5086 I wonder which way she went....

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

– Desmond Tutu --

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Well, we are finally rid of Phyllis Schlafly.  Can you tell I'm not a fan?  

She almost single-handedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment the first time it was submitted to states for approval.  She said there's no such thing as marital rape, since when a woman marries, she has implicitly agreed to have sex whenever and however her husband wants, "Not now" is not an option.  She said that if your husband beats you, you are at fault for not keeping him happy.  She insisted that a woman should stay home and keep house, even while she herself was out running political groups and giving speeches all over the country. 

This wouldn't be so very bad except that she had enormous political and social power. Men ran everything, and they liked what she was saying.  Women who liked being treated like fragile princesses lined up behind her.

She fought so hard against the ERA because she felt that if it passed, women would lose all the legal protections, benefits, and advantages they had.  One of her most effective arguments was that women would be drafted and forced into combat.  A lot of people bought that.  And women would be forced into the job market, instead of having the option to not take an outside job if they didn't want to.  Goodbye afternoon soap operas and bon-bons.  Goodbye huge alimony and rent-free house if the slob left you.  And maybe goodbye to the kids.

Young women today have no idea what it used to be like, when a woman couldn't take out a bank loan for anything without a male cosigner.  When a husband could sell anything a woman owned without her permission or even knowledge, including a business in her own name that she had built from the ground up.  When ten fully-qualified women and one less-qualified man could apply for a job, and the job would go to the man (of course) and the women had no recourse whatsoever.  When a woman likely had no idea what her husband's salary was, what money was spent on, what the family finances looked like, where accounts and savings were, and she was given a household budget (an allowance, really) and that's all she knew, not because her husband was mean - that's just the way it was done.  Women were treated as no more capable than children, except where childcare was concerned, and the laws allowed it.  Encouraged it.

I'll never forget having coffee one morning with a neighborhood mothers' group, and the subject of the ERA came up, and one woman was very annoyed and declared, "Oh, that!  I don't need liberating.  My husband lets me do anything I want."

We couldn't convince her there was anything wrong with that "lets".

Goodbye Phyllis, fifty years too late.  I hope the door hit you on the way out.
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3342 I think, therefore I say

Friday, August 26, 2011

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

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I was just reading a book review, some guy's book (James Pennybaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns), about how one's use of pronouns and sentence structure reveals what one is actually thinking.

Yeah, ok.

The comments kicked off some memories.

When I first started working for The Company, in 1968, I was a rare female in a male-dominated area.

I noticed that I often seemed to turn the guys off, offend them, when it came to technical discussions. No matter how much sense I was making, they would turn away and stop listening, until I was talking to a wall. I finally asked a friend what I was doing wrong.

He explained that I make definite statements, and that's not allowed for females. Males can say "This is blah blah." Women, especially small women like me, must say "I think this may be blah blah", or "It seems to me that..." or "Do you think that..." For a female to make a definite statement is seen by males as challenging their authority. A woman should appeal to that authority, not challenge it.

He was serious. This was 1968. Before women's liberation was in full swing.

His analysis infuriated me. "If I say it, it's obvious I think it, that it seems so to me, so why should I have to say I think it or it seems so to me? And especially if I know that it IS, if this is my area of expertise, why should I say it may be? That's stupid!" Especially when the guys don't have to weaken statements of fact.

Infuriating. Even worse was when guys would later take my analysis, when they rejected it coming from me, and present it as their own conclusion.

Young women don't know what it used to be like. The subtleties. How difficult is was to get past that. I'm afraid that young women now are backsliding, wagging their tails to appease men, not knowing the dangers and what it can lead to.
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3162 Health Insurance then and now

Sunday, February 13, 2011

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose
was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”
-- Dalí --

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An observation on the deterioration of health insurance: Back in the late '60s and early '70s, if my doctor prescribed aspirin, my insurance paid for it. Same with any OTC meds and supplements. There were NO copays or deductibles. No premiums other than what the employer paid. Once when I was hospitalized, in 1970, I was covered by two insurance plans - my employer's and Ex#1's employer's - and both paid in full. I was worried that it was a mistake, but both companies said no, that it was ok, and if I had money left over I could keep it. "If it makes you feel better, use it for costs associated with time off work, pet care, bed jackets to wear in the hospital, whatever."

In the '80s, Daughter was covered under my policy with The Company, and under her father's (Ex#2's) policy, also with The Company. Although by then coverage had been reduced (we had copays and deductibles, and no double payments), because she was covered under both, one policy covered the copays and deductibles on the other, so she was covered 100%.

Compare that to now.

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Something else to compare then to now: Under those health plans, for everything except hospital charges, you had to pay the bills and submit the receipts for payment. Ex#2 and I were divorced, and I had full custody. I took Daughter to the doctor, paid all the bills, filled out the forms, and submitted the receipts to my plan, with Ex#2's plan as secondary payer.

The Company cut the checks, and sent them to him! Not me! And he, of course, never notified me that he'd received any checks. He cashed or deposited them without a blink, without a word to me. Since all the paperwork from The Company went to him, too, I had no idea that payment had been made, or for how much. I had to call Human Resources and ask. And that SOB often claimed he'd never received the checks (not out of meanness - he'd just "forget", and he was a tightwad and didn't want to give me any money).

I was furious with The Company. They said it was company policy to send checks to the father, regardless of court dispositions, regardless of who paid the bills and submitted the claims. It took me more than a year and the threat of a sexual discrimination suit to get them to change the policy, and even then the policy applied only to me, and only because I was also a Company employee. I wondered how many other non-employee women weren't getting their checks and had no recourse, had to beg their exes for the insurance checks.

Compare that to now.

People now seem to think calling a woman a feminist is some kind of insult. They don't know what it was once like, and how hard it was to change the rules.
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