IT IS A BIG DEAL: Some Thoughts on the First Nomination of a Woman for President by a Major Political Party

         Three days ago Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.  I am not here to tell you why you should vote for her (although I think there are many good reasons, even if she wasn’t your first choice) or how it terrifies me to think of her opponent in the Situation Room.  And let me make clear that I am not suggesting that anyone vote for Hillary because she is a woman.  (You wouldn’t, after all, catch me voting for Sarah Palin because she is a woman.)  I just want to spend a few minutes celebrating how far we have come in my lifetime so that those of you under, say, 40 will understand why this is a moment that brings tears to the eyes of women of my generation.        

         I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that for many millennials the nomination of a woman as a major-party candidate for President is apparently not viewed as a big deal.  I guess this means that we did a good job of raising them with a wider view of their options than my generation grew up with.  My daughters, now 31 and 28, grew up believing that they could do with their lives whatever their talents and hard work would allow.  But it is important to remember that it was not always so – important to remember how recently this belief was nurtured in little girls, both by their parents and by society at large.  The women of my generation did not grow up imagining that we might be President one day.  The dream that a woman might one day be in the White House did not take hold until the women’s movement of our young adulthood, and we have waited until we were senior citizens to see this day.  So, yes, for us, it is a very big deal.    

         Let’s go way back for a moment to the 1950s when I was a child.  I didn’t know any mothers who worked outside of the home.  All of the moms stayed home, both in my neighborhood and on TV.  This wasn’t a choice, as it is now.  This was what you were expected to do.  My mother, who was born in 1920, quit working outside the home when she got married.  Women born a few years later quit their jobs when they had their first child.    

         (And, yes, I know that there were mothers working outside the home because they had to, but this was not the “ideal.”  I am talking about the white, middle class world that I knew.  The one depicted in magazines and advertisements and on TV.  I will leave it to someone else to describe the world from which I was sheltered.)

         I wish that I could re-create this world for you in a few words, but it would take more than the length of this post.  The best I can do is to direct you to TV shows, movies, and magazines from that period.  For now, I will simply say that if you were to peruse print and TV advertisements from the 1950s and most of the 1960s, you would find that women were (or were supposed to be) freakishly preoccupied with the whiteness of their husbands’ shirts and with which cleaner would result in the most sparkling floors.  And if you were a little girl during this period, you would have learned from observing the world around you that men had power and that women’s only access to that power was through their feminine wiles or through clever tricks to build their husband’s egos by causing them to believe they were making decisions actually made by their wives. 

         And, in retrospect, the most unbelievable thing is that all of this seemed normal.  Because, unless you are a visionary, normal is bounded by what you know.  It took the civil rights movement for a few women to start noticing that while they were fighting for the rights of the people we then called Negroes, they didn’t have an equal place at the table either.  And I have to admit that when these women started talking about equal rights for our gender in the late ’60s, it took me a while to figure out what they were talking about.  It didn’t take too long, though, for me to start understanding that what I had accepted as “normal” wasn’t fair.

         It wasn’t fair that only a few careers were open to women, and when women were allowed to work beside men, the men were paid more. It wasn’t fair that when women did go to work outside the home, most men still didn’t cook or change diapers or do dishes.  It wasn’t fair that a woman could get fired for being pregnant, and had to choose between having a family and pursuing a career.  It wasn’t fair that we couldn’t get credit cards in our own name.  It wasn’t fair that we couldn’t borrow money without our husbands’ permission.  It wasn’t fair that female college students had a curfew and male college students did not. It wasn’t fair that women were expected to accept being “girls” our whole lives in the same way that black men were supposed to accept being “boys.” And it wasn’t OK that being “taken care of” by a man was supposed to make up for not being allowed to use our brains or pursue our talents. 

 

         And so much more that it is hard to remember now in light of the changes that were wrought as the result of the courageous women (and men) who fought for women’s rights in the face of what, at times, felt like insurmountable resistance. 

         The women’s movement changed my life.  I ultimately went to law school after it occurred to me sometime during my college years that this was something that a woman might actually do.  This certainly was not a career I could have imagined during my childhood or early teen years.  So, my daughters had a mother who worked.  They also had a mother who made the choice to work part-time while they were growing up.  The operative word here is “choice.”  I had choices not available to my mother and her generation.  And my daughters have had choices that were not available to me when I was growing up. 

         So, if so much has changed, why does it matter that a woman may be the next President of the United States?  It matters because it is such a short time since a woman in the White House was unimaginable, and, make no mistake about it, there are still those who would turn back the clock on women’s rights.  It matters because the work isn’t done, and seeing how far we have come gives me hope for a brighter future for our children. 

         And it matters because little girls, like little boys, need role models. I will leave you with this conversation that I had with an African American girl in a third-grade classroom where I was a reading volunteer last year: 

            

         Me: Oh. You're reading about the underground railroad. Did you 
know that Harriet Tubman is going to be on the twenty dollar bill?

         Girl: (Smiling) No. That's cool. She will be the first girl on money?

         Me: Yes. She's going to be there instead of Andrew Jackson.

         Girl: Didn't he own slaves?

         Me: Yes. I believe he did.

         Girl: Then it's good they're taking him off the money and putting a girl on. Will there be more girls on the money soon?

         Me: (Not wanting to mention that Jackson will now be on the "back" of the twenty, whatever that means) - Yes, I am sure there will be by the time you are a grown up.

         Girl: (Grinning from ear to ear) Yay!!!!