Those Pesky Women

 The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) guaranteeing equal rights to all Americans regardless of sex, has been shuffling through the halls of power, waiting to become part of the U.S. Constitution for 99 years. According to the Women’s League of Voters, Alice Paul, a suffragist, wrote the Amendment in 1923. It was passed by Congress almost 50 years ago in 1972 and was finally ratified in January 2020. The full text of the Amendment is:

Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. 

Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Simple enough. But it has yet to be added to the Constitution because the National Archivist, was instructed by the Trump administration to block its certification.  I heard about this obstruction on the radio as I was driving to babysit my grand-daughter.  When Congress first passed the Amendment I was a graduate student in college. 

Things have undoubtedly changed for women since 1972.  When I graduated from college and was job-hunting in the late 1960s, the New York Times listed jobs segregated by sex: “Help Wanted Men/Help Wanted Women.”  Women need not apply for men’s jobs and vice versa.  The low-paying jobs were in the women’s columns.  The help wanted ads could also say “Negroes need not apply,” “Jews need not apply,” “Irish need not apply.”  All this was perfectly legal, which seems unimaginable today.

My job search took me all over New York City, calling on publishing houses and magazines, looking for an entry position in publishing, but they all wanted to know what my typing speed was.  My typing was dismal—slow and full of mistakes.  I couldn’t type, and that prevented me from becoming a secretary which was basically all women were considered for, regardless of education.  In retrospect, I am grateful that I couldn’t type, because it forced me to find other outlets for what ability I had.

My first full-time job after college was as a production editor for two engineering journals.  The job entailed specifying fonts, doing the layout (literally cutting and pasting columns), identifying the Greek letters for the typesetters (yes, type was still set manually in 1968), putting graphs close to the text they illustrated, and coordinating with the authors, if necessary.  I didn’t have to understand the text, just to produce eight journals a year with no typos. The production staff were all women and the managers all men. The men had individual offices while we all had desks in a large room with a window.  So not a typing pool and better pay than secretaries got.  What prestige!

After about two years, I changed jobs hoping to do something more challenging, or at least something where I understood the text I was editing.  I went to work for a major legal publisher and got paid a little more.  The staff were mostly women, but this time a few of them were in management.  The work was more interesting, updating law books to reflect the most recent cases that set precedence.  I edited a law book on pain and suffering which consisted of quoting the entire Book of Job with a few references to case law.  The author was paid by the word.  There was an annual update of cases on negligence, another on medical cases, and so forth.

What made this job really interesting to me were the two women who managed the department. They were feminists at the early stages of the feminist movement of the 1960s. We had gone through the 1950s when women were supposed to be docile and supportive of everything their husbands did.  See shows like “Leave it to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best” where mom is only good for cooking and cleaning and can’t even conjure up the wherewithal to converse with her children without guidance from dad.  Apparently father not only knew best but was the only one who knew anything.

I had not questioned the status quo.  After all, I was working at a somewhat professional job and supporting myself and a husband.  There was a subliminal resentment that nagged at me, but I never examined it. It annoyed me that after a day at work and a two-hour daily commute, I was expected to come home and make dinner when my husband was already home and could do that.  It irked me to spend my weekends cleaning the house by myself, when we shared the space and I was gone most of the time. But I didn’t question that this was the way it should be.

Listening to my coworkers discuss women’s rights, I started to be aware of my resentments and the feeling that the setup was unfair.  They talked about equal pay for equal work, the absurdity of women being relegated to certain jobs and men to others when both genders could do the work equally, the unfairness that women had to often quit their jobs when they became pregnant, on-the-job harassment and all the other issues that women faced.  One of the managers was interviewed on television, a fact that impressed me. A common phrase of the time was raising consciousness.  My consciousness was on the rise.

