Because of them, I was able to choose my life, rather than accept my lot. I am endlessly grateful to the generation of women before me who fought so hard and so long for the legal and medical protections that woman always deserved. Gonna have a little ME time, or a whole damn ME life, for that matter - as men always could. By the time I was a teenager, highly-effective birth control was widely available to women, freeing a generation of women for the first time to be able to say, nah, think I'm gonna go to grad school, think I'm gonna start a business, think I'm gonna wait awhile before taking on the responsibilities of a family. But it just wasn't right if a girl or young woman desired something else, and the pressure was constant and omnipresent to conform.īut I was lucky. Well, OK, if you wanted to go to junior college for a secretarial course or teach Sunday School or work as a bank teller for a few years, no harm done. In the early '60s, girls were still expected to be sweet and submissive, pretty and perfect, and should aspire to no higher goal than snaring a husband ASAP and raising a family.
But when I get really down about the subject, I make myself go back and remember that the America I was born into as a female has indeed changed, and for the better.
I am often frustrated by the sad lack of progress we've made in 50 years - the idealistic, youth-driven belief of the 1960s that we would soon be living in a free, equal, and discrimination-free society has not come to full fruition, and likely never will. Now that I have a chunk 'o lifetime banked, it's sometimes a good exercise to look back and think about where the world was when I got here, and how it is now.
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