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Today is the 31st birthday of one of my closest friends. Dr. P is a woman I admire greatly. She finished her five year surgery residency this past June and is a currently a Fellow at a prestigious hospital in Florida. Today also happens to be slightly more well known across the blogosphere as Women’s Equality Day, which I find very fitting because so many of Dr. P’s achievements would likely not have been possible if not for ongoing pressure for gender equality. As Glennia Campbell of The Silent “I” explains:
This day commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, giving women the right to vote. The right for women to vote was first proposed in 1848, but did not become law until 1920, 72 years later. For 72 years, American women organized, rallied, and fought for the right to vote, something we take for granted today.
What does the right to vote have to do with the right to practice medicine? One need only look at today’s political environment to see how social justice is impacted by the right to vote. Sharon Brogan at Watermark: a poet’s notebook wrote:
It's tough to imagine a world where everyone gets an equal shot; where each person's potential has a chance to fulfill itself; and where opportunity is not a reward for race, gender, class, family, money, or power.
This ideal situation only happens when all people have voices. Enfranchisement is one way to make your voice heard. Without the right to vote, politicians would not even bother to (pretend to?) care about issues that concern women. It is not just straight policy. The right to vote enables people to elect representatives who then go on to select who serves on our nation’s courts. These decisions as often as not dictate how we can live our lives. Back to my (admittedly labored) example, if medical schools continued to admit only men, Dr. P would certainly not be where she is today, and many of her patients would have been deprived of care from a skilled and compassionate physician.
The right to vote is just one step towards creating a world in which women and men are recognized as equals, and it’s impossible to deny that this right came from the feminist movement. In early June, Morra Aarons wrote an inspiring essay on BlogHer, "I’m not a feminist, but… F-that!" that inspired dozens of fantastic comments about what women like about being feminists. Along those lines, Peggy at Peggy’s Musings sponsored an essay contest about what feminism means (“Just share how you'd teach your children, or how you'd like to teach our next generation, about feminism”).
The deadline was August 21, and winners will be announced on August 30. It is definitely worth checking out to see the different ways that feminism is making people’s lives – both women’s and men’s – better.
On a sadder note, The Fringe Blog reported on the loss of a great humanist writer and activist, Grace Paley. Paley died on Thursday, Aug. 23. Her New York Times obituary noted that Paley “focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.” Of course, these are exactly the types of people that tend to get ignored in literature because they are considered less important that the men created by Roth, Bellow, and Malamud.
On Women’s Equality Day, let’s honor the pioneering women who fought bravely for the right to vote, as well as every day women like Grace Paley and my friend Dr. P, whose hard work continues to prove that old feminist slogan - women are people, too.
Suzanne also blogs at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants
