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Musings -- on the editor's mind

International Women’s Day flashed by last week, on March 8, too fast for me to catch it in the March 7 issue. But, reflect on women I did, thinking how different life is today for young women in college than for my sister 45 years ago, in 1973. She majored in physics at the University of Pennsylvania, a very good school. She got in, in part, because she was related to my dad, an alum. But that is another story.

Margaret became a Ph.D. She wanted to be an astrophysicist, excited as she was by the moon landings. But part of her detour came about because a professor gave her a B in a class. When she went to his office seeking an explanation, he told her “Woman don’t belong in physics.” To this day Margaret does not contribute to her alma mater.

My younger sister’s friend, Leslie, went to engineering school, starting in 1976. Women engineers, we see them all the time. But how lonely Leslie must have been in 1976. Were over 90 percent of engineering majors men that year? It must have been a real struggle.

From my college days, the women I know have insisted on equality. The struggle for justice is the sea I swim in. Do girls and young woman truly grasp how steeply uphill the path has been that their mothers and grandmothers climbed?

My ex-mother-in-law was in medical school in the late 1940s. She told stories of finding piss in her test tubes and other “pranks.” She was shunted into pediatrics, though my guess is she would have best served humanity and have been happiest as a research veterinarian. That was unheard of back then.

I will end with my mom, from a way past generation, a child of the Depression and a 1950s mother. I love the story she told me of being at a party for my dad’s work. He edited a weekly labor newspaper; he and his peers were ardent Democrats fully in support of President Lyndon Johnson. Asked in casual conversation in 1964 about the Vietnam war, she spoke against it, being against war, as most mothers are. My dad shushed her, for she was bucking the party line, ahead of her time as she was in opposing the war.

Did she stop speaking? Probably. It was a very different world 50 years ago, though men haven’t come nearly as far as we need to go to achieve equality.

 

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