Today is Women’s Equality Day.

I discovered the women’s movement sometime in the late 1960’s, when I was about 21 years old. Gloria Steinem
came to speak at our campus. I went to hear her, because I recognized
her name from articles in one of the magazines I was fond of; Glamour, I think.

Irony is my watchword.

When
Steinem began to speak, she warned her audience that if we were happy
with our lives as they were, we should leave. Some did.

I
stayed, because I wanted to hear what Steinem had to say. And she was
quite right to warn us; it changed my life. I sat there, and almost
physically experienced my world shift — that famous click. The veil lifted. It was a conversion experience.

It
kept on being a conversion experience through the next decade of my
life. Now it’s simply part of who I am, part of how I see the world. It
brings me both rage and reassurance, as understanding often does. The
rage part was very difficult, when it was pervasive. To maintain some
peace in my life, I had to learn to walk with blinkers on — offenses
were (and are) so ever-present.

I learned about power, about implicit privilege, about oblivious bigotry. About implicit bias. About my own implicit biases.

Consciousness
raising, so subsequently maligned, was a powerful thing — the
recognition that one’s experience is not singular, but shared; and in
that recognition lies the potential to change. To change our lives,
to change ourselves, to change the world.

For me, it is absolutely, deeply true that the personal is political; and the political, personal.

All
my feminist friends, including those who married but kept their own
(father’s) names, gave their own children their husbands’ names. One
made this decision because her husband was so attached to his family,
so the name meant a lot to him; another because her husband was alienated from his family, so this was the only family he had. When most people make the same decision, for conflicting reasons, one must suspect that something impersonal is at work.

I
know I make such decisions, too, feeling entirely in control of my own
life. Feeling entirely unique. I get to make some of these decisions
because of the birth lottery; because I was born the right color, if
not the right gender, into this wealthy country where even the
moderately poor of my generation had food and school.

There is
so much we don’t know. So much we are only beginning to know about what
it means to be a human animal. So much about biology, genetics, gender,
intelligence, sexuality, personality, temperament; the old nature/nurture question; and how all this influences ability.

It’s
tough to imagine a world where everyone gets an equal shot; where each
person’s potential has a chance to fulfill itself; and where
opportunity is not a reward for race, gender, class, family, money, or
power.

It’s tough to imagine — but it would be different from
the world we’re in today, we know that. It might be a world where more
men than women are astronauts, and more women than men are school
teachers — or it might not.

And we don’t need to know all
this, to work toward what is right.

What magic, discoveries, and genius
do we lose to poverty or empty
bellies or illiteracy; to old constrictions and barriers of culture or
religion; to overt or covert bigotry and discrimination? What solutions
do we not have because the people who might think of them never get the
chance?

It’s so simple, really, and so dangerous — this idea of equal opportunity.

It turns everything on its head.

[Sunday afternoon: edited for relevance.]