I come from a long line of women.  Strong women.  

The settling of the American west required a special breed, for the landscape took no prisoners, and the journey, now days by sagebrush-lined Interstate highway or hours at thirty-thousand feet, required months in harsh climate and was a minefield of deathtraps.  Only the strongest survived.

Ironically, many women made that journey as part of a patriarchal society which might have initially been conceived to protect and defend them, but eventually outlived its usefulness. 

The daughters of the generations who walked the dusty, snowswept plains in the nineteenth century know there is no room for discrimination based on gender, for if a calf needs pulling or a fence needs mending, daughters work right alongside the sons. 

As the oldest of five girls and one boy descended from strong women, I had role models in great-aunts, many of them schoolteachers as well as ranchers, just a generation removed from pioneer polygamists in pinafores and pigtails, as hardy as the men they partnered.

******* 

Civil rights and women's issues swirled around me in the late sixties, but I didn't personally face the realities of gender-based discrimination until I prepared to enter college in the early seventies and found I was ineligible for the highest scholarship at the college of my choice, then reserved only for male students, much to the chagrin of a supportive father who believed and encouraged me to believe that I could do anything, and prepared me to do just that.  

I was leaving the cocoon of a small Wyoming town where women had been just as valued and supported as the men, competed and excelled.

Women were only beginning to enter the legal and medical professions in any significant numbers.  Title IX passed just before I left high school, and federal military academies would admit women a few years later.  Following congressional approval in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment went to the states for individual ratification, and the LDS Church, the church of my childhood and some of my pioneer ancestors, entered the controversy, the climax of which was the 1977 International Women's Year conference at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah, where worlds collided and the contrast between past and present was brought into sharp focus.  

I was there.

I was there, along with many of my fellow students and faculty members, some of whom eventually belonged to a Mormon feminist organization called the Alice Louise Reynolds/Algie Ballif Forum, the 'Gray Panthers.'  I had an epiphany that weekend, listening to Lola Van Wagenen, then married to Robert Redford and founder of Consumer Action Now:   this was not Robert Redford's wife; he was Lola Van Wagenen's husband.

******* 

Years later, as I stood in a hall in Washington with hundreds of others listening to a New York senator give a farewell speech to her supporters, I recalled that women's conference epiphany.

******* 

 The term "feminist" was badly branded from its inception, implying to the most negative lens militant bra burners, but clearly meant much more, that a person by virtue of their gender should not be the subject of discrimination.  To me, that went a step further:  a person by virtue of their gender should not be the subject of discrimination based on obsolete social norms.  If I can do it, let me.  Encourage me.  Support me.

I didn't feel the pull of discrimination again until I married after years of being single, a man of another generation, Brokaw's 'Greatest Generation,' who'd been married before.  The respect I'd clung to as a single adult was challenged not only by others with fifties notions of June Cleaver households, but surprisingly, by generations following.  I felt it most strongly assaulted during and after my husband's prolonged hospitalization in 2004.   Solicitors would call wanting to talk to "the man of the house."  Utility companies would ask me to put my husband on the telephone to give permission to discuss an account that clearly had both of our names on it.  My outrage came not from a place of lingerie burning militarism; it came from a place of peace and self-respect.  Why, if my name is on the account, is his voice worth more than mine?  Why is his name listed first?  Why, if the account is in my name only, do you want to talk to him?

A new doctor winks at my husband, refusing to acknowledge my presence in the room as though I was a secretary, a chauffeur, a nurse, a bodyguard, a valet, a social hostess, an afterthought, an appendage, anything but an equal partner.  While generally this is the exception, not the rule, why does this behavior still exist in the twenty-first century?   

Social norms aside, much of the world still views the female part of a male-female relationship as something less than an equal partner, maybe a 51-49 split, but still a minority stockholder, and the original intent of patriarchy has lost its focus and relevance, appearing all too often as unrighteous dominion or lack of respect for human integrity. 

I am pinged with reminders of this when I observe men clinging to the last tenuous threads of a patriarchal rope try to bypass women, or worse, hang them with it by virtue of their gender, rather than treat them with the dignity that is their birthright.

I struggle with solutions.  Educating those who are entrenched in generations of habit or misinterpreted authority is difficult when they are reluctant to listen.   They tighten the rope when you pull on it.   Still, it's important to speak up, to question, to highlight the problem, to work toward better understanding of it, and to continue to advocate for human dignity and human rights of all.

I crossed my own prairie, several months next to a hospital bed in Minnesota, and I pulled the cart.   I don't deserve special respect because of that effort, I deserve it by virtue of my birth.

 *******

I'd stack the women I went to high school with in that tiny Wyoming town against anything that life has to offer.  It toughens the hide.  

My great-aunt Dorothy Ardell Marsh Proffit, who served in the Wyoming senate, finishing out the term of her husband, my uncle Hight Proffit (right).  (photo courtesy Proffit family/Diamond X Ranch)

Painting, top:  Homesteader's Wife, by Harvey Dunn.  1916, oil on canvas. (photo courtesy South Dakota Art Museum)

Photo, center:  The Great Hall of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., where Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave her farewell speech to supporters as she ended her run for the U.S. presidency on June 7, 2008.  "This isn't exactly the party I planned, but I sure like the company."  (photo:  Kathy Riordan) 

For more information on the Mormon Church and the ERA, see:

Young, Neil J.  "The ERA Is a Moral Issue": The Mormon Church, LDS Women, and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment

American Quarterly - Volume 59, Number 3, September 2007, pp. 623-644

The Johns Hopkins University Press 

This is a repost of an article originally published in January 2010.