Civil Rights... women's rights really have improved!

Watching PBS' News Hour tonight, I was interested in the piece about Civil Rights 50 years after the March on Washington.  Being a woman I have my own perspective on this. Women have come a long way since then, a lot further than blacks and gay and lesbian Americans, if truth be told.  We have burned our bras and forced men to accept us in the workplace, academia and have made large gains in income. We still haven't gotten a woman into the White House, but more and more women are working in Congress and I have faith we'll have a woman president before I die.

When I went to college in 1968 I went to a small, Baptist college - The University of Redlands - and frankly many of the professors there felt we woman were only there for our mrs degree.  Maybe some of us were.
In the dormitories, we women were required to be signed in by 10 pm on weeknights,  and 11 pm on weekends... unless we had special permission in advance. And we were grounded if we didn't do so.  Really! (Men of course could come and go as they pleased.)  We were high school graduates, many of our high school friends were out there married or working for a living and we "girls" still had to check in or be grounded.

I admit I was somewhat confused about what I wanted to do with my life. I ping ponged through majors before selecting a group major so I didn't HAVE to choose.  So I took a class called Contemporary Womanhood in our school's  January inter term to take a breather and maybe learn something new. My eyes were opened wide!  I learned who Betty Friedan was (that's her in the forefront above leading a march for the Equal Rights Amendment.)

I discovered that women in some states were not allowed to own property or have a credit card in their own name in the 1960s!  Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women at that time were earning only 56% of what men were for equal work.  (We're still not there, ladies... now we earn an average of 77 cents for every dollar earned by men in comparable work.)

I apparently was also very lucky to be a college student.  Women constituted about 22% of the college population in 1968 and were openly discriminated against at the graduate level since Title IX had not been passed as yet (that was in 1972)  and there were very few opportunities for women to participate in anything but intramural sports. (Most people think Title IX applies only to sports, but it is far more reaching. It also covers higher education, career education, sexual harassment, standardized testing and technology. )

I applaud the efforts of the gay community to achieve the rights we women struggled for... marriage to a person of our choice, the ability to have families if we want and not if we don't, I applaud the Black community for fighting for their rights too - there is still too much inequality on so many issues for them as well.  Who said old white men were the only ones who could rule the world?  Maybe if they let us rule the world it  would be a better place.  And while we're at it, pay us the same amount as you pay your golfing buddy Fred.