me they always hired men. He said their customers are country western fans, and they might not accept women in business. I told him I will work for six weeks for free, and if you aren’t happy with the results, we’ll call it good. Well, they fell in love with me, and I stayed.

It wasn’t easy. I had clients ask me to leave for no reason other than I was a woman, like, “Why would I waste my time talking business with a woman? We don’t want any.“ Also, I am from Mediterranean heritage, so I have dark skin that gets very dark in summer, and I had thick hair that I wore in an Afro, and more than one hiring manager said to me they were concerned people wouldn’t do business with me because they’d think I was African American.

Eventually I moved on to work with one of the early FM rock stations around Detroit, WABX. It was my kind of music and it was in Detroit, so people were more open to doing business with someone like me.

I was earning money and needed a new car, and I went to a dealership. They told me I needed someone to cosign the loan for me, and I could tell it was because I was a woman. So I went to another dealer and I just bought the car with cash, then I went back to the first dealer driving my new car and told them I paid cash.

It was now the early ‘70s, and a lot of good things were happening. The Civil Rights Act, and Roe V. Wade, and Title 9. But I understood that as a woman, you still had to get out and march and show your support, and that’s what I did.

By the late ‘70s, I’d been selling radio for a while and we had two kids and a house, and one day in July, it was like in the high 80s or something, and I was on I-94 and stuck in a traffic jam and I just said, That’s it. I’m not living like this anymore. I got home and told my husband I’m quitting on Monday and moving back home with the kids to my parents’ cottage near Traverse City. He could sell the house and join us later. I told him I wasn’t even going to help pack the house.

Having seen what I’d seen in the business world, one of my main personal goals was to hire women into significant roles. And so I wanted to be a sales manager and have an all-woman sales team. I wanted to give women opportunities for a career. In Traverse City I got a job as a sales manager on an AM station and I started hiring women for the sales team. Pretty soon we had four sales women and me as the sales manager. And we kicked butt. We were focused and knew what we were doing. We were pulling so much money out of the market that we heard other stations were telling people not to do business with us. But we overcame that. Eventually I went to manage sales at Traverse Magazine, and we also had an amazing sales team of mostly women.

In my life, things have definitely improved for women. Today, young women can pretty much be what they want to be—not all of course, but so many more than when I was young. In Washington, 149 women are either House reps or Senators, nearly a 50% increase from 10 years ago. And over a quarter of CEOs are women.

But still, in the last election, we had people who were hesitant to vote for Kamala because she is a woman. We no longer have Roe v. Wade. And the percentage of women CEO’s is plateauing or even declining slightly. As I see it, we have come a long way, but we also have a long way to go. I don’t even know the number of marches I went to back in the ‘60s and ‘70s where we shouted, “Stop the war in Vietnam!” Well, we are at another crossroads like that in our country. We need to march and write letters and make our thoughts known if women are to keep what earlier women fought so hard to gain.