Firehouse's 1st Woman Feels at Ease

Ann Pastreich may be Lexington's first professional female firefighter, but she downplays the difficulties of her job and emphasizes that she is not a feminist.

"Sure they're watching me. They're watching all the rookies," she says, and pauses. "Maybe they're watching me a little more carefully."

Pastreich, 37 years old, a Cambridge resident and mother of two, graduated from the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy on September 7, the only woman ever to complete its rigorous eight-week training program.

She says the training program at first was "awful"--tense and physically demanding--but the 28 men in training with her had trouble too. At 5-ft., 5-in., she was the smallest but not the lightest member of the program, and Pastreich adds, "I would love to be 20 pounds heavier."

"There were times I thought I couldn't do it," she recalls. "A lot of it was body mechanics--a big man can pull up a ladder with his arms. While I had to use my whole upper body. I started out imitating their way and had no luck."

Good coordination and the ability to endure heights gave her advantages over some colleagues, though. "I wasn't worst at everything. There were guys who could never get their breathing apparatus on in 45 seconds," she says.

After bookwork, emergency training, rappelling, drills on setting up water supplies amd handling equipment, and a "smoke room" ordeal, the firefighters had to weather a "live fire" arranged by the academy. During the test, one man told Pastreich, "If you can do this, women can do anything."

Pastriech found she could. "I loved it," she said. "It was real, it wasn't like school."

Two days later, on November 9, she started work at the department in Lexington, where she logs two ten-hour days and two 14-hour nights every eight days. She answers both fire and ambulance calls, and sometimes manages to sleep in bunkrooms at the station. ("There really is a brass pole-the bell rings and you jump up and find your shoes, if it's the ambulance, or slide down in socks and get into big boots, if it's the truck.")

So far she has not been to a house fire--only brush fires, which are common in Lexington's fields and light woods--and she says she has yet to "prove herself."

Pastreich stresses, too, that she is unique only as a professional female firefighter, adding that many women are volunteer or call-in firefighters in rural areas.

No one at the firehouse has hassled her for being a woman, though, she says. "There are probably some guys who wish I weren't there." But women's groups and schools have called her often, and Women's Enterprises, a Boston organization supporting nontraditional jobs for women, sent her flowers.

She says no actual feminist groups have contacted her, and laughs. "I guess they know I don't have much to say to them."

Pastreich sees her career "not from a female but from an individual point of view," and maintains she couldn't "have a good conversation" with a feminist group.

But becoming a firefighter has affected her outlook more than she expected. "I thought of it just as changing jobs, doing what I wanted to do. I never knew much about women's lib. Now I'm finding out what it means."

Feminist or not, does she feel like a "liberated woman?" Pastreich thinks, then smiles. "That's what I've been saying, isn't it? Women don't get liberated. Individuals do."