A professor of mine in college was obsessed with this crazy idea. The man was convinced that in the future, women would take over the world. Though he was supposed to be teaching us criminology, he spent the better part of a semester cramming biological, psychological and sociological studies down our throats that supported his idea that women were far better equipped emotionally and intellectually to handle the realities of the modern white collar world than men. He predicted that within our lifetimes, women would come to dominate almost every occupation, discipline and field of study. I now regret that I didn’t begin taking him seriously until about halfway through the semester, because I think he was right. It’s already begun.
Last year, 57 percent of the bachelor degrees awarded in this country went to women, who make up 48.7 percent of the US population under 30, according to the 2000 Census. Over time, numbers like these are predicted to tilt the gender makeup of many top-paying professions toward the fairer sex. Take medicine, for instance. In 1998, 23 percent of practicing physicians in the US were female. According to the American Medical Women’s Association, by 2010 women will make up 30 percent of physicians and 50 percent or more of medical students. By 2020, they are expected to pass the 50 percent mark and begin dominating their profession.
But statistics tell only a small part of the story, a story I believe most professional women under 35 lack the personal historical context to appreciate. We were raised by parents who by and large treated us as the social and intellectual equals of our brothers, and who placed real importance on our gaining the skills and education we’d need to earn a living. We know nothing else. We take for granted the period we live in without realizing just how vast and unfathomable the opportunities we have today would have been to our mothers when they were our age.
I’ll never forget the story of my grandmother sitting my mother down after high school and explaining to her that to support herself, she had several options. She could become a teacher, a nurse or a secretary, so she should go ahead and chose. That this was told to my mother, a woman with a mind like a razor blade, seems some kind of cosmic joke. A bright young woman today with the world at her feet would laugh if her mother said something like that. But it’s easy to forget that it was a mere 40 years ago that my mother and so many like her regularly heard these sorts of things and believed them.
Take our local history for instance. According to New South Women by Mary Kratt, the first sworn female police officer wasn’t hired by the Charlotte Police Department until 1966. The department insisted that women recruits have a four-year college degree, while men only needed a high school diploma to qualify. The women were required to wear skirts and heels to work. From the 1940s to the 1960s, women attorneys were extremely rare in Charlotte. A check of the 1954 Charlotte phone directory by Kratt revealed only one listing for a female attorney. The list of casual snubs by the male-dominated work force such a relatively short time ago goes on and on.
What is most amazing about this is not just how quickly things have changed, but where we’ve arrived. Not only is it arguably the best time for American women in the history of our country, I’d go so far as to say that it’s a better time to be a woman than it is to be a man.
For once in human history, the rules are tilted in our favor. We can wholeheartedly pursue a career because it’s no longer taboo to ask our husbands to carry at least half the domestic burden that once kept us out of the office. Most of the time, no one will look down on men for carrying it. In fact, carrying half the domestic burden is rapidly coming to be expected of men. If we earn more than our husbands, it’s increasingly socially acceptable for them to stay home with the children.
At the same time, the option to forego the working world to stay home with the kids is socially acceptable as well. And we are learning that we have new power in our relationships that a man will never quite have. Because we can now support ourselves, in most cases, as well as a man could, we don’t exactly need one to start a family or raise our kids with everything they need. In short, we now have far more options then men do.
For women of my mother’s generation, whose financial position and place in life was still largely determined by their ability to marry well and to manipulate their husbands, the many roads now available to us must be bewildering. Forty to fifty years ago, it was about as unlikely that a woman would have founded a paper like the one that now employs me as it was that anyone would take a female columnist with political opinions seriously.
But that was then, and this is now. It’s payback time, and the world that once held us back is ours for the taking.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2002.
