Repeat History-- Yay or Nay?

Last weekend I watched the 2018 documentary RBG, and silent tears streamed down my cheeks. I’m not one of those 40something women with Ruth Bader Ginsburg tattoos, and I don’t dress up my dog in a dissent collar. I am embarrassed to say I never followed her legal career in the papers or on tumblr. But something stirred inside me this year. I devoured Gloria Steinem’s book On the Road. Which awakened me to read both a Ginsburg biography and her autobiography.

Learning details of the 1972 women’s movement and the social inequities today surprised me. So many changes—and rather recently. While I was a girl taking tap lessons and watching The Brady Bunch reruns, thousands of women were laying the groundwork not only for a future me. But for my daughter. How did I never hear of these milestones? The movements? The matriarchs of women’s lib?

As a young business consultant I remember a salty team member in her 50s, a computer science engineer, saying with an icy edge, “You,” (interpreted as the greater ‘you’ of women my age), “will never understand or appreciate all that we’ve done for you.” I probably sipped my coffee and nodded, and wondered why she seemed angry. I most likely answered with a respectful response and quickly asked what time we were leaving for our client meeting. In some ways she was right. I didn’t fully understand then. But I’m starting to. Just. Now.

Do we ignore the importance of gender equality’s struggle? Or is it pure ignorance—we don’t know what we simply don’t know?

Raising a daughter and three sons I’m ever-conscious of gender stereotypes and the treatment of the sexes. Wanting to provide opportunities for them all--yes, you can pursue what you love in life, yes, you all need to learn to cook and do your own laundry, yes, you’re all strong, capable beings. But what I’ve learned, and perpetuated even perhaps, is an unconscious silence about the history of gender’s evolution.

And I consider my husband and I enlightened. I graduated from an undergraduate institution that emboldened us all with the equal treatment of genders…and not only did I thrive in that environment, I am fervently proud of it.

So how could I be crying quiet tears? Ginsburg’s story moved me. But it wasn’t just her story that made me cry. It was that her story was part of ALL of our collective stories. And most of us don’t realize it. So we definitely do not give it proper thanks.

The sound of that silence thundered in my brain. The trailblazing activists, the legislators who took a stand, the individuals cracking glass ceilings. What were the whispers of the early suffragists in 1848 or in 1920? I could hear their haunted echoes, yet jumping to present day not many talk about it. I know my children aren’t discussing this important history. I’ve heard women my age laugh about the women’s marches. People have told me, “I could never vote for a female president.” Women defend and doubt misogynistic people in the news. WHY?

As Justice Ginsburg herself has said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I only hope that more people become conscious of the waves of gender equality warriors and maybe not so silently give thanks to them. We owe them—and our future “them”—much more. Perhaps even a roar. And maybe this is a case for repeating history. Literally out loud. And often.

 “It is not women’s liberation, it is women’s and men’s liberation.”  

Ruth Bader Ginsburg