…and it’s kind of depressing.
While speaking at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, Gloria Steinem (AKA “Gluryo Stinnerman” if you’re an ol-skool Jez reader) declared that gender equity is going to take another 150 years to achieve.
I haven’t had the chance to view it yet, but you can watch Auntie Gloria at F&M here (no transcript, sorry) to hear more about why she thinks it will take so long, and how it might be achieved. You can read more about her presentation here.
Until then, though, I’m curious to know what you think of that prognostication: does 150 years seem impossibly long? (For comparison, it’s been 162 years since the Seneca Falls Convention. Or does it seem hopelessly naive, as gender-based discrimination will always be with us? If you were to hazard a guess, how long do you think it will take until feminism is truly no longer necessary (if ever)? And, maybe most importantly, how will you know we’ve gotten there?
*Bonus points if you locate the sentence in the Lancaster Online story in desperate need of the Oxford comma!
Ooh! Firsties!
She urged the audience to work toward community, reproductive freedom, democratic families, an end to child abuse and conflict resolution.
Conflict resolution sucks, y’all.
To be honest, if it takes ONLY another 150 years to achieve gender equality, I’ll be delighted. I suspect she’s speaking about gender equality in the US and other Western nations. There are a lot of places on earth that have an even longer way to go, with more deeply entrenched misogyny and sexist cultural/political imperatives than we do.
Yeah, 150 years doesn’t sound totally unrealistic when you’re talking about changing attitudes like this
.
That said, there are a lot of variables that could contribute to rapid change such as parental leave policies like Sweden’s, but on the whole, 150 years doesn’t seem like a bad guess.
Gold star for Becky.
I’ve been thinking this over, and I gotta say, I’m not sure that we’re ever going to be “over” gender. As much as I look forward to a post-feminist (because post-patriarchal) society I don’t know that we’re ever going to get there. I’m hopeful that legal protections will continue to move in favor of families, which is good for everybody, but I really feel that the corporatocracy is going to fight hammer and tongs against them.
I hate to say it, but I think 150 yrs might be about right for enough equal protections to be in place.
I wonder however if we ever will get to a place where gender is not still an issue.
We’ve got such an incredibly long way to go
150 might be right to correct all the legal inequalities visible to us now in the US, but the culture will lag. As for other countries, I could not comment.
I’m convinced there are still issues that are not clear to us now, and we can’t even begin to predict when they will be resolved.
I would like to see it happen, but think it might end up being like cult leaders predicting the end of the world, damned inconvenient.
It seems to me that people need things to struggle against, so I predict never. Or at least not as long as we give let our children cut their teeth on books illustrating Opposites.
In 150 years I think a lot will be better, even if we’re not totally post-patriarchal.
When I think about how I grew up (and I ain’t old by any stretch of the imagination), I feel it wasn’t terribly feminist at all – on the holidays, girls cooked and cleaned, and boys sat on their behinds. (That’s still the case, obvs.). I have even been explicitly advised by family members to ‘marry well’! Before all of that nonsense is totally eradicated, it will take a few generations. At least.
For once I’m the optimist in the bunch-maybe it’s the wisdom and perspective of my 56 years.
It’s so much better than when I was a kid, and I think that girls now have a completely different set of expectations for themselves than we did back in the day.
I do agree, though, that gender problems will never completely disappear. But we can hope that rank, undisguised sexism will become generally frowned upon by both men and women.
And yeah, Ph.Dork, just ask the US Chanber of Commerce about family-friendly business practices. They think that means that women will all spend all their time shopping and leave the jobs to the menz.
…depressing indeed. My magic eight ball tells me “Outlook not so good” on the gender equity in 150 years. When I asked if it would ever happen, it said “you may rely on it.” Personally I think it will only happen after we have all worked very, very hard to make it happen.
Case in point, in talking to a fellow mom on the school playground this afternoon about kids and their reading preferences, she said her daughter wanted more books on princesses. We both sighed.
Did you ever hear the thesis that says that slavery was never ever going to end until humans figured out how to mechanize lots of labor, starting from the industrial revolution? That we still would have slaves if we didn’t have a good way to do hard, repetitive things? That very few souls in that pre-industrial time, with no way to imagine mechanized labor, were willing to say, “we’ve got to take some of that sacrifice onto ourselves in order to eliminate slavery”?
not that it means anything, but that idea sorta rings some bells in my head.
I wonder if there’s an analogy to be made between the institution of slavery and patriarchy/gender equality.