Before the positive effects of Tierra Viva wear off, I wanted to get back to paddle training. I've been making rough training plans for UTMB, and they include 2 hours of paddling per week - preferably on water - since it's fun and good for my multi-sport side, and it builds strength for using trekking poles. I'm also going to do pole-specific strength training, e.g. triceps exercises on our weight machine, rowing with free weights, etc. I skied a lot in the winter so I guess I've already started.
Today's podcast was a CBC Rewind program on
Betty Friedan marking the 50th anniversary of her important book, "The Feminine Mystique". It was shocking to listen to the CBC radio panel discussion on her book from 1964. It was such a different world for women then, and that really wasn't so long ago. They also played a 1982 interview with her regarding a later book, and it was clear that society had changed a huge amount in just 18 years.
That got me thinking, as that overlapped a good chunk of my school years, and, although the biggest changes occurred when I was still too young to be affected directly, I remember how radical it used to be to take the position that women were equal human beings and could have decent careers at all, let alone any career they wanted. It's similar to the way views on same sex relationships and marriage have evolved in recent years.
As a young kid, I was good in school, and I remember being asked one time whether I was going to be a nurse or a teacher. Period. This would have been considered an enlightened viewpoint - recognition that I was likely to get higher education and work outside the home after marriage (although possibly not after kids). But that person still only saw two choices for me.
Listening to the program was a reminder of the completely different world I graduated into when I finished engineering school in the mid-1980s. I believed that all doors were open to me. And yet... 18 years is not even a generation. The world couldn't have changed as much as that - and it hadn't, as I later learned. Yet it was already seen as unfashionable by most women my age to refer to themselves as feminists since that was considered to be old school thinking. I see now how fragile things were back then and understand why older women were so frustrated with our generation.
It explains what got into the manager at my first job - the consulting structural engineer position I was so proud to land with my newly minted masters degree. The head honcho invited me to the company's Secretary's Day lunch along with "the other girls". Lucky for him, I was so shocked that I could barely squeak a "no" out of my mouth, let alone express the other thoughts swirling in my head. And that was far from the last time I encountered unequal treatment on the job.
The other thing that struck me is that you don't have to be much younger than I am to have completely missed this era where the role of women changed so much. If you're under 40 (or over!),
consider listening to even the first 10-15 minutes of this podcast (also available on iTunes) so you can hear the 1964 panel discussion. Think of how old your Mom was then and try to imagine her world compared to the way things were when you were her age. Mind blowing.