"We Lied to Our Girls"
Explore with me that one possible reason is our absence of a history that speaks truth to power. If history provides the pegs upon which we hook the threads of our existence and weave them into a tapestry of mutual understanding, then weak pegs aren't going to hold the richness of our collective experience, and the fewer the pegs, the thinner our knowledge of who we are.
By the mid 1980's the cultural co-optation of the second wave of feminism was pretty well along – some argue it was complete – and the idea of the liberation of half the population had been diverted into the service of a system that justifies inequality by making it an individual problem with individual initiative the solution. The liberated woman had won. You can be anything you want to be, we lied to our girls, never telling them that the playing field was not level. And so, when they tripped over the bumps in it as their eyes were on the stars we had taught them to reach for, and they fell on the face, they understood their failure to be their own individual shortcoming. They had learned to hate feminists by then -- femi-nazis – and distanced themselves as far as possible from the solution to a problem they had never learned still existed.
"The Culture's Failure"
We didn't teach them that, while they could strive to be anything they wanted to be, they would have to band together to set up the conditions that would allow them to do it. And we didn't teach them that if they failed, it was the culture's failure to allow it, not their failure to do it.
My Honors students at Syracuse University are disbelieving when they hear that women don't earn the same as men. Well, you can twist statistics anyway you want, they resist. It couldn't be true. If it was, they would have learned it before they got to university. When they are finally convinced of the truth of it, they are furious – at you. Why didn't their teachers teach them this?
"Equal Pay For Equal Work"
Let's imagine a scenario. A fourth grade classroom is studying the suffrage movement. Instead of one more boring ballot exercise, they put up replicas of slogans from women's rights conventions in the 1850's. EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK emblazons their classroom wall, as it did at the early woman's rights conventions. They read speeches in which women – and men – denounce unequal pay – women make only half the wages that men make. And then in Math, they have a problem. If women made 50% of the amount men made for the same work in 1850 and today they make about 75% of what men make, how many years will it take for women to achieve pay equity in the United States? Their learning is integrated. They research what pay equity looks like in the rest of the world and find that we are way behind most of the industrialized world. They speculate about a question: If I am the employer and I give this guy working for me $1.00 and I give this woman $.75, where does the other quarter go? With this backing in history, they examine where the presidential candidates stand on the issue of pay equity.
They learn that Sen. Obama is a co-sponsor of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act, legislation to end wage discrimination against women. Sen. McCain, on the other hand, opposes the Fair Pay Act.
"The Most Important Single Issue to Women Voters"
This isn't taking sides politically. This is educating the future voters to be responsible citizens in a democracy, to know the history of the issues in order to evaluate them today. Going to the heart of pay equity leads to an understanding of why the economy is the most important single issue to women voters. It becomes obvious: given economic discrimination, we are the most vulnerable economically.
Pay equity is a pretty tame issue, though. The most frightening part of this election goes deeper, threatening to rend the very fabric of our democratic society. I want to take you back to 1876 to revisit two women; both lost to history, women that I think we need to know about.
