Poised on the threshold of young womanhood back in the late
60s, I embraced (flung open wide my good-Catholic girl-honor-student-achiever
arms) the women’s liberation movement—or at least parts of it.
Actually, I picked and chose from the counterculture and
women’s lib agendas as though they were shopping lists: same employment
opportunities as men? Yes. Same pay? Definitely. Same political power?
Why not? The same sexual freedoms? Most assuredly.
Did I want to go into
mandatory military front-line duty? No. Did I want a guy to pay for dinner on a
date? Yes.
So I took off my bra, liberated woman that I was, lived in a
tepee on a mountain top, and played my newly acquired sexual empowerment card.
And that was about it. I know, I know, a shallow take on
Gloria Steinem’s idea of a liberated woman.
Decades later, I’m all for gender equality, but my focus on
women’s rights has shifted to the Millions of women, for whom “rights” is not a
matter of equal opportunity in the work place or paycheck, or choosing with
whom they can freely sleep.
For Millions of women around the globe, women’s rights is a
matter of Life or Death.
