It feels welcoming
Last week I went to the Women Leading Change conference. As I walked around in a room full of women I was impressed by the kindness, the generosity, and the staggering number of crazy talented women suffering from imposter syndrome. (We need to get over that.) I have watched the struggle for equality firsthand. My grandmother was born without the right to vote. She wasn’t allowed to open a bank account at the bank she worked at, even though she had a degree, was a registered dietician, and ran the bank’s cafeteria. Rather than have my grandfather open an account for her, she went to a credit union so she could open her own. My mother had degrees from both Brown and RISD and was the president of the Women’s Ad Club of Rhode Island. As an art director, she lived through Mad Men in real life.
When I was in college in the 80s I got into a discussion about feminism with one of my professors, Elfie Raymond, who had degrees from the Sorbonne and the University of Vienna*. Elfie held up a hand to wave off all the politics of the day, looked me in the eye and said with her slow, euro-accented English. “Sarah, the housewives of Scarsdale have burned their bras to show the world that women are equal. Now it’s up to your generation to prove their sacrifice was worth it. You can’t just SAY you are equal, you need to BE equal.” (Elfie always had an edge of both sarcasm and wit.) Those words stuck with me. Being equal wasn’t enough at the time. You didn’t move up the ladder being as good as the guy next to you. Being better was the only way for women to get ahead. The unwritten rules of commerce did not favor women, and yet the slow steady push for equality moved a lot of rubber tree plants and broke a lot of glass ceilings.
Today I have an established business (Catalog Design Studios) and a startup focused on online shopping designed for the way women shop. (Stylaquin) This year I’m also running for town council in my small town. I don’t know if I’ll win, but being equal means I can try. Being equal also means being able to fail, get things wrong, and do things over. Being equal means that if I fail, I won’t fail because I’m a woman. I’ll fail because I’m human.
When I’m in a room full of women I can see how far we’ve come, and how far we still need to go. Looking back, I can see each generation making progress. Looking forward I see even more change ahead. My niece, who’s in data analytics, wasn’t getting paid as much as her peers. She wasn’t afraid to go to HR and complain—that’s progress. The real progress though is that when her peers found out about the discrepancy, they went to HR and complained too, now she’s paid the same as they are. Millennials aren’t as comfortable with inequality as prior generations. They speak up and fix it. That’s generational progress!
*Elfie Raymond was also a Post-doctoral Fulbright Exchange Scholar at Columbia University; recipient of research grants from the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett-Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Scholar-in-residence at Northwestern University, Graduate Theological Union Seminary at Berkeley, the Institute for Reformation History at the University of Zurich, and Reader at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. She was an extraordinary human.
