Women’s History Month Reminds Us of Challenges that Remain for True Equal Opportunity
There wasn’t a Women’s History Month when I was growing up. In fact, there were scant few women highlighted in our history curriculum who we could look to as heroes or role models. I could count them on one hand: Marie Curie, Molly Pitcher, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony maybe throw in Betsy Ross for her sewing skills.
My heroes were Lois Lane and Nancy Drew – and they were fictional.
Later, a few heroes and role models emerged – Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug.
The government in recent times tried to remedy the lack of women heroes by putting Sacagewa on the dollar coin (not much circulated), and just a week ago, in the waning days of February’s Black History Month, unveiling a sculpture of Rosa Parks in the Capitol Rotunda – a twofer since it also honors a Black American and a woman!
I have been learning only recently that our history was indeed populated by bold, heroic, visionary and innovative women of enormous accomplishment: Dolly Madison, for example (who by some measures was the braver one of the Presidential couple).
And on a recent visit to St. Simons, one of the Georgia barrier islands which I learned played such a key role in colonial and Civil War history I learned of Mary Musgrove Matthews, the daughter of a white trader and a Creek Indian mother, who served for 10 years as Indian interpreter to James Oglethorpe, founder and governor of the Georgia colony and is credited with the British winning the support of Indians against the Spanish – much as Sacajawea played a crucial role in the success of Lewis & Clark’s expedition decades later.
Nearer to our own time, Eleanor Roosevelt would have been a hero. Just recently, on a visit to Hyde Park, I came to understand how Eleanor Roosevelt was most likely the innovator of the progressive achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration; certainly the force behind getting him to name Frances Perkins as Labor Secretary, the first woman appointed to the US Cabinet.
But for school girls growing up in the 1950s, Eleanor Roosevelt was not discussed or held up to the girls as a role model for us to follow – even Hillary Clinton, a First Lady in Eleanor’s mold, was largely pilloried for using her professional background and skills in the White House (and for choosing not to bake cookies).
I realize now that the gap in our history curriculum was a calculation on the part of the social forces at the time.
Growing up in the 1950s, there were rules and conventions for girls to follow and it didn’t include aspiring to professional success – work was just what you were supposed to do until you got married and had a family. Stewardesses (as they were known) were actually required to leave their jobs once they got pregnant.
This was a massive cultural campaign to make sure that Rosie the Riveter, who manned the armaments factories during World War II, hung up her machinery, retired her financial independence, and returned to the kitchen, so not to compete for jobs with the men returning from the war. Instead, women’s role was to be the consumer of all the new gizmos and appliances that Madison Avenue was pushing, which made the economy boom.
The cultural barriers were shattered in the 1970s with the rise of the Feminist Movement.
Women have come a long way it is true – some say that the millennial women take for granted the rights that women have today. But it is worthwhile being reminded that in the 19th century (and even into the 20th century), women were still considered chattel to their husbands who could beat them to death without penalty, could not own property or have professional degrees, and did not have the right to vote.
People may argue that women have broken through most of the barriers in the workplace – they work in coal mines, as engineers, in the space program, and a few are CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies. Only last month, women earned the right to have combat positions in the military, which is really more about answering the needs of an all-volunteer military at a time when government has shown its willingness to mount preemptive war (now will girls be required to register for the draft?). On the other hand, there is the unaddressed of the epidemic of rape and sexual harassment in the armed forces.
There is no question that with the familiarity of working alongside women and even under women managers, there is less prejudice against women’s capability purely based on gender – simply because women have proved they can do the job, often by working harder and being more talented than the men they competed against.
I would submit that women have made these breakthroughs more because they were needed in the workplace. Now that the employment picture is reversed, there is less motivation on the part of companies to accommodate women who by virtue of biology are uniquely endowed to be mothers.
Women are outnumbering men in college and in graduate programs. And yet women are still woefully behind men in the top echelon of management, leadership and earnings.
Women’s History – the story of women of great accomplishment – is inextricably tied to family. Most of the women of significant accomplishment are more typically are women who did not have children, or who sacrificed “mothering” in order to succeed in their career. That Superwoman, Having-It-All stuff is pretty rare.
But employers could do a much better job of facilitating work-and-family balance.
What we see today is that the barriers to women truly attaining equality in their careers – in the sense of going as far up a ladder as their potential can take them – are more structural, more practical, more real-world. The workplace itself is designed to impede most women because the workplace has done little to accommodate families.
The glass ceiling is kept in place by the reality that men are promoted more rapidly and women are able to get only so far. But it is also kept in place by the structural elements of work-and-family issues – and the lack of flexibility.
And when women are forced off the career when they start to have their children, there are permanent ramifications, just like today’s prolonged unemployment will impact that person’s career aspirations and earnings for their entire life, because when the woman is ready to come back into the career, they lose the current knowledge, the contacts, and have to compete with each year’s newly minted college graduates.
And in a backhanded way, Heritage Foundation, the rightwing think tank funded by the Koch Brothers, while denying that there is actual discrimination against women in the workplace, explains away the pay gap and achievement between men and women based on the “choices” that women make in terms of child-rearing and family.
Indeed, that is the point.
Back in the 1980s, as the Women’s Movement was taking hold, women realized that there could not be equal opportunity unless the workplace accommodated the realities of family responsibilities. There was a focus on building in flexibility in the workplace: on-site child care was the gold standard (CMP in Manhasset remains one of the few Long Island companies to offer it), but job-sharing, flex-time, and work-from home were other elements that were being advocated.
These are not costly items for a company – in fact, companies actually save money.
Initial interest was propelled by shortages of professionals in the business boom of the 1990s – I attended a conference of professional women where they were extolling how their companies accommodated their family responsibilities.
