What a difference a year makes.
Before I retired from my post as a corporate communications director
with a Fortune 500 company in mid-2016, I’d given up discussing feminism with
the younger women with whom I worked. The few times the topic arose, I’d come
away from conversations convinced that my comments had been dismissed as quaint
recollections of experiences that were utterly irrelevant to young women’s 21st
Century lives.
Younger women would react with bemused tolerance when I
shared how, in the mid-1970s, as an entry-level communications staffer with
another major U.S. corporation, I’d been ordered away from the front door of the
Jonathan Club in downtown Los Angeles, where a meeting I was covering was
scheduled, and sent to the freight elevator at the back of the building. They’d
smile pleasantly when I told them how I’d refused to use the rear elevator when
the meeting ended, and instead marched defiantly down the elegant main stairway
with my (all) male colleagues to leave through the front door.
They’d express surprise when I shared how, on trips to the
Dallas office of that same company, I’d work all day with the guys, only to be
left behind when they headed out for lunch or dinner. The message was clear: good
ole Texas boys might have to work with a girl, but they weren’t going to let
her into their private club.
But these young women seemed to find no parallels between my
career experiences and theirs.
To them, it seemed, equal opportunity was a given. No one
had ever told them, as I’d been chided when I tried to sign up for an
architectural drafting class in high school, that “you can’t take this -- only
boys go into architecture.” None of them had suffered through an undergraduate
pre-law core course taught by a retired Army JAG officer who, determined to
keep women out of the legal profession, would belittle female students when
they spoke up and change any A’s his TAs had given their essay exams to B’s or
C’s. (My TA, a male Ph.D. candidate, told me every time it happened.)
My younger female colleagues had grown up assuming that the
only limitations on their career trajectory would be self-determined: choosing
a traditionally “female friendly” major in college, taking a career break or
switching to part-time status to raise their children, moving for their
spouse’s career and giving up a great job in the process. If a promotion went
to a male colleague instead of them, they seemingly assigned little credence to
the notion that the hiring manager had chosen “in his own image” and instead
concluded that they just needed to do more to prove themselves.
And none of them ever publicly identified themselves as
feminists or used the Ms. abbreviation before their names. To them, both were
relics of the days when hippie chicks burned their bras and spouted wildly anti-male
rhetoric.
As the November presidential election approached, I began to
think that younger women would deem feminism an utter anachronism once the
nation’s first female president was elected. Seeing that “biggest glass ceiling”
shattered, they would blithely assume the existence of a post-feminist career
utopia. That the election of America’s first African-American president eight
years earlier hadn’t come close to creating a post-racial America suggested otherwise,
but younger career women seemed blissfully self-confident that the world was
theirs for the taking.
Today, everything has changed.
The person elected to the American presidency is a
self-declared sexist and misogynist. His Cabinet and team of advisors are
heavily skewed to the older, white male demographic.
When a woman, Betsy DeVos, does get named to head a Cabinet
department, her first major policy recommendation, concerning transgender
student use of school bathrooms, is opposed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The President sides with him, and she is overruled. DeVos may never admit it
publicly, but she’s been put in her place by the boys who really run the show.
Trump’s appointed counselor, Kellyanne Conway, makes sure to
explain to attendees of the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference why
she refuses to identify as a feminist, and incorrectly declares feminism to be
“anti-male” and “pro-abortion” in the process.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren dares to quote a letter
from Coretta Scott King to explain her opposition to the appointment of Sessions
as Attorney General, and is ordered by her Senate “colleagues” to sit down and
shut up. Then, four Democratic male Senators are allowed to share Mrs. King’s statement
with the body.
During a legislative debate on abortion, Justin Humphrey, an
Oklahoma state representative, makes his anti-choice argument by declaring that
women make abortion decisions “with the mistaken belief that their bodies are
their own…I understand that they feel like that is their body. I feel like it
is a separate – what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’”
And among the key changes advocated in the GOP’s destructive
(and now defeated) American Health Care Act was the defunding of Planned
Parenthood, which provides health care services to millions of American women
every year. Just 3% of its budget is allocated to abortion services, and none
of that 3% comes from government funds, but Planned Parenthood was targeted
nonetheless. As were one in five American women, who will turn to a local
Planned Parenthood health center for essential health services at least once in
their lifetimes.
America’s young women are taking notice.
At the “Day Without a Woman” rally in Los Angeles on March 8
– attended by women and men of all ages, races, faiths and gender identities –
the words “choice” and “feminism” prompted enthusiastic cheers. Women whose
faith communities teach them to refuse abortion stood side by side with women
who advocate for the right to make that choice. Teenage girls held signs that
would have fit right in at an ERA rally in the 1970s. I told several of them
how happy this aging feminist was to see their generation taking up the battle
cry for equal rights.
Then, as my husband and I strolled through Grand Park
afterward, heading back to where we’d parked our car, we were stopped by two
young women who asked to take our picture. “Seeing you two here together – we
want to post your picture as a ‘Relationship Goals’ statement,” one of them
explained.
My words of advice, pointing to my husband as they shot the
photo: “If you marry, marry a feminist!”
And BE one.
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