My calendar notes that today is International Women’s Day.
That caught my eye, especially as I was unaware of it. It has been in place
sine the mid seventies with the United Nation’s Year of the Woman emphasis.
The day has its antecedents in this country, as far as I can
tell. Much of the American advantage in textile manufacturing was the hard work
done by women in factories, all the way back to the Lowell factories of the mid 1800s. The word,
sweatshops, applied to the conditions by girls and women in the factories. Days
often extended fifteen hours, and then work needed to be brought home. Some
never saw the sun due to the hours. the cotton dust made breathing labored and
ruined the lungs of many. A terrible fire killed workers in a clothing factory,
as the doors were locked to ensure that the workers could not get a breath of
air outside. When the International Ladies Garment Workers launched labor
action, the Socialist Party picked up on it and announced a Women’s day for
labor. Part of its movement was for the right to vote being applied to women.
It causes me embarrassment and consternation how much
opposition to women’s rights appeared in churches. Using orders of creation
arguments, clergy argued that women occupied a separate, distinct private sphere.
Public life was ordained as a male sphere. Easy stereotypes of female
inequality abounded in sermons and writing. Males offered virtual
representation by watching out for the needs of women, as they did for children
in their voting and public actions. Some of the assertions were repeated in the
anti-Equal Rights Amendment campaigns of the 1970s.
This is a good day to look back on how far we have come in a
relatively short period of time. so many doors have opened to women in both
public and private life. In some ways, it is a revolution. Things that were
considered common currency a generation ago get laughed out of consideration in
our time. Surely, the radical right continues to operate under outmoded
assumptions about gender, but the balance of public opinion has left them in
the dustbin of historical memory.
We also realize we have far to go in the march toward gender
equality. Pick an area, and the data demonstrate gains in so many areas. Pick
one and look up the progress. We do well
to celebrate the achievements of women across the board in our lives. For
instance Elizabeth Blackburn’s research in cells may be an important clue in
cutting off cancer cell production, and Polly Matzinger has done pioneering
work on the immune system. Rita Colwell heads the National Science Foundation.
At the same time, female-headed households of young children suffer high rates
of poverty. so much violence touches women disproportionately. At the same
time, the promise of “having it all” has turned into a enormous burden for
women to a far greater extent than men. In the less economically developed
world, poverty weighs so heavily on women, and they suffer its cruel
afflictions especially with young children.
Many of us seem caught in a reading of our culture that assumes
that everything is going downhill. Some of that reading is caused by a
religious insistence that if things get bad enough, God will come in and
restore all to a new world. That is one reading of scripture, of course, by no means a consensus one. When we address social change, many of us
play the role of Cassandra or Jeremiah, crying gloom and doom and having the
cries going unheard. Today, I hope we take some time to celebrate the heroines
of the road we have travelled and celebrate the achievements of so many across
the broad expanse of human life.
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