About Elaine Rock
Elaine Rock is a women’s rights advocate, former history teacher, and technology executive. Her passion is writing about little-known but courageous and heroic women and men whose persistence and resilience helped shape history and became trailblazers.
She is a member and past vice-president of the California Writers Club-Redwood Writers Branch, Biographers International Organization, Non-fiction Authors Association, National Organization for Women (NOW), National Women’s History Alliance, and supports the Feminist Majority Foundation.
While writing Dusty Roads, Elaine published four short stories and a poem in the competitive annual anthologies of the Redwood Writers Organization.
For fun, you will find her reading, swimming, and traveling—visiting friends in faraway places. England and France are two of her favorites. When her camera is in hand, she explores California backroads to shoot photos of landscapes, birds, animals, and flowers. The results have led to awards for her nature closeups.
Elaine was featured on the 2024 PBS American Experience documentary Fly With Me. She lives in Sonoma County, California.
More About Elaine…
The first high school lesson Elaine learned was that, as a female, there were societal impediments obstructing her rights as a woman. The counselors didn’t know what to do with her after she tested in the 99th percentile for mechanical ability and language on the state aptitude test. She wanted to take drafting or woodshop classes, but they enrolled her in home economics against her wishes. They said, “You’re a girl, and those classes are for boys only, no exceptions.” Shocked and furious, she felt devalued.
At UCLA, she became a women’s rights advocate, joined the National Organization for Women and subscribed to MS. magazine the day it came out. Following graduation, she worked as a secondary history teacher in the Los Angeles City School District and specialized in dissent and reform in American history.
She married a fiction writer and journalist and moved from Los Angeles to Berkeley. After substitute teaching for a while, she got a job as an administrative assistant in the telecommunications industry. An engineer mentored and trained her to design and write telephone systems specifications and give sales presentations to potential customers. She was thrilled to finally put her mechanical and language abilities to work. When the company decided to open a systems design analyst job, she was first in line with her application—only to learn that women weren’t allowed to apply. She saw no other option but to quit. Only later, she discovered she could have filed a complaint based on sexual discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enforce laws against workplace discrimination.
She was fortunate to happen upon the computer technology revolution of the 70s and 80s. Besides having a job that tested the first personal computers in the industry, her favorite job was testing what led to our current laptop computers that we then called portables or luggables (some weighed over 10 pounds!) to eventually be used in the banking industry. She became a technical writer and trainer and eventually became a Vice President at Wells Fargo Bank. She is proud to have founded the San Francisco Bay Area Branch of the Help Desk Institute to mentor local computer support professionals, primarily women rarely respected for their customer service and technical abilities. After leaving Wells Fargo, she became a technology director at a Sonoma County school district and president of a California state-regulated mutual water company. So, despite initial setbacks, she had a successful career.
She loves to cook and often does for parties at home and church coffee hour and luncheons, as seen in the above photo.
When her husband passed away in 2013, he told her she should consider becoming a writer as she had written some short stories and often edited his writing. Instead, exactly a year to the day he died, Elaine met Dusty Roads and knew that’s who she would write about and why.