As We Go Marching, Marching

As We Go Marching, Marching

On April 25, 2004, over a million people of every gender, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, class, and age participated in the March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C. Examining the sea of people, I initially did not understand why such a great number of middle aged and older women were so angry. They were reaching the age where reproductive rights were becoming less of an issue for them personally, but I realized my naïveté on two counts: one, they were not just marching for themselves and two, they were fighting to save the laws which they had changed to protect themselves over thirty years ago. They were marching for their daughters and granddaughters and nieces and goddaughters and students whose futures were being threatened just as their futures had been under attack when they were younger. Despite the movement for change of these Second Wave Feminists, legislation has been directed at the cause of gender inequities in the United States but gender equality has not been an effect of the legislation.

In the late sixties and early seventies, the women of the Second Wave of Feminism created a social campaign for gender equality primarily in terms of economics. As Virginia Woolf points out in Three Guineas, women remain in the power of men so long as they are financially dependent upon them. (Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 132) Housing and food are required for survival and money is required for the attainment of both. Given their history of working in the home and caring for children, American society divided itself up into breadwinners and homemakers: men won the bread and women made the home. Consequently, women have had far fewer opportunities than men to earn money because girls were not raised with the idea that they would someday receive a paycheck with their name on it. Books such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique challenged society to think that women should have a choice about joining the work force outside the home. It is important to note that low income women had been compelled to garnish wages for centuries before suburban housewives dared to aspire to any role model other than June Cleaver. Friedan's work sparked the notion that all women everywhere might not be happy with housework and childrearing—women are women and are not only mothers and wives just as men are not only husbands and fathers.