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WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH 2010
It’s Women’s History Month! Yay! Another month to call attention to the gals.
March 2010. Hmm. Let’s see. How are we gals doing? Well, we have Sarah Palin out there doing stand up. She is just breakin’ all the rules. Gosh, I remember when she first came on the scene. I was intrigued, curious and hopeful, as I always am about a new woman on the scene. Then she got everyone all charged up with her lipstick jokes and I became (and remain) terrified that she’ll end up on a poster next to Eleanor Roosevelt. God Forbid.
We’ve got Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Candy Crowley anchoring big news shows. Good. Sonia got in, Hillary’s keepin’ the peace and Obama’s got lotsa gals doing big jobs.
And Maria Shriver’s October Women’s Conference was just da bomb, with everyone from Eve Ensler to Richard Branson addressing all the challenges we women face in light of the big news that for the first time more than fifty percent of American workers - PAID American workers that is - are female.
But. The kids still know a lot more about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan than they do about Abigail Adams and Lucretia Mott.
MY daughter is turning thirteen. Becoming a woman and all. We’re Jewish and having the big B.M. (bat-mitzvah – bar for a boy). It’s a beautiful important right of passage. She has been studying and preparing for years! I am so proud of her. And I can’t help but notice how she stuck it out – when she was tired or frustrated or just not in the mood – but she didn’t quit. Did ya hear that Sarah Palin? She didn’t quit. Maybe someday she’ll grow up and be the president. She is learning now about how the right choice is the hard choice and how when you make a commitment – be it to do your chores or learn your Torah portion, you keep it. I wanted to quit several times. I wanted to quit reminding her of her responsibilities and I wanted to quit schlepping her every Sunday morning since she was four years old and then Tuesday afternoons and then Tuesday AND Thursday for tutoring. But like a lot of good woman (and jews) I suffered through it – though never silently. That’s just not my style.
Anyhoo, I like being a role model for my girls. I’m a divorced working mother. I don’t know. Maybe if some big book agent came at me waving a big fat check I could be persuaded to quit my job and go off and write about all the neat and not so neat stuff that happened to me in the last year. Of course, my children would probably think it’s OK to quit too, ‘cause ya know it’s not what ya say it’s what you do right? I have a sixteen-year-old daughter as well who really has her nose to the grindstone taking all those A.P. (Advanced Placement) courses for college. I admire her as much as I admire her sister. Ya see, high school has been really hard on her. It’s really hard anyway but then all this icky stuff happened with her dad and he split and she kinda dropped the academic ball a bit and she had to grow up a little faster than she should have.
I look at my daughters and think about how Victoria Woodhull (the first woman to run for President in 1872) was just fifteen years old when she tried to escape a horrible slave driving religiously fanatic abusive father and mother by marrying only to learn she married an abusive philandering drunk. She learned that when she had her first baby at sixteen. Sixteen. But she didn’t quit or run off. Nope.
