Editor’s note: This commentary is by Melinda Moulton, of Huntington, who is the CEO of Main Street Landing in Burlington.
I just turned 70 years of age and I remember what it was like for women of my generation growing up in America. In the late 1800s my great-grandfather started a family construction company and named it after himself followed by “And Sons.” My brother was in line to take the reins of the company, but he was never able to meet the challenge and the business closed after my father died in 1974. At a very early age, I came to realize that because I was not a son, I would never be placed upon the pedestal where my brother sat. My father had one son and five daughters, and I was the one who joined him on Saturdays at the office learning estimating, finance, and the ins and outs of the construction business. This served me well in my career, but it did not earn me the coveted leadership role of the family’s four generational men’s club known as “And Sons.”
As the captain of my high school basketball team, it always bothered me that “forward” players could shoot the ball and stayed on the team’s front court, the “guards” had to stay on their team’s back court, and we could only dribble three times before passing the ball. Strenuous exercise in my time was thought, by some doctors, to be dangerous for girls. No surprise back then that girls who became pregnant were expelled from school but the boys who did the impregnating were not. I lived under the assumption that women were put on the Earth to marry, make babies, and care for the home and I rebelled against this notion from the moment I could talk.
When the ’60s pulled me into the civil rights revolution that defined my generation, I burned my bra and took to the streets in support of women’s rights. We were educated and led by Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem and so many other female champions. We rose up against a male dominated system that refused to recognize women as equal to them. In 1973, the year after my first child was born, Roe v. Wade was adopted by our Supreme Court. The rights we have today left scars on the backs of so many courageous women who fought for equality in a male dominated society. This battle has been raging since the beginning of human history, and it will rise to an unbearable heated pitch over the next few months.
The loss of the Notorious RBG leaves an open wound on the soul of America and a vacant seat on the Supreme Court. A burning arrow of sorrow and apprehension pierces the hearts of many Americans. We face the real possibility that all of the rights she fought for and won could disappear. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is revered and honored for her tenacity, brilliance, diplomacy, and collaboration. Few people alive remember when a woman needed her husband’s permission to take out a loan, open up a credit card account, use birth control, obtain a mortgage, or start a business. Today, employment law has banned gender-based discrimination and women cannot be fired for being pregnant. We now have the right to play sports that in the past were only for men. Women’s lives have been transformed as our rights expanded over the past 50 years.
But, let’s be honest, there is still so much more to do. The passing of Justice Ginsburg craters my mind with sleepless reruns of all the possible scenarios that might play out over the next few months. What if her replacement takes us back from the future and returns us to the past? What if we lose the right to reproductive freedom? The Guardian noted on Sept. 18, “this is what is at stake: reproductive rights, voting rights, protections from discrimination, the power of the presidency, the rights of immigrants, tax rules and laws, and healthcare for millions of vulnerable Americans, to name a few issues. Every big issue in American life is on the line.”
A new generation of young women are rising up to meet this moment to fight to protect the rights that Justice Ginsburg so skillfully fought for. And RBG’s words will forever carry them forward toward their dreams of a more equal and just world for all women: “Women belong in all places where decisions are made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.”
