Why I Feel So Much after RBG's Death: A Letter to My Male Friend

To my white male friend, 

You asked me, in earnest, to explain the injustice women face, and it's hard for me to figure out where to begin.  

Do I start with the fact that women have only had the right to vote for 100 years in the US?

Do I jump to the fact that once women were allowed a political voice, economic security and reproductive health became "two sides of the same coin"?

Do I try to tease out that even though women were able to vote after the 19th amendment by law, in practice, many women were still denied this right?

You and I are the same age, mid-forties, and we both grew up in central Pennsylvania and attended the same liberal arts college.  We have a shared understanding of what it means to be a Bucknellian who grew up in central PA.  So perhaps that's the best place to start.

My parents attended the same college 25 years before we did. In 2013, for our shared reunion celebration, my mom and I co-authored a piece for the reunion newspaper titled, "Bucknell Women, A Generation Apart." (This blog post is titled "I need a wife," as the intro to the article is a commentary on my role as a working mother.  The article is copied at the end of the post.)  In it, we described the different experiences we had, as women, on the same campus. She was hazed.  She was segregated from men.  She had a dress code and a curfew (that the men did not).  

It was the social unrest of the late 1960s/early 1970s that sparked the changes on our college campus that ultimately made my (and your) experience dramatically different.  Can you imagine only the women having a curfew or a dress code?  Honestly, we wouldn't have stood for it, and I think it's likely that our male friends wouldn't have either.

But there were other elements of injustice that women at Bucknell faced, even in our day. If you ask your female colleagues from the engineering department (the fact you have few to choose from is a sign that things weren't quite the same for girls and boys growing up in the 1980s), you will probably gain some insight. From academics to the differences in rules and resources for sororities and fraternities, there was a culture and history of "having a place" (or maybe even being put in our place) that women definitely had to navigate even in the 1990s.

One area that seemed equal from the outside view was sports.  Though I'm guessing if we examined the budgets of the sports teams we would find inequity, there were ample opportunities available for women to play sports at our university when we attended. Title IX, passed in 1972, had made it possible.

Title IX is one of my favorite laws, to be honest.  It made me into an athlete.  My generation of women was the first to benefit from it, though admittedly, it took time to see the effects in my central PA school district.  When I entered high school in the fall of 1990, I had two choices for a fall sport: field hockey and cheerleading.  Though I had been playing soccer since I was five years old in our co-ed rec league with boys - and I could hang with them on the field, no question - the soccer team was a boys' team, and girls were not welcomed.  

After a year of playing field hockey, where the rule that you cannot kick the ball or touch it in any way with your feet drove me nuts, I decided it was a better path to play the sport I loved, despite being unwanted by the coach. I joined the boys' soccer team, which they had to let me do because of Title IX.  In fact, a few of us girls did, and as our numbers grew, and our talent started encroaching on the boys' playing time, I think we kind of pissed some people off. By my senior year, we finally had a girls soccer team, one that my parents and others were able to advocate for using Title IX.  As a side note, Title IX also helped us start a softball team for the school too, and now, nearly three decades later, both teams are a source of pride for the district.

I share these examples because on the one hand, from our generation's perspective, especially from a male perspective, things are seemingly equal.  On the other hand, it's been growth within our lifetime, particularly from the efforts of generations before us, that has led us to this perspective.

And this brings me to the fact that RBG died, and the fear that we will regress is very real.

The fight for women's equality grew after the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.  With political voice came the possibility of ownership: ownership of property, ownership of education and career, and ownership of our bodies.  The article I linked above on the two-sided coin of economic security and reproductive health does a nice job of summarizing why ownership of our own bodies is important to the strides we have made toward equality.  Here is additional information on reproductive rights. 

Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a linch-pin to maintaining progress on women's rights. 

Without going deeply into equity issues that arise without the opportunity for legal abortions (summary: wealthy and white women will always have access to safe abortions, regardless of legality), the simple fact is that this Supreme Court decision recognized women's reproductive decision-making power.  We are not just bodies that exist to reproduce. 

However, since the decision, this self-determining power has been slowly attacked, and in recent years, reproductive rights have been being stripped.  Access to contraception, made easier by the Affordable Care Act, has been under attack and limits upheld by a conservative Supreme Court.

Reproductive rights, including the right for women to decide with whom and when they have sex, is a problem worldwide. (See Amnesty International and the UN Human Rights.) In the US, the recent #MeToo movement (see also NY Times curated list of articles) has illuminated injustice that women face daily.  From sexual harassment in school and the workplace to sexual violence in marriages and everything in between, we live in a culture where women need to be vigilant constantly, and we need to teach our daughters to do the same. This culture is built upon a foundation of underlying belief that women's bodies belong to men.  

This belief seeps into our economic structures as well.  From the time I was five years old, I had a goal to become a college professor.  This goal required me to get advanced degrees.  It meant money, time, and dedication.  As someone who got married at age 23, I needed my husband to be supportive of my goal, and he always has been.  However, I've always counted myself as "lucky" in that regard.  Why is that?  Shouldn't it be expected that partners support each other in achieving their long-term career goals?  I think it should, but the reality is that many women I know have stepped off their education and career paths in order to take on more traditional roles.  It's still the dominant culture, and despite my career success, I've still needed to push back against this culture within my own family.

Women aren't equal in the home and workforce. A gender pay gap still exists, and one contributing factor is the expectation of mothers to handle the load of child rearing (the link between economics and reproduction is strong). There is a lot of evidence that the pandemic has and will continue to hit women harder than men in terms of economic security. (For more on the pandemic impact on women, see Forbes, NY Times, The Atlantic, McKinsey, or talk to any mom who also works outside the home and is trying to manage school and work at home simultaneously.)

So at the same time that women may struggle even more economically, there is the very real possibility that a linch-pin - one of the "laws" of the 1970s that allowed the progress that impacted our generation - will be removed.  We do not have an Equal Rights Amendment (also originally passed in 1972 but not ratified by enough states until recently and likely not to become law), which means that other than the right to vote, equality is not guaranteed to women in our Constitution.  All of the strides made to date have been done through progressive legislation, which can be easily undone and in some cases already have been.

I want my daughter (and son) to live in a world where she owns her body, just as her brother does.  I want her and all of her generation, regardless of socio-economic status and race, to have access to contraception and affordable healthcare designed for women's needs.  This ability will pave the way for educational and economic choices that will allow women of the next generation to live freely and to continue to fight for changes that can eliminate a culture of power over them. 

This is why I marched in January 2017 and why I shared my story after that event.

RBG was not only a progressive voice on the Supreme Court, she embodied the spirit of the fight for women's rights. She was a pioneer in her career, a working mother, and for a time the ONLY female voice on the Supreme Court. Her death means the loss of an icon to several generations, but it also means the loss of an advocate for women. The fact that we have six men (5 of them White) who will likely decide our fate as justices on the Supreme Court is a wake-up call to women of my generation.

Thank you, my friend, for asking about and wanting to better understand the injustices that women face. It is difficult to capture in this letter the intricacies of history, economics, and politics. I admit that there is much more that could be discussed, particularly the role of race and class in the experience of women.  There is also more to discuss in terms of the experience of LGBTQ+ individuals. I hope this offers a starting point for reading and conversation.  

Your white female friend,

Kristen