Women's Work

I’m afraid I tend to repeat the small anecdotes of my life. So, my apologies if you’ve heard more than once that when I was five or six years old my aunt, of blessed memory, took me to hear Eleanor Roosevelt speak. Or, if you’ve already learned that when I was in sixth grade, while daydreaming in my classroom one morning, I decided that when I grew up, I would not become a secretary, a nurse or a teacher. Those occupations were “women’s work,” and I recognized, even at age 12, that those occupations were not accorded sufficient respect.

The rest of my life might, over simplistically, be defined as unpacking those experiences– law school, elected office, appointed office, all fit somewhere in that framework. At the same time, I waited, no, expected that the position of women, at least in the United States, if not in the world, would be one of continuous improvements.

I was an optimistically incorrect youth. Yes, there have been some improvements. For me, personally, that is. I did go to law school. I was not in only woman in my class. That’s something. I chose public sector law, a less lucrative track than the corporate sector, but I made the choice not because there were fewer higher paying opportunities open for women, though, of course, there were many fewer better paying opportunities for women, but because in a false binary society of money vs. meaning, I chose meaning.

But for many women things have gotten worse, not better. The salary gap is widening. Forced pregnancy is now the law of the land. And the rape of young girls by the wealthiest and most powerful men in the country goes largely unremarked. We drift with no moral compass.

So, I should not be surprised that we have had no woman president. On the bright side, there are currently 14 women governors in the United States, more than there have ever been. Ten are Democrats. There are 26 women in the U.S. Senate, again a record. Sixteen are Democrats. About one third of college presidents are women. And more than half of all undergraduates are women. Almost half of practicing attorneys are women. Half of all clergy members are women,

It’s March. It’s Women’s History Month. That we name it already admits there’s a problem. We don’t have a “Guys Month.” It’s an odd consolation to remember that women have only had the right to vote for a little more than one hundred years.

I return to women’s careers. There has been a slow increase in salary for nurses. At the same time, the number of men in the profession has increased from two percent to almost thirteen percent. The job of secretary has become outdated. We have office managers and administrative assistants, still mostly filled by women, still mostly lower salary. Though the lowest salary office jobs such as file clerks, simply don’t exist anymore, the price of technology.

Teachers remain on the front lines. Though there are many more men in the classroom these days, the teaching profession is under respected, and, across a large swath of the country, new laws restrain essential curriculum and reading choices.

I look back to Eleanor Roosevelt as a significant moral compass of her time. Even before she became first lady, her work with the Congress of Working Women, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the National Consumers League and the Women’s Trade Union League helped advance the role of women in the workplace and in labor unions. She fought for women delegates to serve on the national political conventions. As first lady, her work on behalf of women became global.

This history helps relieve my sense of gloom and doom. Women can effect change for good. People can make change for good. I would like to believe that no matter what crazy, brutal, inhumane things Trump does to shift the national attention, no matter how many bombs he drops or people he kills, humanity will ultimately prevail.

And Aretha Franklin gets the last word.

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