"Any girl can be glamorous," Hedy Lamarr said. "All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
At some point in the past 10 years, the women's movement changed. It became a series of feel-good choices for women rather than a fight for equality. We wanted to be high-powered lawyers, CEOs and doctors in three-piece suits. Then the suit became more important than the career. We weren't reading about successful women in the newspapers; we were flipping through the latest fashion magazine seeing how we could transform our business attire into a sexy evening dress.
We????? Excuse me? First of all, as someone who claims to be a feminist, way to stereotype women. Oh, but maybe you thought this is only pertinent to those fashion-magazine-reading manicured types. Those airheads in the chiffon skirts and strappy heels.
Though you should probably understand that I've already read both Glamour and Cosmo for next month, I'm currently sporting a french manicure and I happen to be wearing a sweater and floral skirt and strappy spike heels, as it's a Friday casual day.
Oh yeah, and I'm a lawyer.
Feminism became an ugly word, and if there was one thing we were trying to avoid, it was "ugly."
Actually, I'm more trying to avoid fugly. But whatever.
For the past 40 years, the number of women entering higher education, the workplace and politics has been steadily climbing. As the women's movement progressed, women flooded once predominantly male fields. They engineered new technology, traveled into space and authored influential legislation. They fought against inequity, broke through glass ceilings and did what women for centuries hoped they would one day do.
They also gave pompous speeches in overblown rhetoric.
Okay, that was snarky of me. But when you get the urge to tack on "and leap tall buildings with a single bound" to a paragraph, you might want to consider whether you're going just a touch over the top.
Regardless, I'll grant women are far more prevalant in positions of power, and that's an awesome thing.
As they succeeded, the always-lurking critics raged. They argued the inferiority of women's intellect, fumed about the dangers women were causing their families and proclaimed women were being unfaithful to God. What did the women of the era do? They ignored their critics. They went to work, quite literally, and proved them wrong. They fought to create a world where their daughters could do anything and be anyone without sexist barriers and additional obstacles. They broke stereotypes and passed legislation moving women closer to equality.
Always-lurking? Sounds like a personal problem.
Seriously, who talks like that? Do they twirl moustaches, too?
Regardless, again, I'll grant that there have always been people who feel women shouldn't work, vote, or otherwise assert themselves. I haven't found them "lurking" lately, but whatever.
Then my generation did something terrible. We started listening to those critics our mothers have always known to ignore. We started believing we couldn't learn math and physics as well as men. We felt guilty for living full, successful lives with careers. We let our faith be twisted and took the blame for the "destruction of family values." Then, it all stopped. The numbers stopped climbing. The glass ceilings were replaced. Women started leaving what they had fought so hard to get.
Back the truck up, sister. What's with the "we" again?
Last I looked, there are still inroads being made on the idea of a glass ceiling. For example, check out this report on statistical increases between 1983 and 2002:
Other traditionally male-dominated occupations seeing increases in female workers included:
Police detectives and supervisors -- 360 percent increase
Millwrights -- 315 percent increase
Civil Engineers -- 196 percent increase
Automobile mechanics -- 177 percent increase
Firefighting occupations -- 174 percent increase
Airplane pilots and navigators -- 167 percent increase
Or how about this study on women-owned businesses:
The Center for Women’s Business Research estimates that as of 2004, nearly half (48%) of all privately-held businesses in the U.S. are owned 50% or more by women, for a total of 10.6 million enterprises. This includes 6.7 million majority (51% or more) women-owned firms, and another 4.0 million equally (50-50) women- and men-owned firms.
Growth in women-owned businesses has outpaced that of other firms. Since 1997, the Center estimates that women-owned firms have grown at nearly twice the rate of all firms (17% vs. 9%). Growth in employment by women-owned firms has been even more dramatic—24% compared to 12% for all firms.
The impact of women-owned businesses as employers is clear—and dramatic. The number of women-owned firms with employees has expanded by an estimated 28% during the past seven years—three times the rate of growth among all employer firms.
Now, the pay gap still exists, I'll grant that. But women are hardly falling in droves to the old stereotype of kinder, kuche, kirche.
Since 1999, women have made up less than 23 percent of the Iowa Legislature and have not climbed from that mark. The number of women in engineering plateaued, reaching a man-to-woman ratio of only 4 to 1. In the last 10 years the number of stay-at-home moms increased by 15 percent. Somewhere in our beauty magazines, these numbers floated past us, and we became angry.
Fuming, we pointed our manicured fingers: Critics had misrepresented statistics, created false gender roles and downright lied.
And they had. No doubt about it. But we did something worse. We stood there and took it. They did not ban us from running for Congress; we chose not to. They did not reject our engineering applications; we didn't send them in. They did not fire us when we had children; we left. They called us opinionated and coldly ambitious, and instead of saying, "We are entitled to our opinions and you better believe we have goals," we went to the day spa to escape the stress. We became so obsessed that we might be "socially ugly," we completely forgot that we have the right to live full and meaningful lives.
Okay, here I'm going to really annoy some of the more radical feminists here. Snide remarks about manicures aside, this argument is simply not supportable. Broken down, it states the following:
1) Women have plateaued in the Iowa legislature and engineering.
2) Stay-at-home female parents have increased by 15%.
3) Women who left work to be a stay at home mother somehow "forgot that we have the right to live full and meaningful lives" and have somehow failed the women's movement.
Did you get that last part? That's not a statistic, it's not even an extrapolation from a statistic, it's a value statement. Women who become engineers or legislators are valued, those who choose to stay at home with children are not.
But given that kids need to be taken care of, some adult has to hold that job, whether it's paid or unpaid. So why on earth do you find it some measure of failure on the part of our society if a female parent chooses to take on that job instead of hiring it out? I presume you've no problem with male parents choosing to do so, but if the female does it she's capitulating to male oppression, selling out the sisterhood? Excuse me?
When did we shift from arguing that women's work in the home should hold equal value and weight, to portraying women who stay home as slaves to the patriarchy?
The pinnacle of the women's movement is not the choice of staying at home or working. We have an obligation to acquire the knowledge we can and a duty to contribute to the betterment of mankind. We must remember beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If we do not want our daughters to stand still and look stupid, we must show them by example that the most glamorous women in the word are those who are intelligent, independent, opinionated and ambitious.
On this I agree: we each have the moral obligation, to ourselves if not to others, to become the best person we can be. We should hold ourselves accountable for being intelligent, independent, ambitious and opinionated. Does that mean I have to be an engineer to do it? Would I be less intelligent if I weren't at my desk eight hours a day? Or if I'd chosen to write or do theater for a living instead of the law, would that make me less opinionated? (Why is it I can almost hear the laughter at the idea of my not being opinionated, ever, under any circumstances?) Does promoting equality in the workplace require degenerating the choice of caring for children as a career, albeit an unpaid one?
In our journey to equality, let's not trample on the stay-at-home moms. Women who want to be legislators or engineers should just do it. Don't let anyone talk you out of it, tell you you're not good enough or smart enough. But why not say the same to women who want to raise their kids? Don't let anyone talk you out of it, saying that because you choose this path you're not good enough or smart enough. It's your life. Choose wisely.
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