With all the stuff going on in the current Presidential election I’ve been reading a lot about how millennial women are not feminists. Then today, a 30 year old woman I work with told me she’s not a feminist. To give this some context, she was asking me if I wanted to take golf lessons in the spring with her and explaining that at the charity golf outing she attended last week there weren’t any women playing. She said, “I’m not a feminist, but I thought more women might want to play.” She was not making a statement that the golf outing had been sexist and excluded women, she just assumed that women didn’t know about it or just needed to take some lessons. I’m 51 years old and my immediate response was, “How can you not be a feminist?”
Her response was she thought that feminists had a bad name and were very angry. She didn’t feel as if there was any glass ceiling she was up against. All of the things I know about being a woman in the United States and the world at large came rushing in on me. “Do you think I’m an angry feminist?” She said she thought I was. Okay, food for thought – at work I don’t go on rants about men but there are things I notice about the work place that I’ll point out in general conversation. I’ve never said though “Let’s get a march together!! Let’s protest!!” I work with a man in his forties who repeats what women have just said in meetings as if they were his original thoughts. He never does this to the men. I do complain about this. I will also admit to a sense of frustration that’s built up over the years from the time I was a teenager until the last few years in dealing with some men and even some women. I don’t feel unsuccessful in the workplace, in fact I feel like I’ve done very well for someone who started this working life without a college degree. However, there are daily reminders that come out of people’s mouths that I find frustrating. Like the man who would see me coming out of his boss’ office and say “I should have realized that he was meeting with such a beautiful woman like yourself….” Blah blah blah.
This wasn’t just a conversation about work though. Sure, my young coworker doesn’t feel like there’s a glass ceiling in the office and when I look at her experience, she’s right. She’s gotten her MBA and since coming to work at our company she’s had mostly female bosses and she recently got a really good promotion. I also think that there’s more fairness in workplace hiring and salary because we’re sitting in the Federal Government’s backyard and they’re our customer. We have a lot of VPs who are women and even some Senior and Executive VPs who are women. All of this happened just before she started at our company though under our current CEO. Up until probably six years ago, the majority of Executives were men. It’s so recent that we have such a large number of women in very senior positions that I personally feel like this is just the start, but maybe she sees it as finished.
Still, there’s so much more to being a feminist than just busting through a glass ceiling in your career. We live in the liberal state of Maryland where we have free access to reproductive health services up to and including unfettered access to an abortion should we need one. No one in Maryland has signed a law telling our doctors to lie to us about our condition. That’s not true in all states. Reproductive and general health services for women are being cut back left and right across the country in an effort to cut off access to abortion. That feels like a much more serious glass ceiling to me that needs to be overcome.
Then there’s the courtroom phenomenon that let’s off rapists with light sentences because no matter what damage they’ve done to the woman, he has a future to think about. What about her future? To be sure, there’s an added level of brutality here, Black men are not given a pass for rape. In fact, they are convicted sometimes on scant evidence and punished whether they deserve it or not.
As we close in on an election where we are very likely about to elect the first woman President of the United States I am reading more and more studies about how men, particularly white men, behave when women step out of traditional roles. When men feel challenged they tend to act out aggressively which probably explains the chants of "lock her up" from the opposing bench along with outright cries to kill her. Additionally, not just men, but women as well tend to judge women much more harshly for mistakes than they judge men for the very same mistakes.
Can I feel angry about all of this? I think if feminists are angry, they are totally justified in their anger. When my co-worker told me she thought I was an angry feminist my feelings got hurt, and then, I got angry. Here she was using one of the more popular criticisms used against women who are asking for a place at the table, for their voices to be heard, to influence the way we want to lead our lives. It's an effective dismissal of everything women are trying to achieve. Women are not allowed to be angry. I had forgotten that. Angry women make others uncomfortable.
My being a Feminist is not just about what is happening here in the United States either. I want all girls to go to school, I want an end to female genital mutilation and honor killings. I want women to be free to marry or not to marry whomever they choose. I want all women to have unfettered access to health care including reproductive freedom so they can pursue their dreams.
When women do well EVERYONE does well. This is well documented and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has an article about how empowering women is smart economically. It is in everyone's best interest to be a Feminist.
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