Staring the Devil in the Eye Every Morning

Although our screams of outrage are justified, fear is not, for the fact of the matter is it’s too late to roll back the advances of the last 80 years, the changes in laws and behavior and expectation that have been and are the work of thousands of nameless women and that have resulted, in the United States and across the world, in a diversity that our grandmothers could never have imagined. 

Women are everywhere. We play every role. The forces of misogyny are always with us and must always be resisted, and their shills, women who believe they will somehow escape the effects of women hating because of their looks, are always with us, but the dismaying photograph of an enormous table where forty or fifty black suited European leaders are conferring in Sunday’s New York Times must be seen for what it is—a desperate attempt to hold on to what is already gone.

Look around you. There are women everywhere, at every level of our society—only the entrenched hierarchy at the top is still male and white, and theirs is a last-ditch attempt to hold onto what is already gone, and so is the fanaticism. For example, women make up more than fifty-seven percent of college and graduate school students and graduate at higher rates, and because we work hard and expect no favors, we gain better grades—a change that the old-time universities will probably try to control with a system of quotas as they once tried to control the number of Jewish students—but again, it’s too late. We aspire and we know how to work hard and that is the winning combination.

And it has always been so, to some degree, although only recognized publicly since the second wave of feminism broke in the 1970’s,  as prove “These reflections on the changing art of horsewomanship printed to celebrate the year of the Year of the Horse, 1990, by Robin Bledsoe, Boston, MA.”

“This country fosters a kind of woman who seems never to have been bothered about who she was supposed to be, mainly because there was always work, and getting it done in a level-eyed way was what counted most… These women wind up looking 50 when they are 37 and 53 when they are 70. It’s like they wear down to what counts and just last there, fine and staring the devil in the eye every morning.”

So take heart. Every time a baby girl is born in this country, the universe tilts a bit further toward equality.

In Women