To Women!

Gender inequality and inequity should be a thing of the past. The same, of course, is true for racism and antisemitism and a host of other “isms” based on cultural biases and malicious intent. We shouldn’t need an International Women’s Day, but here we are. As a teenager growing up in New York in the sixties, I watched the world shake apart in so many ways. The times were, as Bob Dylan wrote, a’changing – and among the loudest voices were those of the female variety. By 1971, my heroes, US Representatives Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, exemplified all I thought would come to pass. “The test of whether or not you can hold a job should not be in the arrangement of your chromosomes,” said Bella. It was so profound and yet so obvious that it astonished me that it needed to be said aloud. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table,” Shirley Chisholm advised, “bring in a folding chair.” My mother had settled in to the role of housewife and caregiver, but she had so much more to offer. I was planning to have a closet full of folding chairs.

Fast forward decades later, I now understand the inevitable roller coaster of social progress, and it frustrates me. I recently read the light-hearted but pointed novel Lessons in Chemistry set in the early sixties in which the protagonist, a brainy chemist, has to continually fight for her place at the proverbial table. While it’s easy to think about how far we’ve come – and, yes, we clearly have – I am saddened by the pace and ferocity at which our nation seems to be backsliding on this and other core democratic principles. I know we are light years ahead of nations whose women are lucky if they are even deemed worthy of an education. Still, isn’t it clear by now that no nation can afford to undermine (or underpay, I might add) half its talent?

Kung Fu Buddhist nuns of the Drukpa lineage in Nepal. Photo credit: A. Butcher Nesbitt

By way of perspective, I offer up an uplifting New York Times article about, of all things, a group of Kung Fu Himalayan Buddhist nuns. These women have defied convention, demonstrating their physical and intellectual prowess, and exercising their agency to make social change. They are inspiring! Still, it needs to be said that it took a man to disrupt centuries of tradition, to spur the change they now embody. Just a reminder that all of us, male and female, should do our part to move us closer to equity.