When Good Girls Revolted

I’ll pick one story, an anecdote to begin. Late in 2023 a young Texan woman asked permission from her employer to work from home. Her baby was in neonatal intensive care and she needed to be close to the hospital. In the US no woman has the right to maternity leave, no corporation is required to provide it so sure as hell asking to work from home while your baby is in infant ICU, well that is totally unacceptable. Kyte Baby fired her!. That this company Kyte Baby is in the business of making baby clothing is beyond ironic.There was of course a backlash and soon enough the predictable tortured mea culpa from the CEO of Kyte Baby, not because they acknowledged the obvious values based failing but because the bad publicity had cost Kyte Baby millions of dollars. What is most striking is the dead silence, the collective ‘whatever’ the issue was greeted with. It came, it went and there is still no call for federally supported maternity leave in the US, the only advanced country in the world without paid mat leave.

It is 2024. There is work to be done. And reflections to reflect upon. It can help to look back sometimes. It can remind us where we’ve come from and hint at where we’re going. It can also remind us that the fight is never over. Never. That what has been won, can be lost. That what has been taken, can be taken back. It is upon each new generation to honour those who came before to remember that.

So, here goes.

I can remember the angry protestations from my own peers when we were in our late teens, bitterly complaining about the world they had inherited from those who came before. I’m not quite sure how our parents deserved that sharp, uncompromising criticism. After all they were an entire generation of men and women who had fought and sacrificed through a world war. But to be young is to be certain, what has fair got to do with it? And certain we were. Try to resist when it comes your turn to throw stones, it is no more than a blameworthy fools game, nothing is advanced, ill will roams the land and it serves little purpose.

And here we are again.

I’m 73, a Baby Boomer, a generation that sure as hell raised hell, leaving our world changed. Some of it good change, the rest not so much. But change things we did.

I think my generation’s greatest achievement was with the women’s movement and the tsunami of social, cultural, economic and political issues that came with it. From the fiery activism of Women’s Suffrage before WW1 to the broad based protest of the Women’s Movement in the late 60’s, came real structural change. Voting rights, the rights of married women, property rights and divorce laws, rights in common law relationships, universal health care, federally mandated maternity leave and unemployment support, family support, all of it changed in an active legislative outburst in the 70’s and 80’s, since adjusted from time to time. And even more than all that, how women are perceived and valued has undergone a fundamental, long overdue shift. Our society, warts and all, was never going to be able to achieve any greatness until that screamingly obvious imbalance was corrected. Of course, and as with all significant structural change there was a lot of resistance, some of which continues to this day.

It is odd to think of now but my extraordinary wife Mac can confirm a time when it wasn’t so uncommon to be asked, sometimes in confrontation, “So are you a women’s libber then?!”. It was used in a pejorative context as a way of describing a woman as ‘one of those’ but the status of women has permanently changed and no amount of name calling will change that back.

When young Tony arrived in Canada in 1958 a woman was paid forty percent of what a man was paid for the same work, forty cents to the dollar earned by a man for equivalent work. As of 2021, according to Statistics Canada the gender pay gap for full time employees is $0.90; women now make 90 cents of every dollar men make for the same work. Those are the metrics of change. Still work to be done but you get the point. The trajectory is real and has changed the lives of women across Canada in every respect. It has changed Canada and that didn’t just happen.

It happened, in large part, because Baby Boomers identified it as an issue, and engaged in forcing change. That kind of fiscal change can never be left to corporations, the bottom line is of most importance to a business, not the fiscal health of its employees, so it is a rare corporation that will lead such change. And it demands constant vigilance.

Another anecdote might be instructive. My daughter Sophie is immensely competent at what she does. A few years ago she was working in Calgary in a managerial position. She recommended a friend to the company as a good prospect and after the usual process he was hired into the equivalent position she held. He was junior to her in the company pecking order. I’ll cut to the chase. He was paid $10,000 more annually than Sophie; less experienced, less industry qualified, $10k more. Sophie was incensed and with good reason. To their credit and after Sophie confronted them, the mistake was rectified but only because my daughter stood up for herself, not because the employer stood up for her. And it did serve one good purpose. It reminded Sophie that women must always be vigilant, that economic inequality always lurks in the shadows.

I’m not blind to the many issues still plaguing women, not the least of which is a simple expectation of personal safety. As a man I have rarely experienced a sense of unease in a public place, a feeling that I am not safe. Find me the woman who has not. Women are born into that reality, from the youngest age taught to be watchful about personal risk.

It is complex all this change, made all the more so by how interconnected it all is. It was a daunting task a full century in the making, made all the harder by the resistance it met at every stop. I can’t pretend to understand the path those generations of women have come but I do know that young women born into today’s world live in the shadow of that legacy. A young Canadian woman in this century is free and empowered in ways that her predecessors could only ever dream of. 

So here’s the thing, if you don’t know where that came from, how hard it was to achieve, what sacrifices needed to be made you may take it all for granted.

But here’s another thing: If you don’t protect it, value it and guard it, fight for it the way others before you did, we will take it back!