Reading these chapters, concerning events that took place during my early lifetime, I’m struck by how much I unconsciously conflated the vast improvements in “women’s lot” with the natural opportunities of a wider community that came as I moved from elementary school to high school school and away from my working-class urban community to a midwestern land-grant college. Sure, I was a proud “women’s libber” (helping with childcare services for the Womyn’s Music Festival, getting kicked out of a Marxist lesbian separatist working group for insufficient seriousness), but in hindsight I can understand that I had no idea how much of my exhilarating new freedom came through the hard work of women just 10 or 20 or 50 years older than I was, women who’d spent their lives doggedly unpicking locked doors so I could slam through them wearing my Ladies Home Journal “A Woman’s Place Is EVERYWHERE” t-shirt. And I’m sure I’m not the only under-60 woman (person) who’s made the same assumptions about how “easy” it was to break down those barriers…
Republican women tended to favor the Equal Rights Amendment, but it raised hackles among many Democrats because it would eliminate the protective laws they had struggled to pass during the last generation. Esther Peterson had spent much of her life working with desperate women who were crippled by the physical demands of their jobs, sexually harrassed by their supervisors, and deprived of enough time to be proper mothers to their undernourished children. She resented the “elite, privileged old ladies” who cared about only their own emancipation. “Are women better off being singled out for protection, or are they better served by erasing all legal distinctions between men & women? As the lettuce pickers & cafeteria workers know, it depends on your status,” she said.
Ah, social/class shaming. Guilt — the first, best, most-often-used weapon against women. How can we privileged American women complain about being kept out of the White House, when women are still undergoing genital mutilation and being sold into childhood prostitution elsewhere? (I thought one of the most brilliant ‘needful words’ in Laadan was doroledim…)
It was a very old & very painful debate. The fight for women’s rights and the struggle for racial justice had almost always been linked in America. Abolition of slavery had been the first political issue that brought large numbers of women into the public world, and many of them pointed out the similarities they saw in the treatment of women & African-Americans. Black leaders were grateful for the support but tended to feel that however bad & repressive Victorian marriages were, they were not quite as grim as slavery & lynching. From the beginning, each cause was keenly aware that when they presented a joint front, critical support tended to dwindle away…
And the wealthy white men who control most political power have learned very, very well how to play the “there’s only enough room to slot in ONE minority” game. Works just great — for them — and us “minorities” are still falling for it!
Of all the forces of progress Smith wanted to stop, civil rights was at the top of the list. “Congressman Smith would joyfully disembowel the civil rights bill if he could. Lacking the votes to do so, he will obstruct it as long as the situation allows,” said a writer in the New York Times Magazine…
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“An NAACP for Women”
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Howard Smith’s decision to play games with the Civil Rights Act was an extraordinary example of unintended consquences. At the time he introduced his amendment, the idea of ending job discrimination against was on almost no one’s radar… But of course, once the CRA was amended, expectations rose. And when it became clear that the EEOC had no intention of protecting women workers as the law required, it created instant militancy…
If I had known, when I was 15 or 16, just how tenous a structure NOW was — a handful of women, widely dispersed, with few resources and even less support — could I have been as recklessly brave with my feminist credentials?
Or might it have made me act more usefully, if I wasn’t so sure that richer, more educated, more politically powerful “someones” would have my back?
Damned at Random
I enjoyed reading about Margaret Chase Smith running for Senate. What a tough woman she was. For a lot of my developmental period, she was the only female US Senator, which led me to think Maine would be a great place to live
Linda Featheringill
Hi. I forgot about the book club but here I am now. :-)
I read your post with interest. I never felt that people had my back. I might have been a little paranoid or I might have been a bit realistic.
I did try to leap tall buildings in a single bound a few times but always fell flat on my face. [Ouch!]
But there always has been a difference between sloganeering and actually pushing the barricades back. Young women who wear slogans might also shoulder a lot of the pushing work, of course. There is nothing immoral about shouting slogans. But usually the effectiveness of this activity is fleeting.
Now, of course, you’re doing a whole lot of pushing and shoving. :-)
Damned at Random
It occurred to me that laws preventing women from lifting more than 30 lbs would rule out nursing and housekeeping
WereBear
I only realized how circumscribed the world of my mother was as I got older. At the tIme I continously rebelled at her attempts to put me into the same box I saw her trapped in.
