Free To Be… You and Me was one of my greatest treasures as a child. It’s an anthology of short fiction, poetry, songs, and a dialogue or two, all having to do in one way or another with being true to yourself, with a frequent emphasis on gender neutrality. I bet I went all the way through it 25 times. I see it’s still available. That’s a good thing. I think a little piece of my next check may bring it into the boys’ lives.
It was a Ms. Foundation project. When I consider that today, I’m struck by the contrast between then and now in terms of what people like Gloria Steinem are up to. Generally she’s embarrassing herself when she makes news today. It’s easy to forget what wonderful—and indeed, sensible—things she stood for 40 years ago. It’s also easy to lament how much her current level of agitation potentially trivializes the real fight of which she was an iconic part.
(Gee, any parallels with racism there? But I guess that’s another post.)
A friend of mine was recently invited by a colleague to offer her view on being “a woman in a man’s world.” Well, she didn’t know what that meant. She was “a woman in the world.” Indeed, I think that’s about right. Any surviving sexism today tends to be isolated in individuals, not propagated by institutions. Said individuals are steadily marginalized as people like me and my friend breed, and that’s really the endgame for any kind of sociocultural movement of this sort.
Gloria Steinem has won. It’s disappointing she’ll die disbelieving that.
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