I’ve been tagged! The setup, from Shakespeare’s Sister:
I was tagged by Polly at Marginal Notes to share Five Things Feminism Has Done for Me, with the hope that feminist bloggers in America can run with it as they have in Canada in response to the Canadian federal government’s funding cuts to Status of Women Canada. (Seriously, that’s quite a round-up! Well done, Canadian Progressives!) Here goes…
Here are mine:
1. My career options growing up were not limited to teacher, nurse, cook, secretary, maid, whore or nun. Granted, my great-aunt became a lawyer in the 1920s, but Aunt Peggy was still expected to give up her career when she married and had children. My mother attended a women’s college in the late 50s that offered two majors: teaching and nursing. By the time I was growing up in the 70s, there were no limits placed on what I could do, other than my own inclinations.
2. Having chosen a career, I could be assured of actually being considered for jobs in my field. That wasn’t always so. I don’t know that much about Aunt Peggy’s career (she was much older than my grandfather and they weren’t close), but I suspect she had to hang out her own shingle or work for the government if she wanted to practice law. A former boss of mine, who graduated from Harvard Law School in the early 60s with honors, could not find work as an attorney. She eventually found work as a calendar clerk, and only got to practice law when she began a romance with the son of one of the partners, who she eventually married (and I got to work for them both). Sandra Day O’Connor, who graduated from law school a decade earlier than my former boss, could not find a job as an attorney anywhere in California, despite having graduated near the top of her class at Stanford Law, where she served on the law review. She did get offered a job as a legal secretary. It’s inconceivable today that a female graduate with their credentials would not be snapped up by the biggest and most influential law firms.
3. I own stuff, and it’s mine to do with as I will. Even if I marry (though I’m not exactly beating them off with a stick at the moment), my apartment will be mine if I don’t change the title, my furniture is mine, my money is mine, my credit is mine, my debts are mine, my investments are mine, my paltry little jewelry collection is mine. Well, mine and the bank’s, where applicable. But that’s another point — I can sign a contract regardless of my marital status and it will be valid. Time was, married women’s property became that of their husbands, and they could lose everything in a divorce. Similarly, they lost their legal status as adults, because their husbands were considered the head of the family and therefore acted on behalf of the family, who all were accorded the status of children. This was what was used to deny women the vote for so long — since men were voting on behalf of their wives, there was no reason to give women the vote.
4. I’m not forced to choose between staying childless and having sex. In an earlier generation, such as that of my aunts, remaining childless would have meant either entering the convent or remaining in my parents’ home (or, like my grandmother’s sisters, with other family, in their case with each other). Because I grew up when I did, after feminists had driven the birth-control revolution, I have options for preventing pregnancy that just didn’t exist in my mother’s and grandmothers’ day. One of those options was tubal ligation, which I took advantage of 30 years after my mother was refused a tubal on the grounds that if she didn’t have nine children, she had to have permission from her mother, her husband and her priest (guess who was the problem there?).
5. More generally, feminism has allowed me to have dreams and actually feel like I can pursue them. I never doubted for a moment that I could go to law school, become a lawyer, get politically involved, own property, vote the way I wanted to, raise my voice, or make my own mark on the world. Long before I even connected the dots and realized that I owed all of this to feminism, feminism had influenced not only the way that *I* viewed myself, but also the way that others viewed me. So, for instance, despite how misogynist my father was, feminism had worked its magic on him, so that he wasn’t going to stand in my way like his father had stood in the way of his sisters. Feminism changed the culture and made it possible to imagine something different and better than what had come before.
Time to tag five (or more!) people to continue with the meme:
Ilyka
Auguste
Plucky Punk
Scott
Kactus
and, for a bonus, belledame and Tiffany.
Have at! Don’t forget to link back here.