Tired

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I keep hearing (and feeling too sometimes) of the "you've come a long way, baby" argument when talking and thinking about the place and role of women in American life and culture. Of course, this affirmation originated from a print ad campaign for Virginia Slims cigarettes which always depicted examples of ideal American femininity: slender, smiling, athletic, and sophisticated, but not so smart to figure out that smoking would eventually wreck their looks and give them lung cancer. In 1902, Susan B. Anthony wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton:


"It is fifty-one years since first we met and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women. The older we grow, the more keenly we feel the humiliation of disfranchisement and the more vividly we realize its disadvantages in
every department of life and most of all in the labor market. We little dreamed that when we began this contest, optimistic with the hope and buoyancy of youth, that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women. But our
hearts are filled with joy to know that they enter upon this task equipped with a college education, with business experience, with the fully admitted right to speak in public--all of which were denied to women fifty years ago. These strong, courageous, capable young women will take our place and complete our work. Ancient prejudice has become so softened, public sentiment
so liberalized and women have so thoroughly demonstrated their ability as to leave not a
shadow of doubt that they will carry our case to victory. "

I laughed at the thought of two 19th century women feeling so optimistic as to think their "contest" would finish in their generation. There have been "strong, courageous, capable" women who have worked hard to further "soften" and liberalize public sentiment and while I'm usually grateful for "how far we've come" I have little hope that things will advance beyond my own "blessings of liberty" and be different for women of my niece's generation. Yes, I was able to vote for a woman in the recent primary, and may yet still have the chance to vote for her in the general election for President, but the contest between HIllary Clinton and Barak Obama has painfully shown that while public expression of racial prejudice and hatred must be unspoken or at least successfully masked, hatred of women may be expressed with impunity. I'm tired, heartbroken and discouraged by this. Last night ABC and 20/20 devoted TWO HOURS of airtime to the subject of prostitution in America. Let's talk about the sad, misbegotten lives of these whores (this word wasn't used but implied of course) but let us not talk about the overall patriarchial political and economic frame that really places ultimately all women as members of the sex class. We just don't all work on the Vegas Strip or at the Bunny Ranch.

Everyone is talking about Barak Obama's speech last week about race--when will Hillary talk about gender? Without doubt she is one of those next generation women that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton envisoned, but she could also tell them from personal experience that hatred of women didn't go away when women got the vote, when more of us started going to college and/or postponing marriage and childrearing (or eschewing one or both altogether), when more of us became politicians, doctors, lawyers, astronauts, pilots, ministers, and officers in the military. All those advances just made them hate us more. She'll never speak of it as the only thing more unpalatable to many Americans than actually having a woman President is one that talks about how women are still an oppressed class in our culture. So what can I do now to try and help my now 9-year old niece prepare for the obstacles she will have to overcome?