Herstory

A MOMENT IN TIME

“This will change the World as we know it and it will never be the same.”

These were the words of Dr. Leon Dmochowski, an Electron microscopist at MD Anderson Medical Center in Texas more than 60 years ago. His tone was both excited and a little ominous as he described the development and recent introduction of the contraceptive Pill in the first years of 1960. He was proud to be a member of the development team and his prediction was prophecy.

Able for the first time in history to easily and inexpensively control her own reproductive destiny, women could and would be free enough to reorder tradition in our society in ways unimagined at that time…but very real today.

The 1960’s were explosive. There was the Vietnam War and the unleashing of student protests on the campus steps of universities and colleges all over the nation; signs opposing the War filled with vulgar street language proudly displayed on TV screens every night…music and literature and art exploding with pent-up freedom to no longer produce the ‘expected and normal’ found in the careful and correct 1950’s with women able to engage as freely as men.

There was Castro and the Cuban Revolution; the failed American attempt to overthrow it and the stunning possibility of war with Russia. There was the Kennedy assassination mingled with the growing insistency of the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King and LBJ’s efforts to complete the work of Kennedy and make those rights a reality.

And with it all came Betty Friedan and her best selling book “The Feminine Mystique” which became the Bible for “Women’s Liberation”; Gloria Steinam and Ms. Magazine, Helen Gurley Brown and Cosmopolitan Magazine and eventually Myrna Blythe and Good Housekeeping Magazine were the ‘social media’ powerhouses of the day carrying the message that women were free at last, free at last. The Women’s Liberation movement swept through America like the Jet Stream on Chrystal meth.

Consider this: It took women almost two hundred years to fight for and finally achieve the right to vote. It took black women another 75 years to attain that victory.

It took Women’s Liberation less than ten years to alter the tradition of life in America: the fundamental relationship between men and women, home life, education, the workplace and politics.

Before the Pill women were held by society in a constant consideration of unwanted pregnancy – in or out of marriage. It freed them from the wanted or unwanted hierarchy of men’s desire. It freed them from having unwanted children or unwanted illegal abortions in back alleys. They were free of these societal burdens for the very first time. There would have been no Roe v. Wade without women’s liberation.

The Pill indeed changed our society as nothing ever had and we live with those changes now and forever.

TRADITION

It seemed so simple and logical when we look back at what was.

The culture of the mid 19th through the mid 20th Century seemed almost as simple as children’s books about family life …almost like sweet fairytales with happy endings.

Men were generally considered boys until they married and the expectation of them was simple…they were the leaders, the breadwinners…the hunters of old now in business suits and hats.

When it worked Mom was the center of it all. Mom was the creator of each family’s tradition and brought that tradition forward in her children and most especially her daughters.

There is no book on how to become a parent; one learns from Mom, from parents or makes it up. But when Mom was on the job, her children had a role model of parenting that they could either mimic or change…but a role model nonetheless.

But there was more and it was essential to the strength of this nation.

The entire structure of our unique nationwide public school system was based on the “tripod” of the teacher, the child and Mom at home making certain that homework assignments were completed every night at the kitchen table even if Mom had no idea of the subject matter; even if she was still struggling to learn English. She saw to it that the homework was completed…that what was learned in class had followup. That was her role and expectations were met.

The other choices for women were very specific. They could become secretaries, teachers or nurses. They could work in retail stores. Those were the fields that welcomed women into the work force and those were the fields where American women worked. And as the years progressed and Women’s Liberation forced open new doors more and more women worked.

As the years became decades and the decades turned into a new century, women worked in fields that had been closed to all but a very few: Medicine, law, dentistry, finance, business administration, marketing, advertising, public relations. Token acceptance disappeared. Acceptance became the norm. Today there are more women in medical and law schools than men.

In politics, women are everywhere..in all levels of government.

In media, women are everywhere even as anchors of major new networks.

There is a law in physics that says for every action there is a reaction. And with all that success in just sixty years what has become so successful has not come without critical life-altering changes.

HOLES IN THE BUCKET

It might not be fair to blame anything on the freedom of women to be what they desire. But, as Irish poets tell us, life isn’t fair. But because women helped build the America we have known, when women changed the role they had, America itself changed. Their role as gate-keeper, watchdog, nurturer, was the foundation of our lives. There was a tradition of family life that depended on women…even as the third leg of our education system did: Mom was the leg that made it all work.

The expectation of women changed. There were going to be glass ceilings to break in time but girls could now dream the dreams that boys did…success in life could come from many, many places.

Once women worked, even superwomen, certain aspects of life had to change. If no one actually replaced Mom then she had to do it all…the new and the old. And if she did, things would have to get lost in the shuffle. And if things slipped through the new hole in the bucket life as we know it…the society itself…would change.

In the meantime, what got lost in the bucket was very, very important.

There is no question that the excellence of our public education system was perhaps the real reason that America became a superpower.

That was a system which taught reading, writing and arithmetic and also taught American and World history, all the sciences, social studies to help understand the World around us and also subjects like music, art, shop for boys and homemaking for girls.

Little of that is left because the education of teachers did not change when the tripod collapsed. Moms were working. When they got home they had little time to focus on homework. And as the teaching of reading and math changed, they found it especially difficult to actually help. Now they’d call “Did you do your homework” and they’d hear a muffled yes and that was it. The dinner table as second classroom was gone.

Teachers could no longer count on Mom to help solidify what was being learned. Nothing in the training of teachers was altered to replace that dependence on Mom. And so a hole in the bucket grew and grew until what is left in public education is a system that no longer works

The development of charter schools, free of any controls or directives from the public school system but receiving public school funding, was supposed to provide models for the improvement of teaching,,,so-called ‘best practices’. They have not and will not. An idea that had merit doesn’t work that way at all.

But there are other holes in the bucket which might be considered more serious. They have been nakedly revealed by life in America since the Covid pandemic.

Women – Moms – at home no longer working out of the home are tasked with working inside it with the reality that they should be doing more with their children than makes them comfortable. As their discomfort increased with the length of the pandemic they have begun to feel inadequate as parents…a deep, haunting feeling which can do no one any good. Reports of depression vie with studies that reveal a fundamental loss of confidence and increased shame at what had been hidden and was now disclosed.

Family traditions passed from Mom to children especially to daughters, slowly receded in the years of liberation and work and then slowly disappeared. The long enduring role model of Mom was gone and now their daughters and granddaughters are on their own having done what they could but without a script, without an outline.

And now they are home with children who are immersed in social media day and night. Children that are literally learning nothing but the thoughts and feelings and attitudes of friends and strangers pouring at them relentlessly day and night.

For every action there is a reaction.

The herstory of women from passed centuries is first now being written with an awareness of what is happening today. That herstory points us to an understanding of what has happened and suggests what must happen to rebalance what has been lost so that the best of America has a chance in the years ahead.

We are a heartbeat away from having a woman as President of the United States. Will such a reality be but its own moment in time or will the strengths of women and what has been learned from their liberation combine to produce what was an exceptional country?