THREE CAPE GIRARDEAU WOMEN BALANCE PRESSURES OF WORK WITH DEMANDS OF THE HOME

In an age of women's rights advocacy, anti-sexual discrimination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and a menagerie of other women's movements, one would think that women would have become an accepted fixture in the working world.

Not so, according to three women in Cape Girardeau who work in what most would consider traditionally men's occupations.

Joyce Statler has been a Cape Girardeau police officer for just over nine years. She has worked in the patrol division, with the detectives and as a station commander.

She has racked up more experience in those years than have most department officers and has handled the same situations as her co-workers, yet she is still "treated like a woman, sometimes," she said.

Statler, originally from Bollinger County, said she first became interested in law enforcement after taking a criminal justice course at Southeast Missouri State University when she was in college.

"I really enjoyed the things I was learning and thought, maybe I could do this kind of thing for a living," Statler said.

Statler is the only female patrol officer in the department, a fact that she says has its good and bad points.

"You encounter some attitudes that this is a predominantly male profession, and some people just can't see women as police officers," she said.

"When I tell people that I work at the police department, they ask if I'm a dispatcher or a secretary," she said. "They almost never ask if I'm a police officer -- they just assume I'm not."

Statler said she was working at the front desk one night when an older man came into the station to pick up his son from jail.

"He looked at me and said, `They let you carry a gun?'" she said. "I wanted so bad to tell him that I was the one who arrested his son; but I wasn't, so I couldn't.

"The thing that got me is he really seemed serious about his question -- like it was preposterous for me to have a gun in the first place," she said.

She said she occasionally encounters that kind of attitude on the street and within the department. "Some people are very skeptical when they see me on the street," she said. "They wonder if I'm serious or not."

In the department, it's another story.

"I've heard things which have gotten back to me about the male officers saying things like, `What if we're in a fight or something? She can't fight like a man They look at it as a power thing -- a matter of size and strength.

"Sure, I'm 5 feet 4 inches tall and weigh about 140 pounds, and there's no way I could fight some guy who is 6 feet 7 inches tall and weighs 350 pounds. But neither could most of the men on the department. We have to be realistic about things like that; in reality, women fight dirtier than anyone."

There are advantages to being a member of the gentler sex, she said.

"Sometimes women are more comfortable talking to me -- especially in sex-crime situations like sexual assaults or rape," she said. "In situations like that, women don't want a male officer telling them what to do or asking them a lot of potentially embarrassing questions."

Statler said her job hinges on trust and faith in herself and fellow officers.

"We're a very close-knit group," she said. "We spend eight hours out of every day depending on each other for backup and trusting our lives to one another. I take this job very seriously. My fellow officers know they can depend on me, and I feel they will back me up when I need help. That's what it's all about."

Statler, who has four sisters, said some of the men in the department have come to be "big-brother" figures in her life.

"I've made a lot of very good friends in the last nine years," she said.

"That's one thing I like so much about my job," Statler said. "I meet people from every walk of life -- every race, every religion, every age.

"It's really amazing how much you can learn from the people you deal with," she said. "I grew up in a small, sheltered, farm community, and police work has really opened my eyes to the world."

When you drive up to a construction site, most often you see big orange signs proclaiming "MEN WORKING," as if they are telling you to pay close attention and look for an anomaly you don't often get a chance to see.

But in Cape Girardeau, those signs are slowly changing to reading just "WORKING," largely due to the presence of Wendy Shetter.

Shetter works for the city's department of public works on a street crew, putting up street signs, painting stripes and arrows on roadways, and street cleaning.

"I'm the only woman who works on the crews with public works," she said. "It was real hard at first. The first six months were a very trying period; I felt I had to prove myself to my co-workers to show them I could do the work."

She says sometimes when she's in the cafeteria her male co-workers forget themselves and start in with "man talk."

"They'll tell dirty jokes or start to talk raunchy," she said. "Then they look at me and say, `Oh, I'm sorry,'

"It really doesn't bother me," she said. "They're not saying anything I haven't heard before."

Before getting on the crew in Cape Girardeau, Shetter worked with the Missouri Highway and Transportation Department laying and repairing road surfaces.

"I really love what I do," she said. "You don't have to do the same thing every day, you're never in the same place two days straight, you get to work outdoors, and you get to meet all kinds of people."

She said her presence on the crew attracts attention of passersby -- sometimes unwelcome -- but she takes it in stride.

"Some people have told me that they envy what I do," she said. "I'm not stuck in an office all day wearing business suits -- I couldn't do that."

Shetter's husband works in the gardening and landscaping business, which she said they both take some flak over.

"I'll tell people what I do and what my husband does, and they think that I should be the one gardening and he should be working on the street crew," she said. "It's really kind of funny how some people react."

Women not only are rarely seen in labor-intensive or potentially dangerous occupations, but also are somewhat of a rarity in high-powered administrative positions.

Patricia Ferrell, senior vice president of Boatmen's Bank in Cape Girardeau, balances a demanding career with life at home with her two young children.

"I sometimes feel I have to work harder, particularly with a family," she said. "In essence, I have two full-time jobs.

"To be successful, I have to channel a lot of effort and hours into my job," she said. "But at the same time I can't take time away from my family -- I just don't sleep a lot."

Ferrell said her job can be stressful at times, but all women who work and have families shoulder a greater responsibility than single or male co-workers.

"I really have an advantage," she said. "I can take my work home with me at night and do it after my kids go to bed. "A lot of the tellers and secretaries who work here have to do all their work while they are here."

When a child gets sick or there is some sort of emergency at home, Ferrell said her life comes down to bare-bones crisis management.

As a working woman "you have to build a network of people you know you can depend upon if a situation arises," she said. "And, if your network comes apart, you end up having to leave work, remedying the problem and coming back."

Ferrell said she always tries to be home in the evenings with her children.

"Sometimes that hurts me on the work side of my life, when I can't be at certain functions or be visible as I should be," she said. "But I don't want my children raised by babysitters."

Two weeks after her daughter was born, Ferrell said she was back at work on a part-time basis. By the end of eight weeks -- the accepted maternity leave time -- she was working full time plus carrying home work from the office.

"It can be really hard on you physically," she said. "Sometimes you find you have very little or no time for yourself, and that can be a strain."

But Ferrell says she has not yet reached her goals in life and will continue to move ahead at work and at home.

"I've always believed that your own mental attitude will get you as far as you want to go," said Ferrell. "I've never had a problem with any of the men I've worked with over the years.

"A lot of people regard what I do as a man's job in a man's world, but I learned to adjust to those kinds of attitudes early on," she said. "I've always been lucky: I've worked with good people and I have been judged based on my performance rather than who I am."