If women ruled the world, everything would change, according to former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Politics would be more collegial. Businesses would be more productive. And communities would be healthier. Empowering women would make the world a better place. Blending memoir, social history and a call to action, Myers challenges us to imagine a not-too-distant future in which increasing numbers of women reach the top ranks of politics, business, science and academia. Here's an excerpt from “Why Women Should Rule the World”:
Introduction
Women should rule the world.
That was it, the answer to my frustration and growing political alienation. It seemed so simple, so obvious. Women!
If we were in charge, things might actually change. Instead of posturing, we’d have cooperation. Instead of gridlock, we’d have progress. Instead of a shouting match, we’d have a conversation. A very long conversation. But a conversation nonetheless. Everyone would just hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”
Or would they? What would it be like if women ruled the world, I began to wonder?
Would anything really change? Would the world be a better place? My hunch was that more women in public life would, in fact, make things better.
After all, more women already have.
It’s easy (and perhaps a bit facile) to argue that men haven’t done such a great job. The last century was the bloodiest in human history, and so far, this one has been a tale of war, terrorism, religious extremism, abject poverty, and disease. I’m not saying it’s all men’s fault. But let’s just say, they’ve been in charge, and it doesn’t seem we’re much closer to finding answers to these profound and vexing problems.
On the other hand, if there are societies where women have truly ruled, they are few and far between. For virtually all of history, woman has played a supporting role to man’s, well, leading man. A comprehensive review of encyclopedia entries published in the early 1900s included only 850 women, though it covered a span of nearly 2,000 years. And the queens, politicians, mothers, wives, mistresses, beauties, religious figures, and women of “tragic fate” were notable mostly for their relationships with men.
I have always believed that women could rule the world. As far back as I can remember, it has seemed obvious to me that women were, in fact, every bit as qualified as men in most endeavors, and better than them at many. Of course, the corollary — that men are better than women at some things — also seemed obvious, at least after the sixth grade. Before that, I thought I could do anything any boy could do. I was a good student and a good athlete, and I didn’t have much trouble keeping up with boys in the classroom or on the playground. But then Doug, another sixth grader at Wiley Canyon Elementary School in California, challenged my friend Peggy and me to a game of two-on-one basketball, first side to ten would win. He beat us 10-0.
I realized then that athletic boys are better basketball players than most girls, even the ones like Peggy and me who spent a fair amount of time shooting hoops. While I confess this was a bit disappointing at the time, I certainly didn’t think that boys were better at everything, or even most things. That idea simply never occurred to me.
Maybe it’s because I grew up surrounded by strong women. My mother, a product of her generation, left college after two years to marry my father, a young Navy pilot.
Within a few years, she had three little girls and a husband who was often at sea. With Castro’s ascent in Cuba, then the war in Vietnam, my dad was gone for weeks or even months at a time, and my mom was left to manage alone. One of my earliest memories is of helping my mom pack a little plastic Christmas tree, some cookies, and a few wrapped packages into a big box to send my dad, who was on a ship somewhere in Southeast Asia. But she never complained (at least not when my sisters and I were listening), and she never seemed overwhelmed by all that she had to do. The Navy, like all branches of the military, would collapse without the community of able women (and now a lot of men) who manage things stateside, while their husbands (and now some wives) are away. My mother and her network of Navy wives helped each other tend to sick children, unstop kitchen sinks, and deal with worrisome news from the war raging half a world away.
After my father left the Navy, we moved to the suburbs of Los Angeles, and my mom eventually earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees, then went to work, first as a counselor at a local college, then as an executive at the phone company. She was good at what she did, rose quickly in her various jobs, and got a lot of satisfaction from her professional accomplishments. I didn’t always like it when my mom was gone, but I never doubted that what she was doing was important. At the time, most of the mothers in my neighborhood stayed home, so what my mom was doing was unusual. But my dad was supportive, and my sisters and I were more proud than displaced — even when we had to eat dry macaroni and overcooked hot dogs every time it was my sister Betsy’s turn to make dinner. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t go to college and have a career — as well as a family — of my own. Both my parents, but especially my mother, encouraged me and led me to believe that it was possible.
My father’s mother, Grandma Bernadette, also shaped my ideas about what women could accomplish, in ways I think she never would have imagined. Her husband — my grandfather — died of congestive heart failure (he’d had rheumatic fever as a child) when he was just thirty-seven, leaving her with five children: my dad, who was eleven, and his four sisters, ages twelve to two.
My grandfather had owned a gas station on Main Street in Racine, Wisconsin, while my grandmother was busy raising the children and playing the organ at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. She hadn’t been very involved in the business — and it certainly wasn’t a business where one expected to find women in 1946. Because of his heart condition, my grandfather didn’t have any life insurance, but his business was insured. So when he died — as my grandmother liked to tell it — the insurance men came to her house, suggested she sell it and the gas station, and move with her children into the Catholic orphanage across town. She told them to get the hell off her porch and never come back. She kept the station and managed the day- to-day operations until she sold it more than thirty years later.
She raised five children, put them all through college, and still found time to play the organ at Mass every weekday and five times on Sunday. While she clearly missed things about being married — and having a father for her children — she never really dated or considered marrying again. She would sometimes say she never found the right fellow, but her daughters believe that she simply liked being the boss.
So my grandmother — by fate, rather than design — was a small business owner and single mom long before women routinely did either, let alone both. And I’ve often wondered: What would have happened to another family if the mother had died and left the father with five young children? How many men could have managed to run the business, raise the kids, and volunteer at church six days a week, all by themselves?
In addition to my mother and grandmother, I grew up surrounded by accomplished women. The principal of my elementary school. My guidance counselor in high school. My father’s sisters. My friends’ mothers, and my mother’s friends. It seemed to me that women were capable of doing just about anything. Not that they were always allowed to, of course. When I was in second grade (even before I learned that boys were better at basketball), our teacher asked us to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. The kid next to me, Robert, drew himself as a TV repairman. While his choice of career may not have thrilled his parents, it struck me hard. Wow, I thought. He can be anything. I have to be a teacher, or a nurse, or a nun. I drew myself as a teacher.
Happily, the years since I finished the second grade have seen an exponential increase in options. Girls can now aspire to be elementary school teachers or university presidents; nurses or doctors; nuns or — in many denominations — priests or ministers or rabbis. Girls and boys can be engineers, entrepreneurs, or astronauts. They can repair televisions or appear on them as actors or journalists. They can build homes or stay home with the kids.
And they can be press secretary to the president of the United States, as I was.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/23308727/?GT1=10856 / Link For Tech Purpose
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