I saw this story in the Huffington Post today, about a woman who went with her 60 year old mother to vote and watched as she cried.
Okay, I admit it, I cried when I voted too. I voted on Maryland’s first day of early voting. When I left the building, my eyes welled up with tears. I had to sit in my car for a while as the moment sank in, and I had a good cry over getting to vote for a woman for president.
My first vote for president was Jimmy Carter in 1980. I was 21. Carter lost. It would be 12 years before I would know what it was like to watch my party win the White House. Since 1980 I’ve wondered when would I get to vote for a woman. Sure, I voted for Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and I voted for Hillary in both primaries (2008 and 2016). But I knew Mondale was going to lose, and Maryland’s primaries are so late that voting in them is symbolic, the party’s candidate is a done deal by then. So this time it was emotional. Hillary will carry Maryland easily, and knock on wood will win on November 8th. So I cried.
My parents died just over a year ago, and often things happen in my life that make me want to pick up the phone and call them. The day I voted was one of those days. In any other year, I would have called them to tell them I voted, to talk about when they were going to vote. They too were faithful Democrats, and they too supported Hillary. Always. Even back when she said that thing about baking cookies. They would have been appalled by DJT. He would have made my dad so angry, especially over the Chinese steel thing. My dad was an auto worker, proud of the union. He walked a picket line a time or two in his life. My mom and dad and I would have had a good chat that day.
Finally. A woman is within striking distance of the White House. When I was in grade school, I remember having a one-on-one session with one of the teachers about what our goals were. I said I wanted to be a doctor. She told me, you know there’s a lot of math in that, you might want to think about being a nurse instead. In high school, I was in the Future Nurses club, a club of about 20 other girls and 1 token boy (who the other boys liked to make fun of). Turns out medicine wasn’t for me, but I did get a BS in math and computer science. I’ve worked 30 years in the comp sci field, a field utterly dominated by men. The office I am in now — 95% men. Although management where I work is full of women, technical work is dominated by men. So you bet I’ve felt a glass ceiling a time or two. Who gets the best tasks? Who gets the tasks with the most visibility? Always a man. Who gets to be team leader? Whose name is first on the report? Always a man. From grade school through high school, college and my entire career, all I’ve heard, seen and felt is that women are not supposed to be doing a man’s job. Women are not supposed to be smart. Women are supposed to assist men, bake for them, do their scut work.
Remember when Barbie first spoke? I used to play with Barbie dolls, Skipper, Francie, etc. Talking Barbie came after my doll phase, but still. Imagine my disappointment when she first spoke and said math is tough and let’s go shopping. Now I like a good shopping day as much as the next girl, but all my life I was told math is tough, and you know what, that’s just crap. I love math. I work with math all the time. Math is not tough. Being dumb is easy.
When I voted last week, I thought of that teacher and being told that I should settle for being something other than what I really wanted, I just felt all those times when society told me that because I am a woman, I should not want to do what I wanted to do, that I could not be who I wanted to be, that only men are good at math and I should just be satisfied to be less and to just assist them. After I voted, I cried. On November 9th, I will wake up to the first day when we have a woman as our president-elect, and I’m sure I will cry that day too.