I wrote this originally as a comment on this diary but decided to also post it separately.
As I approach 70 in less than two months. I think back over my own experiences of sexism as I have encountered them. My mother graduated from Columbia Law in 1937 2nd in her class by way less than 1% but could not get a job as a lawyer except with the family law firm — the person ahead of her clerked on the Supreme Court. I know that Sandra Day O’Connor had similar problems despite being 3rd in her class at Stanford some two decades later.
I grew up with a mother who worked, eventually full-time when I turned ten, who then became among the first Assistant Attorneys General in NY State.
But then I went to an All-male college, Haverford, in the Fall of 1963, where the only female teachers I had were two women from Bryn Mawr teaching Russian. Yes, the head of our Physics Department was female. And as a Quaker institution we theoretically were supposed to view women as full equals, but there was a lot of sexism at the time, part of the times in which we lived.
I was in New York when Bella Abzug won the primary that propelled her to the House of Representatives, and noted at the time how few females were part of our political elite (although my mother had been vice chair of our town’s Republican committee), and that the few women who served in the Senate were usually appointed to replace deceased husbands.
Perhaps it is that often I have been partnered with gifted women. Even my freshman year for a while I dated a woman who was clearly very gifted, who years later would become internationally famous for her work on the mind-body connection, then with the last name of Zakon and now known as Joan Borysenko.
Perhaps it is that I have worked for as many female bosses as I have male bosses, something not unknown as the school teacher I am today, but which was quite unusual in my 20+ years working in data processing.
And certainly the more than four decades (and 3 decades plus of marriage) spent with Leaves on the Current — junior Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, Marshall Fellowship to Oxford where she got a masters, award winning dissertation from an American university, recognition for her superb work in several fields, as well as being a loving aunt to all the nieces and nephews — has more than convinced me that women are completely the equal of my own gender