Women's Rights
Last New Year’s Eve most of my friends went to New York City. We’d gone the previous year and had a good time (we all got wasted) but this year people were split into separate groups (the organized and the unorganized) and I didn’t relish the drive from my family’s location outside Boston to NYC again (it’s especially difficult on January 1st, no matter how many 4 AM pancakes you eat). Luckily, my college buddy was having a few people down to his Cape house, and so I decided to tag along. Most of the people attending he knew from high school, and each person perhaps brought a friend or significant other, so there were plenty of strangers sharing the house.
I got to talking to one of the strangers about graduate school. We were both in our second year, but in completely different programs. I was at a research institution for engineering; he was at Columbia for women’s studies. I found that fascinating, even though I don’t know anything about women’s studies, the suffrage movement, or anything at all. Pretty early into my academic career, I decided I enjoyed math, science, and English, but I would be putting the minimal effort into learning history. Still, I’d call myself a feminist - with some accidental misogynistic tendencies thrown in for flavor.
Him: “I’m reading through a bunch of Betty Friedan’s letters right now, it’s great stuff.” (He actually sounded more like a Columbia graduate student, but I can’t remember his exact phrasings).
Me: “Oh. Is that so?” (Clearly don’t know who Betty Friedan is).
Him: “The Feminine Mystique?” (I still have a blank look). “Have you heard of Margaret Sanger?”
Me: (curled up in fetal position, embarrassed).
We didn’t talk all that much more about his graduate work.
I later brushed it off by telling myself women’s rights history isn’t really that interesting, and in fact, history in general isn’t that great, don’t you remember you decided that? And it’s even less so when it has to do with a group who specifically doesn’t include me. That made me feel better…. Until!
I just read an article in The New Yorker (link, although you’ll need a subscription for the full article) on the birth of planned parenthood. Obviously a large focus was on Margaret Sanger (I learned who she was!) and the battle to provide decent birth control to the largest possible group of women. It was fascinating, extending from the first birth control clinic in 1916 through today’s ongoing sometimes-legislative, mostly-political battle on the subject.
Anyways, that’s unimportant. What’s important is,
Why the fuck, when I originally learned about Margaret Sanger in social studies, the material so boring? Was there something wrong with me?! With the teacher? I demand to know! It is impossible to describe how much more interesting and informative the single New Yorker article was than anything I’d learned in the classroom.
The worst part is, now I’m faced with the prospect not only of rereading a history of the women’s rights movement (first and second wave… that explains where Betty Friedan fits in to all of this!), but also having to consider that any subject from my various history classes (all uniformly dismissed by yours truly) could actually be interesting. I’ll never be able to cover all that material in my free time! A day has only so many hours, and I need to work, and I’m not willing to give up reading fiction entirely, at least not yet…
Looks like I need to check The Feminine Mystique out from the library.
Fucking Betty Friedan stole my free time.