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When Women Fought to Enter the Workforce, This Isn’t What We Had in Mind
The unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement
I grew up in the era of shoulder pads. On TV and in movies, women clicked their heels against sidewalks, swayed their hips in form-fitting skirts, and took up just as much horizontal space, from shoulder to shoulder, as any man in the vicinity.
Of course, their skirts prevented them from manspreading, but seeing as this was a term that hadn’t yet been invented in the 1980s, no one seemed too concerned.
The working women of the 1980s owed their expansive shoulders, and the right to take space that came with them, to the second-wave feminists of the preceding decades. By the time I was born, at the dawn of the “decade of greed,” it was hard to imagine a time when most women didn’t work. Nearly every mom I knew worked, even if she didn’t sport high heels and shoulder pads. My own mother, an art teacher, wore jeans and paint-smattered smocks.
I owe a lot to the feminists of the 1960s and 70s. I simply cannot imagine a life confined to the home, wholly dependent on a partner for my financial well-being, my days lost in an endless blur of housework and the incessant demands of children.
