You’ve come a long way, baby…or have you?

I love history. The best-documented parts are horrible—disaster, cruelty, and war—but my favorite stories are about real people’s lives. We humans have changed so little over the millennia. Homo sapiens have always fallen in love, gotten annoyed, and joked around. Children have always misbehaved, and mothers have always worried. One letter surviving from Roman times is from a mother to her soldier son; it accompanied a care package of extra socks and underwear. Around the same time in Japan, court noblewoman Sei Shonagon was writing about annoyances like snoring lovers, whining mosquitoes, and know-it-all neighbors.

History puts time into perspective, as does getting older. One hundred years nearly fits into living memory. Photographs were in wide use by the 1840s, meaning we only missed having photographs of the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence by a decade or two. One hundred years ago, my grandmother was already a teenager, and women were voting for the first time in America.

I am old enough to remember 1970’s advertisements for Virginia Slims cigarettes, which featured vintage photographs of ‘misbehaving’ women demanding rights, driving cars, or sneaking a smoke behind the barn. The catchline was, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The implied assumption was that women had won the big battles for equal rights. At the time, I thought it was true.

Magazine advertisement for Virginia Slims (Philip Morris USA)

It didn’t occur to me (in my defense, I was still a kid) that a subtle premise of the marketing campaign—e.g., that attractive women are slim, white, and young—showed that we still had a long way to go. Well into the 21st century now, how much progress have we made? Women still get paid less than men for the same jobs. During their lifetimes, most women will be sexually harassed (or worse). Matters that were once considered settled law, like autonomy over one’s body, are being relitigated.

We owe gratitude to the brave souls in the early twentieth century, the so-called ‘first wave’ of modern feminists, who secured basic rights (the vote, the ability to own property, to sue for divorce, etc.). Some of these women were repaid with prison time; many were mocked, frequently by other women. Let’s be frank, the Virginia Slims ads themselves poke fun at the suffragettes. How cute they were in their button-boots and white dresses, what a lark! From the safety of settled law, we could laugh.

 We should also thank the ‘second wave’ feminists of the 1960s and 1970s who stood on the platform their grandmothers built, broadening it to take on sexual freedom, reproductive rights, and implicit, informal gender role inequities.

It has been fifty years, is it time for a third wave? What has my generation done to move things ahead? With the Dobbs decision, which holds that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to an abortion, there is a new rallying cause. People of diverse political beliefs don’t agree on much, but a solid majority in the U.S. support the right to an abortion. Particularly in southern and midwestern states where abortion rights are most at risk, new voter registrations ahead of November’s midterm elections are surging. Most of these new registrants are female.[1] It cannot be called a wave yet—indeed, many analysts expect more of a red than a blue one at the ballot box this fall—but it bears watching. Political waves move forward sometimes, and other times they recede. History is making itself right now. American women—the ones who are registered to vote, that is—will help decide how far they are willing to go back.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/opinion/women-voters-roe-abortion-midterms.html