This is NOT a diary about Gov. Palin. I refuse to grant her that much of my time and energy. It is a diary that explores the fall-out for the average working woman due to widespread republican acceptance of Palin running as a VP.
As a 54 year old woman who has worked since I was 14, I have seen the small changes in the workplace to accept women as a colleage and equal to men. It has been sloooow and hard fought. More below the fold:
My personal story is that I entered the carpenter's union in Atlanta in 1979 as an apprentice. Prior to joining the union I spent one year in a technical school training in carpentry. I spent one year preparing because I didn't want to fail. Those four years of apprenticeship taught me a lot about myself and my goals. I learned to persevere, I learned to use humor to cut off comments of disrespect. I learned to ignore ignorance.
I knew that my passion was to be a jorneyman carpenter. As a toddler I would play with wood blocks and loved the smell of the wood and creating structures and patterns in the different colors of the wood. I was not allowed to take shop classes in high school--girls were forbidden, but I built some amazing forts with my brothers at home.
Carpentry is hard work and most of the men I worked around did not want me there. I worked my ass off to earn their respect. I postponed having children, I doubled up on classes, I took additional classes in welding and electrical to better understand the complete picture of skilled trades. I was the first woman to receive a journeyman certificate in local 3064. I began teaching math in the apprenticeship school and later accepted a full time position teaching carpentry at the local technical college. Using the same work ethic I learned as an apprentice I became the first woman dept. chair of skilled trades in the state. I went back to college at night got a BS in technical studies in Education. Received my Masters degree in Adult Education. Blah-blah-blah--you get the picture.
When John McCain says that women need more training to be accepted in the work force as an equal or to "make it" he reveals how little he knows and how hypocrital he is. He did not choose a woman of superior intellect and knowledge for his running mate.
I don't believe my commitment and training is greater than any other career woman. We are the overwhelming majority of Master Degree classes. We KNOW that we must be over qualified, work harder and longer to gain the credibility that comes easier to a man. These have been the rules of the game. The truth is that we are actually more educated than our male counterparts in many fields.
Using education as an example--School teachers are overwhelmingly women, but principals are usually men, and Superintendents are overwhelmingly men. It is not unusual for a woman with more experience and a PhD to be an assistant supt.to a man with less education and experience. In my rural community the Supt's job is usually reserved for the football coach with a MA in PE.
I think that John McCain's decision to insert an obviously under qualified, under prepared, and inferior candidate on every level of measurement erases the forty years of inroads millions of women have worked toward. I look at my 20 year old daughter and I wonder how much harm Sarah Palin's VP nomination has done to her personally. Will she now be viewed through the "hockey mom" filter? Will she also endure the overt sexual harrassment I dealt with thirty years ago? Will she be asked interview questions of when or if she plans to have children as a pre-requisite to obtaining a job, like I did? Will she also spend precious time away from her family to over educate herself to obtain an opportunity for a promotion? Will she face many of the barriers that I, and millions of other women faced, and thought we had buried?
Make no mistake, this unqualified and undereducated woman has hurt us all! It does not matter that Jill Biden has a PhD and that Michelle Obama is a lawyer. They are the wives. Gov. Palin is the shining example for the republican party of what a woman should be. In a debate with a man of superior knowledge and experience she is viewed the winner. Why? She is cute and offered a steaming loaf of BS and generalities as answers. She is a mile wide and an inch deep. When Joe Biden showed a deeply personal side and actually choked up. This unscripted moment revealed that beneath the fluff there was nothing. At the end of the debate she and her husband didn't even embrace. She is the mother of an extremely disfunctional family. I learned a lot in that debate. I learned that she is unqualified as a politician, unqualified as woman, unqualified as the matriarch of her family.
She holds the view that our bodies should be under the control of a bunch of white haired old men. If discriminated against on the job we should suck it up and stay silent. If sexually harrassed, we should just keep quiet because we deserve it for being born a woman.
Since the debate I have been in a funk, and this is the reason. Have the efforts of an entire generation of women; the humiliation we have swallowed when we were disrespected and harrassed and yet we still stood; the hurt we endured when less qualified men were promoted ahead of us, and still we worked; have these all been erased by a simpleton hockey mom who stumbled through note cards to reveal no moral character or intellectual substance? I need to know that I, and millions of other working women of my generation, made a difference. Has the bar been lowered so low that my daughter, and her generation of women, must begin this same fight from square one?