Women hold up half the sky

I’ve been thinking about my mother lately. Yesterday would have been her 95th birthday.  She was among the youngest of a family of twelve who grew up on a farm in upstate New York.  Because my grandfather didn’t believe in “higher education” for girls, my mother and her sisters were not sent to the high school in town but stayed in the school down the road, repeating the 8th grade until they were sixteen and old enough to be on their own.  She moved downstate and lived first with a brother and his wife, gaining a skill that made her marketable, and then with a girlfriend.  After working for a few years she came home, married, and became a stay-at-home mom.  She was always a voracious reader. I remember when she earned her GED.  And the various things she took up, including mentoring various young female friends and relatives, oil painting, and selling Amway.  Later she worked as a home health care aid, which earned her health care benefits in retirement.  She had cancer, the result of  a lifetime of smoking. She died at 77, having lived with us after my father, who had been her caregiver, died.

My generation was the first to go to college.  I got married at 21 (younger than she had) and worked as a teacher while John attended medical school.  After he graduated I also became a stay-at-home mom.  And earned an MBA.  I also took up projects (mostly kid-focused and non-paying) while my kids were small, and I’ve mentored young people, both male and female.  Unlike my mother, I’ve had the opportunity for meaningful and gratifying work, most but not all of it unpaid. For that I am profoundly grateful.

I think about the differences as I read about the terrifying threats to women’s rights that seem to be happening all over.  Recently I read The Handmaids’ Tale for the first time, and it did not seem far-fetched.  Although recent stories argue that it’s been misrepresented, it’s easy to believe the news that Missouri’s SB 5 would allow employers to fire women because they are on the pill.  Reality is so bizarre that nothing can be ruled out.

As I make choices about how to spend my time now that I have so much of it, I want to focus on ways to support women, both as individuals and collectively.  I’m interested in ideas.