Time Goes By – What it’s really like to get older
Go read the whole post, and bookmark her blog. Great, great, writing.
We of the Interim generation were raised to marry, have children and keep house. If we went to college or work, it was considered a time filler, something to do until we found the man of our dreams and moved to the suburbs. The words “career”and “woman” were not mentioned in the same sentence and the only “professions” open to women, usually “spinsters” who could not find a husband, were nurse, teacher and secretary.
Then something happened on our way to fulfilling our destinies as brood mares. Everyone believes they remember what happened in 1963: John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But there was another event that year, at first overshadowed by the death of the president, that would at a slower pace have a much greater effect on western culture. Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique was published.
Pick up that book today and you will groan. The writing is so dense it reads like cement and I have trouble imagining now how I got through it. But I did, along with millions of other women, and it changed not just our individual lives – it changed, in time, everything.
A couple of years ago, I ran into a snippy little 20-something just down from Cambridge with a shiny, new Harvard MBA making $150K as a Wall Street analyst. She told me that feminism is not relevant to her generation because they have evolved beyond the self-consciousness of labels.
Oh puh-leeze. Who does she think made it possible for her to go to Harvard, an all-male school when I was her age. Who does she think made it possible for her to become an analyst, an all-male enclave not so long ago. And who does she think made it possible for her to get a mortgage or any other kind of credit without a male co-signer?
Who did all that? We did, the women of the 1970s who got together in thousands of small consciousness raising sessions all over the U.S. to study Betty Friedan’s thesis and figure out how to put it to work in the real world. It was so radical then that many could not tell their husbands what we were doing at those meetings. Men made the decisions then. Men ruled the household then. Men even told wives how to vote then. And if your husband didn’t want you to read a certain book and have certain kinds of women friends, you didn’t.
So soon we forget.
Bravo, and THANK YOU!!!! Bless all you older women for being brave, beautiful, and strong enough to lead the way for those of us who owe you so much.