Riding the bus home from downtown Chicago today a few young girls, maybe 12 years old, got on the bus. They stood right in front of me. One girl straddling her two-wheel Razer had a few buttons on her bag. The first I noticed read "Girls Can do Anything." I asked her to read the other buttons, which she did, mostly about the environment and social justice.
I said to her that she was the culmination of years of work by her grandmothers and mothers who worked to make it possible for her to believe "Girls can do Anything." It took many years and work to accomplish this and that I was so proud that she wore that button and believed it.
She said "Thank you" for doing that. "You're Welcome" I replied.
I got off at the next stop. I didn't want an entire bus to see me crying. I walked several blocks alone with my thoughts. It hit me that this random child represented the culmination of all our work all those years ago.
My own granddaughters are the children of my daughters so I know they believe and will believe that girls can, indeed, do anything. But this 12-year-old girl, and all the other 12-year-old girls, believe this in their heart of hearts. "My G-d" I thought "We really did it."
About 38 years of so ago I knelt by the chair of a friend in Michigan who was crying, bemoaning the fact that she had brought a girl-child into the world, one who would suffer discrimination from her first breath. The teaching collective was gathered to outline what a Women's Studies program would cover. Most of us were there that day, in a professor's summer house back yard.
I said to her "Don't worry, we'll just change the world so she will be free." Those were in the days when bosses snapped bra straps, good bosses, except for that. When if a woman got a promotion, everyone wondered who she slept with to get it. When women got much less than 77 cents on the dollar for every buck a man made. When if a woman was raped the cops asked if she enjoyed it, did she have an orgasm.
Those were the bad old days of women being responsible for rape because she dressed wrong, whatever wrong was for the day, where abortions were all back-alley ones. The same prof who's house we met in, had an illegal abortion in the '50s. When the "doctor" came to her apartment, he insisted on having sex with her first. This way, he said, you won't get pregnant because I'll do the abortion right after it.
He really did not think his own act was rape. Any girl who needed an abortion was easy anyway so why not get his first.
Yes, those were the bad old days.
And Romney and Ryan want to bring them back.
If they win, if other Republicans win, this beautiful, shiny, new girl in 2012 will go back to those days, too. This new, incipient woman will be forced back into that ungodly mold.
Please, please don't let it happen. Send some money, even if it's small to Democratic candidates to retake the House and keep the Senate. Send some to the President. Work every day you can to stop these horrible people from ruining the lives of all these new people who actually believe in their own worth.
The donation sites are all over the front page here and in diaries. Choose those you want to send money to. Please don't let them ruin all our kids.
Remember that we really did change the world, everyone on this site, not just us older folks, all have changed the world for the better. Let's keep changing it for the better, together.
UPDATE: I am so moved by the stories in the comments, the stories both old and new. Thank you all for sharing those moving stories. As we each speak about our experiences new light is shed on our history, while even more light is shed on our future, and what we want it to be. Each story shakes a new truth out of the past and that past is what the right wingers want us to go back to.
We will not let them do it. None of us.