Linda Featheringill
Reminds me of my mom. She had a way of surviving in the world that involved a lot of compromise, in the bad sense of the word. For instance, she had a number of techniques for preventing an angry man from hitting her, none of which involved bopping him on the head with a frying pan.
I realize now that some of those compromises might have been necessary.
Damned at Random
My working class family didn’t believe in girls living away from home when before they got married and wasn’t too enthused about college either. I was able to go to university only by agreeing to live at home – my mom wouldn’t sign the aid paperwork otherwise. I was in my Junior year in University before I really felt like anybody had my back. I really didn’t want to live the life I was expected to
Damned at Random
My mom was a very shy and frightened person. She was terrified of what would happen if she let us out of her sight. I always wondered how she would have reacted if she had had a son
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
Nobody at your back:
I have wondered at times about poor people feeling that they are pretty much on their own. And they really are, usually. I have a half-baked theory that families that are supportive and protective of each other might prosper more and families that are built on sniping and dominating just might not prosper.
Being supportive might not make you middle class or better but it probably wouldn’t hurt.
Linda Featheringill
I think my dad was frightened a good part of the time. He compensated by being mean. It’s not a good life.
Linda Featheringill
Which women do you women admire that lived and worked before the women’s lib movement starting in the 60s?
Damned admires Margaret Chase Smith. I admire Eleanor Roosevelt.
Others?
Linda Featheringill
And Shirley Chisholm.
Damned at Random
I think most youth gangs are about mutual support. My family was supportive to a certain degree- I just tended to push the envelope. Had I aspired to a career in teaching, or gone to secretarial school, it might have been easier. It was all about protection. Overprotection. I think I would have lost my mind if I hadn’t got away. And I didn’t see marriage as a means of escape. I’m still surprised I wound up married (at age 51)
Anne Laurie
@Linda Featheringill: Bella Abzug (my first political crush). Shirley Chisholm. Frances Perkins. Joanna Russ. Jane Austen. Fanny Burney…
Damned at Random
I admire writers and Victorian women adventurers. I read a book some years ago by a woman who went to Japan as a missionary and traveled to Hokkaido with an inept Japanese translator. It was in the 1870s or 80s. Her interpretor clearly thought she was crazy. I sent it to my stepdaughter when she was based in Japan and I’ve forgotten the author’s name. I would never have had her courage
Anne Laurie
@Damned at Random:
My quite disfunctional working-class family wanted me to get the heck out of their hair (partially out of love, which I didn’t appreciate at the time). My dad “jokingly” said he wouldn’t sign the aid paperwork unless I went to an out-of-state college. He was from a generation that didn’t believe in unmarried people “leaving home”… he lived with his parents in a one-bedroom apartment until he got married, at the age of 28. When the marriage broke up 12 years later, he moved back into his parents’ (rent-controlled NYC) apartment. And by the time his parents moved full-time to their ‘summer cottage’ upstate, the oldest of his teenage sons moved in with him. I don’t think the guy ever spent more than a couple of months living solo, which was probably both a symptom and a partial cause of the familial disfunctionality (as Linda F suggests).
nancydarling
My Dad was born in 1898 and my Mom in 1907. There were 4 of us kids and we were all expected to go to college. We all made it. Daddy worked for an oil company so we were constantly on the move. My oldest brother went to 16 different school districts before he graduated high school in 1948. I was the youngest and we were not moving as often, so I only went to 8. Moving all the time, it was hard for them to accumulate any wealth so they couldn’t help a lot with money, but god, did they put the desire in all of us. They actually came out of WWII with quite a bit of money saved as Dad had worked 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week because oil was so critical to the war effort and there was a shortage of man power. Then my Mom had to have two surgeries in a short time and there went their nest egg because there was no insurance. They never really recovered financially. They were the most optimistic people, and the four of us were their treasures—what a feeling! They had a very traditional marriage in terms of dividing up the work, but Daddy always told my sister and I we could do any thing a man could do and to dream big. My Mom’s one regret in life was a lack of a college education for herself. I think the lack of a formal education was a little painful for them both. The odds were against all of us but that support and protection you spoke about Linda made all the difference.
