Think Like a Girl: A Goodbye to Backwards and in Heels

My grandmother was born in 1919. She was a WWII nurse, a working mother, a wife. She worked tirelessly for the Salvation Army. One of my favorite stories about her was when my grandfather was passed over for a government job that should have been his. She bundled up her nearly 1-year-old (my father) and her 3-year-old and went to Washington DC to give the President a piece of her mind. She ended up talking to an Assistant Post Master instead. My grandfather got his job. Clearly she knew her own mind. She was tenacious, determined and some might say stubborn. Yet she was not born with the right to vote.

American women won the right to vote in 1920 with the 19^th Amendment. It wasn’t a slam dunk. About a third of Congress voted against it, and ratification state by state was an uphill fight.

Raising girls is tricky sometimes. Probably raising boys is hard, too, but having been a girl and now raising two daughters, I can only speak to that. In one of the most modernized nations in the world, we’re only two generations out from the 19^th Amendment. We’re only one generation out from Mad Men’s 1960’s. And I’m only about a week out from being told, at work, that I looked “hot” because I had worn a skirt.

I want my daughters to embrace being female, to enjoy being female. I want them to know the history of it, the people who blazed the trails we, they, walk on. And I want them to never, ever question whether that history places limits on their limitless future. I want them to appreciate when literal doors are held open for them (that’s just polite), but also not feel like they need an invitation to break the glass ceiling. I want phrases like glass ceiling to be quaint and old-fashioned for them, like flibbertigibbet or fortnight. But I want them to be aware that there’s always a glass ceiling for someone, and to be compassionate enough to take up those causes.

When my daughter did a research project on ancient Greece, the historical fact that stuck with her was that unwanted infants, which included baby daughters, could be abandoned. They either died of the elements or were sometimes taken in by other families and then often raised as slaves. “Girls have it better now,” she said with her usual understated candor. True that. And yet.

I work at a company that’s about 90% male. There’s almost never a line for the bathroom. So, there’s that. A lot of the time, I don’t think about being the only girl in the room. But occasionally, I look around and think, “Oh, right.” For instance when a coworker, not my boss, scheduled a meeting with me –an actual calendar invite meeting so that I took a notebook and pen – for a meeting that turned out to be about my “career goals.” He was willing to help me out. Lend a hand. Be my champion, I suppose, in this tough man’s world. He was also a year younger than me, not particularly adept at his own job, and on his way out of the company, as it turned out. “Once I get settled in a new job,” he said, “I’ll send for you.”

Um, come again? I’ll send for you?

There are only so many things you can say to that. And if I say it more than once, I lose my PG-13 rating, so I’m just going to let everyone think it. Because, seriously.

When the program I work for gave out commemorative models of the aircraft that we use for our product, I was told that my husband could help me put it together. Uh huh. I’m a mother. To say nothing of going through natural childbirth, if I can put together a 500+ piece Treetop Hideaway Legos set without tears, I can handle myself in nearly any small pieces situation. I’ll see you your model airplane and raise you three dozen homemade popsicle-stick Valentines crafts.

I’m not writing to sermonize about how biased life still is for women in the 21^st century. There are lots of circumstances about life that are unfair. It’s unfair to be born into a village without running water while I leave partially full bottles of celebrity-endorsed Smart Water sitting in my car for three weeks before finally tossing them. It’s unfair to be judged according to the latitude you call home or the accent you speak with. Life is a loaded deck. It’s important to recognize that. I’m well-housed, well-educated and respected by those who matter to me, and I don’t discount that. But better than it was is not as good as it could be.

Every child wants to be something when they grow up. Right now, my oldest wants to be a teacher and my youngest wants to be an author and run an ice cream and fresh fruit food truck. Those have been pretty consistent for awhile, but if it turns out my daughter wants to be a farmer, or a ballerina or an organic chemist, I’m all in. If she wants to be a radical homemaker or the next Sheryl Sandberg, I’m delighted as long as she feels confident, empowered and happy. But I like what Sarah Silverman said, “Stop telling girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. I think it’s a mistake. Not because they can’t, but because it would’ve never occurred to them they couldn’t.”

Sometimes I worry that because I married someone who is a veritable Mr. FixIt, I’m setting a poor example. My grandmother was a master gardener, and so I can’t keep a houseplant alive. I didn’t need to learn. Someone else took care of that. Meanwhile, I don’t know how to stop a leaking faucet or hang cabinet doors. Someone else takes care of that. “Daddy will fix it,” my daughters say. And more than likely he will. But shouldn’t I know how? Shouldn’t I show my daughters that they don’t need Daddy to fix it, that they can fix it, because I can fix it. And then I remember that being successful doesn’t mean knowing how to do everything from organic canning to auto maintenance. It means that I am confident in my abilities to find answers. I am capable and I am intelligent. What I don’t know today, I can learn tomorrow if I need to. Or, I can go to my grave never learning to can peaches and find my answers to that in Aisle 16 of my local grocery store. Answers come in different forms. If each of my daughters reach adulthood knowing that they are capable, that they are intelligent and confident that they can find the answers, their answers, maybe their generation will have fewer patronizing meetings with would-be benefactors.

I sometimes think of that old saying, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.” And frankly, I’m over it. I’m over women being congratulated or vilified for wearing the pants, and climbing the ladder and sitting at the table and all those irritating phrases that imply we’re slightly out of our league but allowed at the club. We smell good, I’ve been told. And yet we are also our harshest critics. We judge each other’s fitness and morality and fashion. We criticize each others’ parenting decisions and career paths. Sometimes justly, sometimes not.

Eight years ago, my female boss caustically called Hillary Clinton “that bitch” in casual office conversation. “Why do you say that?” I asked. She just didn’t like her. “Bitch” is an attack on our DNA. It’s personal. And it’s lazy and overused. And we don’t have to like other women just because we’re women. We shouldn’t be voting single issue with our reproductive systems. The assumption that we would is just as insulting as being told that we should. But we can respect ourselves enough to contribute to a meaningful dialogue. We’ve come farther, worked harder, than stereotypes and name calling. Whether we like the women who have been our trailblazers, we can acknowledge that they have had to dance backwards and in heels. We owe it to our grandmothers, and theirs, to be thoughtful with our criticism of anyone, but especially other women.

Our mothers have had more options than our grandmothers. Our daughters have the world at their feet, but even cleared paths need care and maintenance. What paths we take should be less about gender and more about personality, with no one dancing backwards. At our house, my husband generally mows the yard. I generally cook. This may seem like a traditional gender divide, until you consider that I get hives from the sun. And I’m allergic to something like seven types of grass. Also, I am not particularly organized. This means that if I mow, I meander around the yard until I feel like all the grass is about the same, shorter length. Apparently, this isn’t how a yard is supposed to be mowed. There’s this thing called yard striping, alternating yard striping, even. Noted. Here’s your yard back. I’ll see you inside. When I cook, I am equally unsystematic. I look up some recipes, get the gist. See what ingredients we actually have, make some substitutions, and that is how dinner gets made. It works because of who we are, not what we’re doing.

When we prioritize by what we’re most interested in, the questions that we want to answer, rather than the questions we think we ought to answer, we end up with a better slice of history. When we challenge ourselves to be thoughtful in our personal commentary, we end up with a deeper understanding of each other, our similar journeys, our different paths.

What I love most about the story of my grandmother taking on Washington is that you can feel her strength. She wanted answers and she set about finding them. I’m glad that I have her blood running through my veins. And I’m going to make sure my daughters know that they do, too.