I love this artist’s take on my generation’s “feminism.”
Anyway, just read an interesting piece over at Newsweek and that link is here. So, these 70’s women and what they were doing was something girls my age in the 70’s looked up to. They were in the workforce and it is really interesting to read about the concept of “dollies.”
They were an archetype: independent, determined young graduates of Seven Sisters colleges, fresh-faced, new to the big city, full of aspiration. Privately, they burned with the kind of ambition that New York encourages so well. Yet they were told in job interviews that women could never get to the top, or even the middle. They accepted positions anyway—sorting mail, collecting newspaper clippings, delivering coffee. Clad in short skirts and dark-rimmed glasses, they’d click around in heels, currying favor with the all-male management, smiling softly when the bosses called them “dollies.” That’s just the way the world worked then. Though each quietly believed she’d be the one to break through, ambition, in any real sense, wasn’t something a woman could talk about out loud.
It was still like that in the 80’s at the places I worked. Some women slept their way to the top?
I’m serious. Most of us who considered ourselves feminists would not do a thing like that. Not on the job. Ever. We would have really looked down on a perceived “sister” who was doing that. We just wanted to be seen as equals with the males we were working with. Read the whole article. It’s good.
Sexual equality and sexual freedom were part of all that too. In a sense we became very much like men in the way they acted. This included relationships?
We were just “equal.”
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 
Great article Bonnaire. Good to see women are thinking more about equality again.
Yesterday i had lunch at the restaurant I told you about and the first woman Governor of Arizona, Rose Mofford eats there on Saturday, at her booth. She was a secretary to the Secretary of State for many years, before Wesley Bolin appointed her as the SOS, when he became the governor. She became the governor after Evan Mecham was impeached. Since then we have had two women governors. Janet Napolitano and Jan Brewer. Rose Mofford? I love to see her and say, “Hello Governor!” She is as tall as my own grandmother was with a beehive hairdo that is her trademark. Compared to California we were small, maybe more like Alaska was back then., I guess.
Az didn’t become a State until 1912, so it still had the pioneer women around when I was born, for this reason we have more women who have been firsts than many States, including Sandra Day O’Connor who was educated in California btw. Az had the first woman State Court Chief Justice, Lorna Lockwood, more female legislators than men, the first woman legislator to be Speaker of the House. I guess because of that… growing up, I just took a lot of it for granted.
I hadn’t thought about feminism until I began to read your writings, and how Hillary Clinton was treated. I still find that unbelievable. Still.
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None of us could believe it about Hillary. None of us. I will never vote for any Democratic women again, Song. Riverdaughter has the whole history over at her place. One thing I really like about AZ women? They are so strong! Like you! I like your state.
One of these days, Song. I’m visiting. I am.
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well, I look forward to that Bonnaire. Phoenix has grown, and many of my friends are heading out of it, north. It was a small town when I grew up here. The best government was and still is, the least.
More women in our legislature sometimes than men. I have seen several of our governors around the town. Jack Williams at the Circle K, regularly. Fife Symington, who resigned, took culinary classes. And Rose Mofford, who I see almost every week.
Rose and I are natives. She is as tall as my grandmother.. There wasn’t one thing small about my grandmother. I like to see Governor Mofford, just for a faint memory of my grandma. Not in looks. Well the white hair, but in personality.
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ps: I found your site because I was reading RD awhile before. You must be thinking here of someone else.
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Somebody called “old mack” came over here from Rodg’s place? And made a comment about “Stirrups” but I think it went under “about myself as a writer” — it is hard to keep track of where the comments land?
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