Hear me roar

For someone of my generation, it really is startling to realize sometimes the barriers that the women before us faced.  When I was little, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" meant "What career?" and I always had an answer (they varied over time, and some of them were a tad unrealistic).  The girls at my school played on the same playground equipment as the boys, climbing and swinging and yelling.  Later, kickball teams were always co-ed -- and there was no sense that this was anything unusual, it was taken for granted.  I don't recall ever being told, "You can't do that because you're a girl."  I have a hard time wrapping my head around the notion that earlier generations were raised to believe that they were somehow less because they were female, and that most of them accepted that.  I just can't imagine feeling that way, thinking that way.  For most of my life, no one even hinted that I wasn't just as good, as smart, as capable of making my own decisions as any boy.  So I'd like to say thank you to all the women who went before me who defied and conquered the inequality that is so foreign to me.  I can understand enough to know that it was a great gift to me and my sisters and our daughters and granddaughters.  Some people are trying to take a lot of that away right now, but there's no way to reverse the mindset with which you have raised us, and the examples that you have provided for us.  (I recently read a story about Madeleine Albright's granddaughter thinking that the Secretary of State is always female!)  The women of this country will never accept a subservient position in our society again, and we are actively working to share that attitude with the women of the world who are still legally controlled by the men in their lives.  We are defying gravity, and no one is going to bring us down.