By the time I arrived in San Francisco in 1975 and took my most pivotal job, I was intolerant of being treated unequally.  My husband and I divorced, largely because I had evolved into a different woman from the one he had married and I was no longer content to be submissive to keep the peace. I started working as a technical writer for an engineering company, again one where men had the important jobs and women were predominantly secretaries. The group I worked with however, consisted of men, both straight and gay, and women. The women were well educated, and all aware and intolerant of inequality and bias. Much to the bewilderment of our boss, who was, in fact, a fair man, the women staged a walkout on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore Day, based on the movie of the same name.  The walkout didn’t do much, and I’m not even sure that anyone outside the department was aware of it, but it made us feel like activists.

Things were beginning to change slightly and slowly.  At first there were no women engineers in the company, but over the nine years that I spent there, a handful of women engineers were hired. There was a woman economist. Because of my knowledge of the Middle East, I was promoted to help with marketing to that geographical sector. The Middle East was awash in petrodollars and the company wanted a slice of that market. This was progress, but many of the men in management still thought of the women who worked there as their playthings.  One evening I was working late and one of the managers felt it was one of his job perks to come into my office and grope my breasts.  Another executive would make oily suggestions that I should join him on some business trip.  The secretaries, usually assigned to men, were reluctant to answer my phone or do my typing.  For the most part, though, the handful of women who had been promoted were left to do their jobs and sometimes even appreciated for their contributions.  By the 1980s women in middle management were beginning to gain acceptance because we were getting the job done.

There was a strong movement to ratify the ERA during the 1970s and 1980s, and feminists like Betty Friedan spoke out for it.  But there were women like Phylliss Schlafly who enjoyed the perks of male professional life as an attorney, and wanted to deny those benefits to other women.  She used the canard of many who wanted to keep women at home, that the ERA threatened protections that society bestowed on women.  Evidently, she herself did not need those protections but other women were too dimwitted to fend for themselves without them.

A couple of years ago when the Me Too movement started, I was socializing with some of my neighbors, men and women in their seventies. One of the men mentioned that he didn’t believe that harassment was as prevalent as the movement claimed.  He was in the navy and never encountered this sort of behavior on his ships.  I asked for a show of hands from the women present who had been sexually harassed on the job, and every woman there had been.  I had to explain to the surprised men that sexual harassment was not based on the women’s looks or what they wore, but that it was about power and who has it.  It revealed how differently men and women regard this behavior.     

I am not in favor of demonizing boys and men to empower women. There is a tendency now to shortchange boys at school and to dismiss all male bad behavior as a universal male trait.  Just as it is wrong to discriminate against and harass women, we need to be discerning about what constitutes male malice. Having spent my childhood in the Middle East, I am acutely aware that some men are desperate to hold on to their power. Keeping that power seems in their minds to equate with subjugating women.  It is not that men want something that women have, but that they do not want women to have the power men have.  What is happening in Afghanistan is a case in point.  The Taliban, all men, are threatened by a twelve-year-old girl getting an education; they know that knowledge is power. Many men in the west are similarly threatened by the sense that they could lose their power if women are treated as equals.  I have often thought that the friction between Islamist fundamentalism and western culture is not about territory or economics or policy but about the role of women.  If women universally have equal status as men, then men will have been “demoted.”

On February 10, 2022, Congress unanimously passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. It seems a civilized society should not require decent behavior to be legislated, but clearly that is not the case.  Gretchen Carlson, formerly at Fox News, initiated this legislation following her sexual harassment case against Roger Ailes, the chief of the network. The Act prohibits forced arbitration so that companies can avoid publicity when they have acted badly.  The victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment are primarily women.  So to those who say that there is no need for the ERA because women are already protected by the Constitution, I want to point out that Congress (even ultraconservative Republicans) evidently did think there is a need to protect against such actions.  

As I am writing this, Russia is invading Ukraine because this former satellite republic may opt to ally itself with the values of democracy and freedom. Russia, and Putin in particular, find this extremely threatening, to the point of risking another world war in order to keep Ukraine subjugated.  What is it about other people’s freedom that is so threatening?  Whether democracy or women’s rights, the established powers seem not to be able to tolerate ceding control.