by Patricia Jonik Stein

The commotion on the New York City street fascinated and perplexed me.  There was a bevy of women circling a flame-filled green metal municipal waste can.  Some were holding hands with eyes on one another while others looked pensively at the few police officers standing nearby. My friend grabbed my arm and guided me toward the intersection where we would cross over to visit one of the museums that she had on her list.

“Do you know what is going on?” I timidly asked my worldlier friend about the throng of mostly women on the sidewalk, chanting and marching.

“Yes, they are burning their bras to show that women have rights too.”

I pulled back to get a glimpse of lace, ribbons and underwires snaking whippets of smoke and ash into the air.  It was an awakening for me.  Indeed, I knew that as a girl, I was considered a second class citizen, but it never occurred to me that it should not be that way.  Why, I thought in my naïve high school mind, would one burn underwear to prove something?  In 1967, I knew that people had taken to the streets for numerous issues: the Vietnam War, civil rights, dangerous work conditions in factories and a host of other problems, but women were not minorities and I hadn’t entered the work pool yet, so the glass ceiling was no more than something belonging in Cinderella’s castle.

In the years that followed I learned many things.  I had boyfriends who wanted to “take care” of me, I had a gentle father and mother who denied that I needed a college education because some man would certainly “take care” of me, but they were people of their times and the times were beginning to change. Then there was a high school counselor who would not help me apply for college until all the boys had been accepted. Boys, after all, had to earn a living. The school thought it was acceptable, but I also had a mind of my own.

As I made my own way through college and shed the overbearing boyfriends, I learned that there was a glass ceiling, not in Cinderella’s castle, but in corporate America and indeed, women’s pay was less than a man’s for the same work.  Women were considered of lesser importance than their male counterparts, even within my own family.

My mother, who was a bit of a fiery individual, instructed me that women can and do run things, but not overtly. We had to play a game and covertly manipulate the men into following our desires.  It worked in many instances, yet it just did not feel right. It certainly did not pan out as well in the work force, unless wiles were used in the form of sexual favors.  That was not my idea of a way to move ahead, especially when I was instructed to “wine and dine” certain clients to gain their business.

There were hard lessons during those times. Our young men were being slaughtered in Vietnam, African Americans were being disenfranchised and held down, and women were still viewed as objects for the delight of men or to carry babies, whether wanted or not, and of course to have a piping hot dinner on the table. We had the right to vote, but many women voted as their husbands instructed.  We did not even have the right to govern our own bodies, let alone think for ourselves.

Today, many of these issues have been overcome.  There are women who are CEOs and managers in the work force.  There are women who are highly educated. There are women in the military, not just as nurses.  We have the right to abortions should we desire or medically have need for them. Many of the young women of today do not know what it is like to desperately seek a ‘back alley’ abortion where their lives could be at stake or to be viewed in a highly derogatory manner if they are single and sexually active or have a live-in boyfriend.  Some do not fully understand the extent of the double standard to which their mothers were treated.

Great strides have been made for women and there have been great women and some men working diligently for that progress, but there is still a hill to climb for true equality.  It is an ongoing idea that women are a lesser breed than men, that “only talk” about grabbing their bodies or kissing them without their consent is okay, or actually doing so is a triumph.  With a misogynist in the White House, it will be even harder for women to crack through the elusive glass ceiling, but it is not impossible.

Change comes slowly, but it does come, even if it is kicking and screaming and with pain much like a baby being birthed.  There will be a woman in the White House eventually, there will be changes in how women are viewed, not as objects but as people with hopes, dreams, talents and intelligence.  But this change will not come easily. With each and every step forward we make, there will be a setback as there always has been with any positive progression.  We do need to raise our voices and while maybe not burn our underwear, use our intelligence, our initiative and our abilities to keep marching forward.  Yet, we need to also remember what our mothers have taught us: that sometimes perhaps we do have to work from the inside, from behind, not necessarily overtly but honestly.  We should make small inroads, and like the stream eventually it will become a river and move into the ocean, equal with every other drop of water.

They say the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world, so it is up to us to raise the next generation to understand that both genders have value, equal value, that women and men both deserve respect and opportunity, that we are but one species and that our very world and humanity depends on it.  After all, without both men and women equally, we are extinct.

Patricia Jonik Stein lives with her husband and two cats and writes from her Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, home. She worked as a theme reader, writing coach, teacher and mentor after a career in market research. She retired to care for her aging mother after her father’s death. She raised three sons, who are now on their own, and she’s happily awaiting the next generation to come along.

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