"What feminism boils down to" by Molly Ivins PENSACOLA, Fla. -- Women's History Month is upon us, which calls for a smart salute to the Founding Mothers and a little stock-taking by the rest of us. Personally, I still think the single most amazing thing about the women's movement in this country, both the first wave and the second, is that it's barely a blink old in the eye of history. Until long after the Civil War, American women really had no civil rights, no legal rights and no property rights. If you look at it with hstorical perspective, we have come such a long way in such a short time that you'd think we'd do nothing but celebrate. Isn't it odd how at the same time it can feel like such a long time passing with no progress at all, or, worse, that there's such a vicious backlash building that we not only have to refight old battles, but there is no guarantee we can win them anymore? I like to start in Texas -- it gives one such an appreciation for where we are now. We started off briskly with a burst of progress in 1890, when the Legislature raised the age of sexual consent for a woman from 7 to 10. Until June 26, 1918, the Texas Constitution mandated that all Texans had the right to vote except "idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane and women." We continued to bump along with legal disparities (women were not allowed to serve on juries until 1954; they thought it might upset us), the most notorious of which was Article 1220 of the state penal code. 1220 made it legal for a husband who found his wife and her lover `in flagrante delicto,' as we say in Muleshoe, to dispatch one or both of them to kingdom come without any legal consequence. And that was the law until 1972, when they changed it because Texas women started demanding equal shooting rights. And how have things changed since then? Well, I used to go on college campuses 25 years ago and announce that I was a feminist, and people thought it meant I believed in free love and was available for a quick hop in the sack with anyone who asked. Now I go on college campuses and say I'm a feminist, and half of them think it means I'm a lesbian. What I'd like to know is, how'd we get from there to here without ever passing "Go"? I'll tell you exactly what it means to be a feminist, and I know because I was there from the beginning of the second wave: It means you believe that women should get equal pay for doing equal work. This is not a real exclusive club. We don't have a lot of entrance requirements. You don't even have to be female. I can already hear a bunch of people muttering: "Oh, it can't be that simple; I've heard you have to have hairy legs or no bra or think all sex is rape." Nope, you just have to think women should get paid the same as men for doing the same job. You think that's already an established principle in law -- something that no one has had to worry about for years? Perhaps you didn't notice just a few weeks ago when female employees of Merrill Lynch, the financial services firm, won a huge settlement. Does Merrill Lynch strike you as some kind of hick, backwoods corporation that might have missed the news that it is illegal to pay women who do the same job as men less than those men? You'd be just as surprised by the other major employees that still discriminate. Welcome to 21st-century feminism. The fight's still on. Another thing that the second wave of the women's movement tried to do was open up opportunities for women, and in this I think we have been successful. I think girls today have a wider range of dreams; they can dream of being doctors as well as nurses, pilots as well as stewardesses, lawyers as well as court reporters, CEOs as well as secretaries to CEOs, astronauts, mountain climbers, professional athletes, orchestra conductors, presidents of the United States, electricians, carpenters, engineers, clergywomen and much, much more. And one more thing the women's movement set out to do -- I know because I was there -- was to change things so that women who choose to be full-time homemakers no longer introduce themselves by saying apologetically, "I'm just a housewife." We made our mistakes -- most dramatically in our failure to make working-class and minority women feel part of this movement. But there are mistakes that we get accused of that we did not make. We are not anti-male, anti-sex, anti-marriage or anti-motherhood. My late mother the Republican, at the age of 84, had a bumper sticker on her car that said: "Pro-child, pro-choice and pro-family." And she was. I recently read a column by that nincompoop Cal Thomas, one of the finest minds of the 15th century, in which he seized upon some extreme quotations of who-knows-what-vintage from radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and tried to use them to discredit the entire women's movement. That is such a tired old ploy. Why is Dworkin more representative of the women's movement than, say, the late Erma Bombeck, a devoted feminist? I mean, who sold more books? Why Catherine MacKinnon rather than Ellen Goodman? There is more to be said on the state of the American feminism anon, but for now, let us say with Aunt Susan B. Anthony: "Woman has shown equal devotion with man to the cause of freedom and has stood firmly by his side in its defense. Together they have made this country what it is. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever." ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
