A few months ago, I was having a heated feminist discussion with a lesbian lawyer who specializes in LGBT legal issues. (As of last week’s Supreme Court decision, her business must be booming! Hooray!) We were both on fire with the issues and loving the debate. The question was whether women are still “oppressed.” As is my wont, I was playing devil’s advocate, which isn’t hard for me considering my belief that women are our own biggest oppressors these days. In my view it’s not really a question of how much women in the U.S. today are held down by the culture as much as how many shackles we are willing to leave on ourselves when the key is lying next to us on the floor. My colleague in dialog was not seeing the issue this way.
Here was the question I asked her that brought her up short: If women of means in a free society – who represent over 50% of the college degrees and entry level workforce – don’t exercise our rights to simply BE equal, what are WE telling the women who don’t have means and who aren’t free? There are millions (billions?) of women in our country and others who face death and worse for even hoping that equality is possible. What hope do they have if we can’t even use the freedom we already have to stop pushing the responsibility off on others and simply BE free?
The conversation shifted after that to the questions that I care about most – the shackles and prisons that live in our hearts and our heads and truly keep us prisoner.
I’m not saying that freeing our minds and hearts from a culture that has made a habit of painting women into a narrow and unhealthy definition of success is easy, or even fully possible for my generation. But I do believe that a modern, professional woman has a better chance at this kind of freedom than any other woman in history.
I don’t know about you, but I am committed to leverage every ounce of freedom our country and culture have given me to free myself. When I’m as free as I can make me, I’ll start complaining about oppression from external sources.
What about you? How free are you?