My vote goes to Eleanor Roosevelt,too!
Damned at Random
The writer Carolyn Bird was mentioned in this book. I read her book “Born Female” when I was 13 – I think I read the Population Bomb that year, too. Those books changed my life. The first tangible proof that I wasn’t crazy.
Linda Featheringill
I actually got a good deal of support from my grandmothers [both of them]. They were very different people but both made fine use of the word, “Pshaw!” as a dismissal of people who were trying to get into the way.
Unfortunately, they both died before I finished high school. But I was lucky to get to know them for a while.
Damned at Random
Well, that was weird. I couldn’t remember my Victorian woman traveler, but Carolyn Bird jumped into my mind.
I went to Amazon to look for the book, and the author was Isabella Bird. The book was Unbeaten tracks in Japan: an account of travels in the interior including visits to the aborigines of Yezo and the shrine of Nikko
Linda Featheringill
@Damned at Random:
Snappy title!
Anne Laurie
@nancydarling:
Thank you for sharing this. Makes me feel better about prospects for the future, seriously.
Best thing about my parents was that they admitted to us, right from the get-go, that they weren’t very good parents. They were smart & creative & funny & desperate for education — which having six kids in nine years short-circuited for both of them — but they just were not equipped to do the parentling thing. What a blessed difference it made for their kids that we grew up in an age when the Catholic church no longer ruled blue-collar lives, and both contraception & the knowledge to use it correctly were widely available! And it saved some of us, at least, from a lifetime of neurotic wondering what we had done wrong to be the cranky, ill-socialized individuals we became; we knew we’d just drawn bad cards in the life lottery.
Damned at Random
I wonder if gender equality wasn’t attached to the Civil Rights Act if it ever would have passed on its own. The whole notion that women were well protected and happy on their pedestal was unquestioned by the ruling class – I think the 60’s vintage Congress had even less notion how common people live than the current crop of multimillionaires does.
Anne Laurie
Thanks guys… same time, same place next week? And then I will absolutely remember to put up a reminder OT in the morning (or possibly the night before).
For the reading, how about we stick to just the one next chapter, “Civil Rights”, and give it the attention it deserves?
(Note to lurkers & laggards: Now is your chance! Catch up & join us!)
Katie
So I’m a little late to the party, but I have to chime in.
I’m in my mid-fifties. I was too young to participate in the beginnings of the “women’s movement”. I was a senior in HS when Title 9 passed–that was the most concrete form of equality for me at that age! What did strike me, was that boys teams had home, away, and practice uniforms for each sport. Us girls had one uniform and that was for all 9 sports we could particpate in. I shared my uniform for field hockey with a girl that played basketball. We’d wash it and pass it back and forth.
I have a co-worker that prides herself on being an assertive female. She’s frequently upset that young women/girls today don’t appreciate what they have and what people in the 60’s and 70’s did so they can feel that way. Girls these days take it as their due to compete on a level field for scholarships, jobs, etc.
I think that’s great. It’s truly a wonderful thing that they don’t feel like it’s odd to be equal, that they don’t have to fight for something because they’re female. It means that a lot of what women fought for earlier was realized. They succeeded.
irmaladuce
Well shame on those poor & minority women for being too mean-spirited to realize that progress for wealthy white women somehow, magically translates in to progress for all women.
Oh, I see. Poor & minority women don’t have any reason to side-eye a “feminist” movement primarily concerned with the welfare of wealthy white women. They’ve just been brainwashed by The Man into thinking so.
irmaladuce
Woodrowfan
Sounds like my Mom. I didn’t really start to pull out of my shell until college, and then I made damn sure I went to college away from home! According to my wife I still tend to worry about worse case scenarios too much..
Barry
@Damned at Random: I have a feeling that the various ‘protective’ laws were juuuuust protective enough to keep women out of higher-paying blue-collar jobs, but not enough to, you know – actually protect women from job hazards. IIRC, nursing is a job where there are a large number of back injuries from lifting and moving patients. And that’s now, with lots of work done to help. 40-60 years ago, it was undoubtedly worse.