We are well into the twenty-first century, and misogyny is alive and well in the Capitol. My teenaged self would never have thunk it.
Walking along Avenue J in Brooklyn last week, I half expected to see the bus driver with the tight red curls coming up behind me to make the turn onto Bedford Avenue. Every day, for three years, it was his blue city bus that picked us up on a busy street corner a few blocks from my house to transport us to high school.The blue had seemed shiny and new, back then, compared to the old green ones. The driver seemed so young and kind, back then, though he never smiled — never even seemed to recognize us. It struck me that was his way of being invisible. I wasn't sure of too many things, back then, but I was pretty sure I didn't want to drive a bus when I grew up.
Those were the early days of Title IX. By the time I got to high school, I had just as much right to participate in a varsity sport as my brother did. Elite private universities, which had long felt compelled to admit women, still often relegated them to distinct women's colleges that did not even bear the hallowed name. Together but separate, equal but only to a point. I refused to attend any such school, on principle. My mother always worked (in addition to having her hair and nails done and having doors opened for her by my father and having dinner ready for all of us at six), so I came upon my "one from column A/one from column B" version of feminism honestly. It never occurred to me that there was something I could not do -- or at least attempt to do. I also knew, deep down, it wasn't a bad thing to be treated like a queen.
When I return to Brooklyn, I marvel at how little has changed, at least on the surface. The old ladies sitting outside brick apartment buildings on folding chairs on their concrete beach. Housewives wheeling metal grocery carts down rutted sidewalks. The mixed aromas of ethnic foods. Horns blaring, double parked cars holding their ground. On a Friday, as it was this time, Orthodox Jews scurrying about, the storm before the calm of Shabbat.
It remains a land of mom and pop stores with dusty wooden floors and narrow aisles and shelves packed with apartment-sized miniature versions of things. Not a Starbucks or a Crate and Barrel or a gourmet grocery chain in sight. Window displays are functional, not pretty. Still, if you’ve ever tasted a kugel, the haphazard rows of bulky trays makes you salivate. The city buses are still cumbersome and noisy, and still blue.
I walk by my old high school, a venerable place, across the street from Brooklyn College, another venerable place (although I would never have actually enrolled there; that was beneath those of us with grander dreams). The college campus captivates me now. It is green, it is open, it is pretty, just like any campus. A moving mosaic of ethnicity criss-crosses the paths cutting through the manicured lawn. It strikes me as a haven of opportunity. Why had I never noticed that before? Maybe the bus driver with the red curly hair would have given anything to go there. I see young women and young men, all convinced they are destined for greatness. Indeed, some are.
So many years later, we take all our equality and, more importantly, our dignity for granted. Yet, so many years later, if you are a woman in the Senate and you challenge one of the old white guys, you are reprimanded. You are reminded that you are primarily there to be seen but not heard. With so much left to fight for, we appear to be backsliding. So many years later, a bumpy ride on the big blue bus.
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