> Synopsis: the battle is over; feminists still retain the
> old world view; why?
> 
> My friend and I are reasonably intelligent and observant
> individuals... we simply do not see the injustices claimed
> by modern-day "feminists". What we have seen and experienced
> is probably the "utopia" dreamed of by the feminists who
> fought so long and hard and claim that the battle still
> continues... where? In undergrad and grad school (EE and OR)
> I saw no discrimination . . .
> My friend (a woman) . . . 
> who works in Marketing for medical products has seen no
> discrimination. . . .  
> Since I've been working here I've seen no evidence
> of discrimination. When we hear feminists make claims as to the
> horrible world we live in and the tremendous injustices
> done to women in it, we look around and wonder what planet
> they are speaking of... it certainly does not resemble
> how we perceive the USA in the year 1986... it does resemble
> the USA in the past, but that is history. 

We won!  We won!  The polls are in, the facts have been assessed, and
we won!  Relax sisters and brothers in the battle for
equality; the war is over and we can enjoy the well earned fruits of
victory.

The ERA has passed and "Equality of rights under the law shall not be
denied or abridged on account of sex" is the law of the land.

There is a female president in the White House, and
the recently reached parity in the number of men and women in both
houses of Congress (and in government at the state and local levels)
ensures that Lincoln's rhetoric is finally true.  We have
"government of the people, by the people, and for the people", rather
than government of, by, and for men.  

Women have been fully integrated into American business.  Half of the
CEOs and management of American companies are now women.  American
labor unions have at last realized the dignity and importance of the
female worker; half of the carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc.
you encounter will be women.

Men have been fully integrated into the American family.  The 
realization has finally arrived that a couple's children are truely
the equal responsibility and right of both parents.  Men in great
numbers have taken up the call for decent and afordable day care
because the need for it impacts THEIR careers.  He, as often as she,
leaves work when the kids are sick.  Joint custody has become the rule
in divorce cases, and where custody is given to one parent it is as
likely to be the father as the mother.  Where couples can afford it
and desire a one wage earner family, househusbands are seen as often
as housewives.  Where both work, housework and childcare are shared
on a friendly and equal basis.

The military establishment has ceased to coerce young people on the
basis of sex.  Young women who want to serve their country for a time
or make a career of the military are no longer shunted into auxilliary
support groups that have little to do with the real business of the
military.  Young men who do not want to go into the military are not
in danger of being forced.

The fundamentalist religious right has reverted to being a religious
revival, and is no longer an anti-feminist political force.  They are
saving souls instead of bombing abortion clinics, lobbying against day
care legislation, and preventing birth control from being included in
aid packages to starving third world countries.  The Roman Catholic
church has relented on the issue of a male only celebate clergy.
Since their heirarchy is no longer forced to regard women primarily as 
temptation, they can see them as fellow human beings.  Consequently
the church no longer takes political stands on issues like divorce,
abortion, and birth control.

American schools have ceased to be institutions that rudely push or
subtly cajole our children into old fashioned sex roles.  That article
I saw in this week's TIME, the one that quoted the superintendent of
schools in Massachusetts as saying "We discourage the girls from using
scarce computer resources because our boys are going to need that
knowledge in their engineering careers."  -- that article was a
mistake.  The retraction is even now being typeset.  The newspaper
interview I saw last month with some Minnesota teacher who was up for
a major teaching award -- he didn't really say that boys were easier
to teach because girls were flighty and cared mostly about dates and
clothes.  It was all a mistake.  And no one wrote to the newspaper to
call him on it and demand he be denied his award (as they would surely
have done had he made some similar remark about blacks) because they
knew it was a mistake.  We're all waiting confidantly for the
correction to be published.

And it's so wonderful to know that in my own life I can relax and enjoy
the feminist Utopia.  Tomorrow when I arrive at work, I will no longer
find an engineering company that employes hundreds of engineers -- 
and has a growing staff of female engineers who can all go out to lunch
together and sit at the same table in a local restaurant.  I will no
longer work for a male department head who feels free to stand around
the halls and make remarks about how women are a pain to have in the
work force because they have no sense of teamwork --  probably, he says,
because they never played team sports in school.  I'll never again go
into a meeting of other staff people at my level and be suddenly
afraid that I've blundered into the men's room.  When I go to my
local medical clinic the next time I know I'll see an equal number of
female and male doctors, not the one in twenty ratio I've been used to
-- and, of course, the support staff of nurses, clerks, and technicians
will be half men.  How wonderful it will be not to have to worry any
more about the cub scouts turning my boy into an unthinking male
chauvinist piglet by using 'girl' as a constant insult -- "Come on
there, what are you, a bunch of GIRLS, get out there and WIN."
How wonderful never again to explain to some male co-worker
that I feel about the word 'broad' the same way I feel about the word
'nigger' and have him say "But I wasn't talking about YOU, Carole." as
if that made everything all right.

God, the more I think about it, the more wonderful it seems to be
able to live my life in the feminist Utopia.  Free at last, free at
last . . . Huh?  What?  Wait a minute, you mean it's not all true?
But he SAID we were living in the feminist utopia.  He said it right
here on the net.  And his female friend agreed.  They MUST have meant
that all these things I've been talking about were true.  I mean,
really, there couldn't possibly be anybody so (?)impossibly naive(?),
as to think that the revolution was over and the utopia arrived if
these things weren't true.  Could there?


					Carole Ashmore