We, in the late '60s, '70s and '80s, are acting like we have just discovered freedom and liberation. But I'm sure that many women have worked for that for such a long time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I started giving talks about women's history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, 'Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.' It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point.
We live in an era of globalization and the era of the woman. Never in the history of the world have women been more in control of their destiny.
At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man's world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries. But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere.
While women were powerfully liberated both externally as well as internally by the feminism of the 1970s, we made some serious mistakes as well.
When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.
Our goal in the '70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.
It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
In the 1960s, you had this booming economy, and you didn't really have enough men around to fill all the jobs. So there was this sudden demand that women come back and perform a lot of the white-collar and pink-collar roles that men had done before or that hadn't existed before.
I don't believe in Women's Liberation. No, no, no, no, no. Not at all.
Women are trying to have it all but are trying to regain control over their time. That's why many women are busting out of the traditional workforce and starting their own businesses.
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