Excerpt: 'Our Mothers' Daughters'
Read an excerpt of Cokie Roberts' new book.
April 7, 2009 — -- Renowned journalist Cokie Roberts asks a simple, but complicated, question in her new book: Just what is a woman's place?
And while "Our Mothers' Daughters" may not give a definitive answer, it does explore the different facets of women including sister, activist, aunt, soldier and mechanic.
Read an excerpt of her book below and click here to visit HarperCollins' Web site where you can learn more about the book.
What is woman's place? That's been the hot question of my adult life. From the boardrooms to the bedrooms of the country's companies and couples, the debate over the role of women has created enormous upheaval for society and for the family. For women like me, who grew up and graduated from college before the revolution, it's all gotten a little exhausting. We were the vanguard, not necessarily in philosophical terms but in practical ones.
Most of us weren't engaged in fighting for the feminist cause, but we were busy— unbelievably busy— living it, either consciously or unconsciously. We went with our shiny degrees pouring into the workforce as the first generation of women with the law on our side. When I graduated from Wellesley in1964 it was perfectly legal to discriminate against women in the workplace. Help Wanted ads in the newspapers were divided into "Male," "Female," "White," "Colored." When we applied for jobs, the men we were applying to regularly and with no embarrassment told us, "We don't hire women to do that." But the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed that summer and, though it took a while for any of us to realize it, the workplace terrain underwent a seismic shift. (The men who wrote the Civil Rights Act had no intention of changing the lives of women, and therefore men, so dramatically, but that's a tale for another place in these pages.)
We were the pioneers — or so we thought. And in many ways we were. We were the first women at almost everything we did, and most of us often had the experience ofbeing the only woman in the room. Unlike the few women who preceded us in the world of work, who in most cases were singular obstacle- leaping females, we arrived as an entire generation of educated and, in our minds at least, equal-to-men women.
We have the scars to show that we knocked down barriers rather than jumped over them, making it easier for the women who followed us. (We've been known to grow a little grumpy over the ingratitude of young women, for their sometimes smug assumption that all that "woman stuff" is passé, ancient history. We find ourselves muttering, like the Wicked Witch of the West, "Just you wait, my pretty.") The brave new world we were forging took its toll— many of our youthful, preliberation marriages didn't survive. The rules changed so fundamentally from the ones in place on our wedding days that it took more than the usual amount of adaptation to make those unions work. I'm one of the lucky ones.
At the age of eighteen I spotted the perfect husband, and finally convinced him to propose when I was an almost- over- the- hill twenty- two. With good senses of humor, and incredible generosity on his part, Steven and I have happily managed for more than forty years to make it over the shoals of constantly shifting expectations.
Now here's our generation, women in our sixties, with grown daughters faced with the challenges of work and family. There's a lot of reassessment going on, and a lot of rewriting of history. There's also a lot of foolish rehashing of old debates, as privileged women who have the choice of whether to earn a paycheck engage in finger- pointing at women who make different choices than they do. I must admit this often vituperative argument— the so-called mommy wars— about staying home versus going to work makes me nuts. It's not men who are doing this to women; it's women who are doing it to one another, trying to validate the decisions they make by denigrating the decisions of others.
Over the decades, as I witnessed and participated in this great social movement of the twentieth century, I had only one real fear for women: that we would lose our sense of perspective. Our great strength, in my view, has been our ability to see beyond the concerns of the day. As the nurturers, the caregivers, we have always worried about the future— what it will mean for the children— and as the custodians and carriersof the culture, we've carefully kept alive the past.
I was afraid that we might become so involved in the daily demands of the world of work that we would break that threadof connection to generations of women before us. I greatly admire the way men seize the moment, take on the tasks of the day with single- minded purpose. But that is not for us; women have traditionally been multiple- minded. And so we still are, thank God. We, of course, do what the job—whatever it is— requires, but often with some other concernnagging at the backs of our brains.
Instead of this being some early twenty- first-century definition of life on the distaff side, I would argue that it's always been this way— that women have always played many roles at the same time. For years my mother kept telling me that it's nothing new to have women as soldiers, as diplomats, as politicians, as revolutionaries, as explorers, as founders of large institutions, as leaders in business; that the women of my generation did not invent the wheel.
In the past women might not have had the titles, she painstakingly and patiently explained, but they did the jobs that fit those descriptions. Now I'm finally old enough, and have had enough life experience of my own, to listen to my mother. In her nineties, she maddeningly responds to almost all "new" developments with some similar story from the past, concluding with her favorite expression, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." As I've learned the stories of the women in this book, the women from our past and today's women following in their footsteps, I've come more and more to appreciate my mother's wisdom.
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