I hope you joined us on the podcast this week as we celebrated women in STEM and discussed the changing landscape of women in the workplace. Watching “Hidden Figures” with Amber and Christen really brought home for me how much things have changed from the time when I was a little girl watching men land on the moon. We’ve passed from the days where the dress code for women at NASA was a skirt, high heels, and pearls, through the transitional period where the idea of “Mr. Mom” was a humorous outlier, right through to many parents sharing equal duties while working from home. I find it fascinating that we’ve come so far, but I’m bothered that in many ways we still have a long, long way to go.
When I was younger, I balked at the word “feminist”. The whole “Equal Rights” movement of the 70s left a bitter taste in my mouth for years as many feminists seemed to oppose anything that was…well, feminine. While I agreed that women should receive equal pay for the same work, I was not at all interested in being in military combat, being drafted, or being treated like a man. I was a girl. Period. End of sentence. Let’s face it, most women are not equal to men when it comes to physical strength, and I like sitting back while the guys do the heavy lifting. I like being girly, having long hair, wearing dresses, and putting on make-up when I want. My stance on the ERA was that we should be fair, but don’t make me genderless, or even worse, masculine.
As I grew older and had more life experience, I came face to face with gender bias in school, in the workplace, and even in my home life. It was profoundly unfair when the manager at a local pizza parlor refused to hire me as a driver making $6/hour plus tips because I was a girl, stating, “It’s not safe for girls to deliver pizza.” Instead, I was offered a position as a cashier for $4.35/hour. I was a single mom and needed that driver's pay, but the manager (who was female) hired only male drivers and cooks. Girls were cashiers. Years later, it was my pregnancy that was the excuse when my boss refused to give me my annual raise. He told me point-blank that he didn’t want to give me the raise because I would be going out on maternity leave soon and he didn’t think it was fair to give me more money while I was gone for 6 weeks. He was the same boss who routinely asked women in the office to make coffee, get his mail, and send his faxes, even when it wasn’t their job to do so.
Sexual harassment was a real problem, too, even though I had no clue that was what it was. Dirty jokes, sexual innuendos, pinching, and touching…these were things that happened at my high school on a daily basis. One boy even presented me with a dildo as a mocking sort of Christmas gift one year. I remember being so flattered that he had bought something for me, and then utterly crushed and humiliated when I opened the gift and saw what it was. In college, some years later, I was hit on so often by my mostly-male classmates that I had to make up an imaginary boyfriend to get them to leave me alone. Studying in a male-dominated field like audio engineering left me wide open to just about every kind of harassment because, as the #metoo movement has demonstrated, any female in the entertainment industry is fair game.
In recent years, I’ve come to a different point of view when it comes to feminism, and for many reasons. For one, modern feminists are not the same male wannabes that were the most vocal supporters of equal rights in my youth. Today’s feminists are women…real women who still want to be women, but expect to be treated fairly and to enjoy the same rights and privileges as men. We are proud to be women; we recognize and celebrate our differences. The equality we are demanding is to be treated fairly based on our abilities, not our gender, and to live in a world free from predatory sexual harassment. A twenty-first-century feminist is a person (male or female) who is concerned with and supports the rights and issues of women. They believe in reproductive freedom, whatever that entails, and recognize the rights of women to make choices about their own bodies. They support causes and issues that are unique to or faced primarily by women. They encourage and empower other women to live their best life – much like we do here at Modern Musings.
As the Crone of Modern Musings, I am often the one with old-fashioned views and one foot firmly planted in the past. Sometimes that makes me resistant to change and slow to embrace a new idea. But I think most of us agree that enough is enough. It’s time to change the way we treat one another. To treat each other fairly. Not just women, but everyone – men, women, children, the elderly…not despite race, color, creed, or religion but because of it. Because we really have so much to learn from one another. It’s time to really listen to what people have to say. To worry less about defending our intentions and realize that everything we say and do has an impact on others and that our actions can hurt even if that’s not what we intend. In order to move another step forward, we cannot just stop doing what’s wrong – we have to actually step up and do what’s right. When we can do that, we will turn being feminist into being humanist.
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