Flipping through the channels while on the treadmill last
week, I heard a panel of both men and women say that this is the hardest time
in history to be a woman. Skeptical but curious, I tuned in for another minute
to see what evidence they would give. Nothing new or surprising came up. They
mentioned how women are expected to keep bearing the load of home management
and child rearing while working at least 40 hours a week.
While I would concede that we women may be operating at the
fastest pace ever, I cringe at the word “hardest.” Does this panel of
well-dressed, well-fed, well-paid American men and women ever read about history? Can we even
begin to imagine what “hard” looked like for a woman in the ancient world? A
woman who had no warm place to live, no hospital or medicine, no lifespan
beyond a couple of grueling decades? What about all those women who gave birth
in fields, only to watch baby after baby die? Generations and generations of
women lived their lives knowing—and fearing—that men viewed them as little more
than objects to be used and assaulted. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they also
had to sew and wash their clothes by hand.
In more recent history, I think of the slave women who
watched their husbands and children sold on an auction block. Or even the
pioneer women, who traveled for months by foot or horseback, enduring violent
storms, illnesses, and attacks by natives, only to end up in a freezing cold
shack miles away from the nearest neighbor, cooking three meals a day out of
whatever they could grow. What about the women who starved themselves so they
could parcel out their few morsels of food to their children during the Great
Depression? Or the women who saw every man in their lives—husbands, boyfriends,
brothers, and sons—leave for the great wars, their minds consumed with worry, their
hands burdened with holding down the American fort?
There is nothing simple about American life today, but to
call it the “hardest time in history to be a woman” shows a shallow,
self-centered view of history. I know that there are women today who still live
in slavery, who still have no rights or opportunities, who live in war zones
and have babies in fields, but I would argue that most of them are
beneficiaries of at least some modern conveniences. And American women? I don’t
know one who doesn’t find it difficult to juggle all the responsibilities of
her life—but we do it in warm (or air-conditioned) houses, driving warm (or
air-conditioned) cars, sipping lattes and checking our e-mail.
Not a day goes by when I am not somehow grateful to be living
at this time in this place. It’s far from perfect, and life is hard for
everyone, but I’ll take our “hard” over history’s “hard” any day.
