Feminists

Eighty years ago women won the right to vote in the United States. They are one group in a long line who have had to have special legislative recognition in order to be treated as 'normally' human. Yet even after eighty years they still haven't overcome the glass ceiling in the business world, are questioned on propriety and ability of they want to run for President, and still are expected in many households to have dinner on the table when the man gets home from work (after she's gotten home from work, cleaned the house, tended to the kids, etc, etc).

There are lots of flavors of feminists. Just look at Wikipedia on the topic. Some are brave. Some are aggressive. Some are progressive. Some are angry and totally objectionable, even spiritually lethal. But if we narrow the issue to 'equality' alone we will catch the spirit of Suffrage and bra burning.

I am a white male. My mother was elected to city council in the early 1970s and eventually became mayor pro tem in our cautious small city on the edge of a metropolitan area. My father encouraged her. We all had influences; this was mine.

Am I a feminist? Do I believe that women have as much legal right as men? Do I believe that women should be paid equal wages for equal work? Do I believe that women are in general smart enough to be equal decision-makers alongside men? Do I believe that women should have equal say in how a household is run? Do I believe that it is reasonable for a woman to expect a man to put as much time and energy into a household as she does? Do I believe that a woman has a right to say no to a man, for anything she doesn't want to do? Do I believe that God looks at women as being equal in faculties and responsibilities as men? Do I believe that historical figures as wise and respected as Aristotle were wrong in their assessment of women as weak and less than men?

Yes.

I realize that in writing this I am merely repeating something that has been said for decades and centuries by others, and it is unlikely that I will sway anybody of a differing belief. Yet in trying to envision the greatest revolution humankind can ever go through -- conquering the self rather than nature -- it will turn out that our failure to value women as equals will turn out to have been an embarrassing mistake. The same goes for racism, classicism, and -isms and oppression of any stripe. I look forward to a time when race, gender, orientation, origin, and so forth will no longer need legal distinction and protection because it no longer matters. I don't see a gender-blind, color-blind, difference-blind culture, and in fact see a valuation of differences while relying on our commonalities to get through everything together. Right or wrong, I believe it's what God wants from us.

Realistically, I don't expect it will happen in my lifetime. But unless we do something about it today it will never happen.