President Clinton tried to strike a positive blow for women in nominating Zoe Baird for Attorney General, but her nomination was torpedoed when it was learned she had hired an undocumented couple from Peru as caregivers and had not paid Social Security (Nannygate, it was called). How many male nominees were scrutinized about their nannies? None up until then.
With Hillary still pushing Bill to appoint a woman, Clinton’s second nominee for Attorney General was Kimba Wood, who also was asked to step aside over the nanny issue. He finally went to Janet Reno who had no children. (Later on, when a male Cabinet nominee also was revealed to not have paid social Security taxes for his family’s nanny, it was ignored).
You may think this is not relevant today, but it is. The fact is that paying domestic caregivers a fair wage and benefits makes the cost prohibitive for most women, based on their salaries. You would have to earn something like $80,000 a year just to justify the expense of hiring a nanny.
This was all in the days before internet and cloud computing, Skype and videoconferencing, which make it easy for people to work from remote locations (like home). Today, there is little reason why new parents cannot be accommodated with at least part of the week working from home. Indeed, 10 percent of workers now spend at least one day working from home.
Why aren’t flex-time and job-sharing more prevalent? Because companies are a reflection of the people – and the politics – of their owners and managers, as we have seen in the rhetoric of Papa Johns and other companies.
An alternative to accommodating new parents by allowing them to work from home would be to have greater availability of affordable, quality child care and pre-K. But unlike every other modern industrialized country, the United States does not offer universal care or pre-K, though Obama has called for pre-K (fat chance). Here, too, the politics – as a reflection of a cultural predisposition against true equality and opportunity – will make sure that child care and pre-K are not universal, are not subsidized, and overall derided as the basis of a literal Nanny State.
We are fortunate in Great Neck to have CLASP, which has transitioned from a before and after school program that started in the 1970s, to a toddler-to-pre-school program, since our public schools have taken on a private operator for before and after school programs. But CLASP has depended upon subsidies from Nassau County and others.
And Clinton’s Welfare Reform requires mothers to go right back to work – a kind of rock and hard place for families who cannot make it on one income and who don’t earn enough to pay for child care.
Among two-parent families with children under six years old, 53% have both parents working (only 6.1% are where mother works but not the father); among single-parent households, 58.6% of mothers work.
The Republican position is that it is noble for high-income women – like Anne Romney – to choose to stay home with their children, but parasitic for a low-income woman to stay home with her children.
Add to this issue the crusade of the Republican Right-Wing and Religious Right to deny women’s reproductive rights (a Woman’s Rights issue), to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood – often the only affordable medical care women have access to – and you have women and children trapped in a cycle of economic ruin and disempowerment.
Try advancing your career under those circumstances.
The Republicans do not deserve any points for finally going along and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women’s Act months and months after it lapsed because the Republicans did not consider undocumented women, lesbians and transgendered women, and Native American women worthy or deserving of protection under the law. Their obstruction conveys the disdain they have for women as equal persons. And while at the federal level, Republicans might want to put on a pose of caring about women (after taking a shellacking in the 2012 election), Republican-controlled state legislatures are still pushing more and more restrictive laws curtailing women’s reproductive rights.
So during this Women’s History Month, the Millennial women need to be reminded of how easy it is to speak of equality and rights out of one side of one’s mouth, but structure conditions to deny or steal those rights away – just as Blacks are reminded of how fragile the hard-fought rights won during the Civil Rights Movement with the right-wing activist Justices on the Supreme Court poised to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act (Scalia called the Voting Rights protections ‘racial entitlement’).
New mothers should be given the opportunity to work from home, at least part-time, for the first 18 or 24 months of their baby’s life; then, there should be the availability of affordable, accessible, quality day care; then, universal pre-K. And there should be flex-time, job-sharing, and other innovations to balance work-and-family obligations.
So you free-marketers, let’s see how well corporations – without any Big Government, Nanny State mandate – respond to this societal need and change their policies to be more accommodating to mothers who need their incomes but also need to work. Let’s see how flex-time, job-sharing, telecommuting, and even on-site child care takes hold.
Employers have had 40 years since the Women’s Movement took off and mothers have howled for such help. And companies haven’t responded.
Indeed, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s pronouncement – ironic and hypocritical – banning telecommuting for her own employees, even though she is able to have a private nursery set up outside her office, is not a good sign.
This is a perfect example of a generation who has grown up without being automatically turned away from colleges or jobs or forced to accept (as I did) lower salaries because “you have a husband to take care of you,” or being turned away from purchasing an apartment or house without a husband as co-signer.
Women may have proved their mettle in being able to do any sort of job. But companies have made a calculation that they don’t have to do much to keep women in their organizations once they have families, since there is a steady stream of eager, well-trained and low-cost college graduates coming after. They see workers as widgets – no real difference between them.
But workers – and women – are individuals, with their own potential.
Society is paying the price because of the contributions that women might make but will not have the opportunity.
President Obama, in his proclamation declaring women’s History Month pointed to these disparities between equality and opportunity, and the challenge still ahead.
“Meeting those challenges will not be easy. But our history shows that when we couple grit and ingenuity with our basic beliefs, there is no barrier we cannot overcome. We can stay true to our founding creed that in America, all things should be possible for all people. That spirit is what called our mothers and grandmothers to fight for a world where no wall or ceiling could keep their daughters from their dreams. And today, as we take on the defining issues of our time, America looks to the next generation of movers and marchers to lead the way.”
Obama closed his proclamation inviting “all Americans to visit www.WomensHistoryMonth.gov to learn more about the generations of women who have shaped our history.”
