Making gradual steps toward gender equality

I SAW A VERY interesting bumper sticker a few weeks ago. It said, “I Comfort the Distressed and Distress the comfortable.” I laughed when I read it and immediately thought back to when I began attending university.

Being a middle-aged person, I was comfortable with my values and beliefs; but that soon changed. Education can do that.

In my last two articles I’ve apparently caused some degree of distress in some of the people reading them. And the ones that have disagreed with me (whether on the Collegian forum or in the paper) have all made me think as well.

And while my suggestions about how we can change the status of women in our society through language are admittedly simplistic, the result was that it did get some conversation going.

I do love that aspect of our country; the right to speak freely and believe whatever we believe; within certain social constraints, of course.

I also want to make it clear that although I am a feminist; I do not speak for all feminists. I think it is safe to say that all feminists strive for equality; however, the ways of going about it can vary greatly.

But what is feminism anyway? One definition I love is this: “I myself have never been able to find precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

That came from a feminist by the name of Rebeca West, in 1913. There are many others. But, basically, feminism is simply about a woman’s right to be treated equally by members of the dominant culture.

This applies to every aspect of our lives, whether at work (the glass ceiling), at school (girls in sports), in politics (there has never been a woman president or even vice president of our country) and so forth0

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I wish it were a simple fix. I wish that just changing language would make everything magically equal.

I wish language could stop domestic violence. I wish language alone could stop rape. I wish that language could stop sexual harassment at work. There is no end to this list.

And there is no quick fix for the problems I mentioned. But there was no quick fix in ending slavery.

There was no quick fix in keeping children out of the factories during the Industrial Revolution.

There was no quick fix in getting support from researchers and the government to try and end the horrible disease, AIDS.

What all of this took was people caring enough, people willing to listen and people being vocal in supporting these movements. And sometimes that meant comfortable people got distressed.

Of course, my two articles do not make me a champion for women’s issues, although I believe in them wholeheartedly. There is so much work to be done in striving for equality in our society.

But it is a start and that is the little contribution I can make to the cause. And that is perhaps all that most of us are able to do. But a lot of “little,” adds up to much.

And, as I said in my last two columns, language is a very important factor in reducing inequality in the lives of citizens in our society.

That is because how we talk about people is also how we think of them. That is true enough that the government passed a law against “hate speech,” pointing to the importance of the language we use in speaking about women (and other people).

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