Change! You got Change!? Aw come on, help a guy out!

I forgot to mention.

There was something I wanted to address in my last post that I forgot. I don’t want to re-edit the post, I’m kind of a stickler for keeping things the way they were.

 ...uuuuuugh...

Along the lines of “We were founded when women were thought of as inferior”, we need to realize that the concept of women being equal is fairly new. Women didn’t start to leave the household until the 1940s-50s. And it wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s that the idea that women were genuinely equal was accepted in mainstream America. We have only had about forty years of this idea of accepting women in jobs and roles that were once reserved to men. Change takes time. We still have a lot of people who remember the days before the 1960s. But with each new generation, we move past the injustices of yesteryear and grow a little. The pay gap is shrinking and more women are moving up the ladder. I just don’t think it’s fair to compare the wages of a woman manager of five years to a male manager of 20 years.

We cannot have sudden radical change overnight.

Put yourself in this picture: You, your father and his father were slave owners. Society has been dictated by 200 years of tradition. It has been clear for generations that you as a white land-owner are superior to your black slave. The hierarchy is clearly defined. Then one day you wake up and suddenly find out slavery is now morally wrong and has been abolished. All of your slaves have been freed. And now, you are told that your former slave is now equal under the law and could potentially be your boss or elected leader.

I’ll let you pick up your jaw from the ground.

This is what happened during Reconstruction after the Civil War (although the change wasn’t “overnight” and there was obviously a lot of anti-slavery sentiment in the years leading to the war). Add to the fact that your nation just lost a war, your money is worthless, your property was destroyed, and it may be given to your former slaves. The reaction of the white southerners to Radical Republican rule is hardly surprising. Even though it was in the 1870s when the first African-Americans were elected to Congress (in states backed by the US army and set up to be loyal to Radical Republicans in Congress), it was about another hundred years before another African-American entered the halls of Congress not as a cleaning man. The reaction to Reconstruction gave us Jim Crow laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, and 80 years of segregation. We are still trying to overcome these injustices.

We could not have a sudden overnight transformation of the American woman led by Congress. As the Feminist Movement in America entered the 1970s, it started to get more radical (“only lesbians can be feminist” beliefs) and we got people like Phyllis Schlafly. The “Big Government can solve all problems” welfare state of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s gave us the “Government is not the solution, Government is the Problem” Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Roe v. Wade gave us the immediate pro-life movement, creating more opponents to abortion as it was slowly becoming acceptable state by state.

Look at Egypt. Do they have a fully functioning democracy with institutions and fully formed political parties yet?

Change takes time. It can be reversed but with vigilance, we will continue to move forward.