Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Show Your Bias--Rate Your Patriotism
Today Jill wrote about International Women's Day, and she mentions that despite the generations of toil for women's rights, there's still unequal pay for women. We've really come a long way, but there's still some ground to cover, and it's like that everywhere in the world where women are still fighting battles for their rights.
This weekend I asked my girlfriend if, on a scale of 0-100, she would rate how "proud she is to be an American."
She gave her answer, which was a bit lower than I had expected, and we discussed it. She pointed, for example, to the fact that she is a woman, and that while women still do today have an increasing number of opportunities they did not have at the beginning of the last century, there's still a ways to go. And I, despite all my academic training to recognize equal rights issues, and feminism, and all the rest, had somehow forgotten all of this when it came time to evaluate my personal happiness with my country. At that moment, I was amazed at how easy it was for me to forget that people like me--white males, that is--have never had to fight for any of their rights.
So happy Women's Day, women. It's a bit late, but that's not because I don't care--only because I needed some women to remind me in the first place.
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