Celebrating Women’s History Month!
While the whole concept of “generations” is basically flawed, one of the few factors that actually point to generational divides is the group experience of those born into a certain era. As an example, I recall a casual conversation with a clerk at a shoe store in the late 1990s; a young man who was probably no older than 19 or 20. For some reason we were discussing the longevity of marriage. (I think the subject had arisen because my companion was buying shoes to wear to an anniversary party.) The clerk mentioned he’d just realized that many people who married in the 1950s and 60s were still together; were celebrating 30- and 40-year wedding anniversaries. People of those eras must have had a better understanding of what they were getting into when they married, he said. They must have made more realistic decisions about life partners.
My friend and I, both of us having been children in those decades, glanced knowingly at each other and then gently explained to the young man that, no, adults from that era were no better at choosing partners than anyone today. They simply didn’t have the option of divorce. “No Fault” divorce didn’t exist at that time, we told him; one had to prove a serious reason, usually adultery, to obtain a divorce. A spouse could actually contest a divorce, which was sometimes then not granted. Domestic violence was not even recognized as a problem, we continued, far less a reason for granting a divorce; a partner’s alcoholism or drug use, ditto. Female divorcees were ostracized, even when it was their partners who were at fault; divorced individuals were spoken of in gossiping whispers.
The young clerk was stunned. While he understood that divorce had been forbidden until modern times, he’d grown up in a world in which it was as common as crabgrass. He could barely grasp the reality of a world where one could be trapped for a lifetime in a loveless or abusive marriage, with no option to leave; in which the stigma of divorce destroyed lives. The reality absolutely flabbergasted him. I’m not certain he really believed us.
I often recall that conversation when I consider how minimal an understanding young women today have of the battles their female forebears have fought to achieve even the lopsided equality they currently enjoy. As much as the youngest generations appreciate the desperate struggles they still have on hand—the right to control their own bodies; the struggle for pay equity—they, like that young clerk, cannot even begin to comprehend the world that we older women grew up in: a world where most of our peers had no goal except to be “married young and then retire”; where the only office jobs available to women were secretary, receptionist, or bookkeeper; where a woman might become an elementary school teacher, but never a principal; where it was assumed she was working or attending college only until she could “find a man and get her M.R.S.”
Never was this better demonstrated for me than when, pondering all this, I was suddenly plunged into the memory of an old advice column, probably Dear Abby or Ann Landers, from my youth. I read those columnists religiously from the time I was 10 or 11 years old until I was a young adult, and sometimes—often–learned more from them than I did from school about life and love and human psychology, as well as courtesy, manners and etiquette.
This particular column contained a letter sent by a woman objecting to the way in which married women signed their names, protesting that they violated propriety by signing letters or cards as “Mrs. Jane Smith”. Mrs. Jane Smith did not exist, the complainant stated. There was no such person. The signatory was either just plain Jane Smith, or Mrs. John Smith.
Although I no longer recall the columnist’s response, I do well remember my acute dismay as I read that letter. All these decades later, that remembered dismay has multiplied a thousand times as I realize that many women of that era—my adolescence!–were cooperating in their own erasure. They collaborated in their own eradication.
And, terrifyingly, this still happens, I realize, looking about at a world where women must still go cloaked in burkas or endure plural marriage or genital mutilation; where they march with signs denying others of their gender the right to control their own bodies. Fifty years or more since that Dear Abby letter, and still there are women unable to oppose or actively cooperating in their own obliteration.
But then I look about at the strong, vital young women also marching, voting, struggling for their bodily autonomy and pay equality; unafraidedly naming their abusers, and calling out even an ex-President for the gross shame of his behavior, and I am encouraged and given new heart.
Mrs., Miss or Ms.: women exist. And they will never again be obliterated, from history or from life.
As always, feel free to repost any quotes from, or this full essay, with author attribution.
Speaking to the Heart of Many Matters 