One Small Voice: Growing up female, growing up absurd

by Lynn Mandaville

Tonight, at the close of my 71^st birthday, I find myself reflecting on what it has meant to grow up female in the latter half of the 20^th Century America and reach real maturity in the 21^st.

It’s been a promising trip.  So far.

In the part of the United States where I was born and raised (northern New Jersey in the early 1950s and 1960s), most of the people we knew and I went to school with were from stereotypical, nuclear families: two parents – a dad who went to work and a mom who stayed home and took care of the house.  (I only ever knew one child all through elementary school whose parents were no longer married.)

People didn’t move around much.  I went to elementary school with the same 23 kids from Kindergarten through 6^th grade, give or take one or two “new kids” or old kids who moved away.

The United States was a pretty great place in those days.  Post-war America meant that government support of the dairy industry provided every school kid a six-ounce carton of whole milk every school day for the cost of 2 cents per day.  It was a boon to building strong bones and teeth in America’s baby boomers.

Fluoride in the water was intended to reduce tooth decay, particularly in the teeth of growing children.

All children were screened each year through high school for a spinal deformity called scoliosis, so that early medical intervention could prevent future disability.

We were also administered routine TB tests (tuberculosis) to keep the population free of that affliction.

And when polio vaccines were developed, we were all inoculated at school against this deadly child-killer.

We boomers were the fortunate beneficiaries of post-war scientific advances and a government that believed its role was to make life better for all its citizens regardless of social status or income.

America became a shining example of what democracy in a free republic could achieve now that it was at peace with the world.

Women’s roles were fairly static following the war.  Those who had gone to work while the men fought overseas returned home to cook, clean, launder, and raise children.  They were expected to forget what they had accomplished and achieved as part of the war-time workforce.  They were expected to be subsumed by their husbands’ accomplishments and find satisfaction in the return to housework, even though they might have discovered great personal satisfaction through earning their own money, exercising their own independence, and broadening their personal horizons.

Many women, like my own mother, relished this traditional role of homemaker and mother.  My mother-in-law, it seems, felt otherwise.  She had to give up a promising supervisory position with General Motors in Lockport, NY, when the men returned from World War II.

It was a job she had earned through sheer determination, having quit high school two months prior to graduation so she could beat her classmates to the job market to help support her widowed mother and younger sister.  Without a high school diploma she had surpassed many men at Harrison Radiator, becoming an independent woman, a plant manager, with her own income and sense of achievement, only to have it stripped away from her due to peacetime and a backward sense of what women’s and men’s roles were.

By 1968, when I went off to college, the feminist movement was gaining strength in America.  Many of us young women were still under the influence of the “Ozzie and Harriett” and “Leave It To Beaver” images of what our futures would be.  But thanks to Gloria Steinem and Helen Reddy we were getting a glimpse of what a college education and a career in our own rights could mean.

We were also beginning to realize a freedom from old sexual expectations that had been ingrained in us as girls.  Science had provided us with a simple birth control option we could exercise apart from men.  We were no longer “prisoners” of male expectations or their unwillingness to use condoms.

(I was shocked when my mother told me she was not allowed by her doctor to have a diaphragm for family planning purposes until AFTER she had borne her first child, and that was standard medical practice toward all married women in her day.)

Sex was no longer something women had to abide or could use to manipulate men.  It was something we could enjoy ourselves without the old consequences of being “that kind of girl.”

When I started college in 1968, all women undergrads had curfews — 9PM on weekdays (even though the library, where many of us went to study, was open until 11PM) and midnight on the weekends.  We also had to have written parental permission to leave campus overnight, regardless of destination or purpose.

That changed during the fall of my freshman year when all of us women in the freshman dorm conducted a “strike” for a week, staying out past curfew, in the library, en masse, until the college administration caved in and treated us like adults.

When I was first married I couldn’t apply for a credit card in my own name.  Women prior to the mid-seventies had to get credit through their husbands or fathers, even if they were gainfully employed in their own rights with their own bank accounts.   The right to finally have our own financial identities was a pretty big deal.

During the past 50 years, however, we haven’t seen some of the changes that should have been no-brainers following a fairly successful feminist movement.

Women still don’t get equal pay for equal work in America, and the inequities are inconsistent even among women, depending on the color of their skin.

Women don’t have equal representation in managerial positions, as CEOs, or in political posts and appointments, in judicial roles, or in certain, still male-dominated careers.

Women are still victimized by certain gender-biased, sexual stigma, where, until MeToo! And Time’s Up! shed new light on sexual harassment, most women weren’t believed when they spoke up about molestation and rape, sexual coercion and power play.  In the US military women are still harassed and violated, and their complaints are not taken seriously.

And now, in spite of the historic Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which guaranteed women the privacy to seek legal, medical abortions, there are overt legislative attempts to strip women of our most basic right to own our own bodies.

This probably explains why I have had such a visceral reaction to the Taliban regaining power in Afghanistan.

While my own women’s liberation movement took place more than 50 years before I began to see some of my rights eroded, women in Afghanistan experienced their liberations over only 20 years, where their new rights, including even more stark freedoms than I had over a period more than twice that long, were granted and then taken away.

Afghan women were granted the right to drive a car.  To travel, even to the grocery store, without the male escort of a father, brother, or uncle.  To venture out of doors without being covered head to toe.  To have a job outside the home.  To enter a prestigious profession.  To hold public office.  To merely become educated!

And then, under renewed Taliban rule, it has all been stripped from them.

I cannot imagine what it’s like to have gained and lost so much in so short a time.

Today I am 71 years old.

I’ve seen so many changes for the good during my years.  So it pains me to see the America that nurtured me with 2-cent milk, fluoridated water, polio vaccine, and TB tests, return to the days when a woman’s body wasn’t her own.  Where her sexuality was viewed as something to be controlled by others, by men, who don’t understand what it is to be treated with ignorance and disdain.

At 71 I’m too old for sexual mores and philosophical ethics to have a lot of personal effect on me.  But I’ll be damned if I’ll not raise a big stink over the dark ages of sex in America descending on the next generation of women.

By this time, in 2021, men and women should have matured enough to know that our bodies belong to ourselves, not to someone else’s idea of to whom else our bodies belong.

If it’s wrong for the Taliban to take away the basic human rights of women in Afghanistan, it’s wrong for male legislators in America to take away the human rights of women in America.

Tonight, at the close of my 71^st birthday, I reflect on what it has meant to grow up female in the latter part of 20^th Century America and reach real maturity in the 21^st.

And I wonder:  why are we going backward instead of forward?