biodiverseed:mypubliclands:Honoring Trailblazing Women at the BLMIn recognition of women’s history m
biodiverseed:mypubliclands:Honoring Trailblazing Women at the BLMIn recognition of women’s history month, we are featuring three trailblazing women who were the first in their field at the BLM: Elaine (Mosher) Pearsons, Lynell Schalk, and Caroline Peters. Click below to learn more about the careers of these exceptional women who broke barriers in the 1960s and 70s. Keep readingI love seeing these stories, but I also kind of hate the language being used. When you individualize the stories of women like this and say they were “exceptional,” “trailblazers,” and “broke barriers” it deliberately skirts around the fact that there have literally always been women capable of doing these jobs, and the only “exceptional” thing is that men decided to stop legally discriminating against women.It’s analogous to what Chris Rock had to say on the idea of “black progress.” When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.In this case, it’s not that women have made progress, it’s that men stopped being crazy and irrational, and stopped deliberately creating laws and social barriers for women’s participation in public life. I’d like to see more people flip the narrative about this idea of “progress.” Yes, these women fought, yes, they struggled, yes, they were strong and determined, but don’t put it some passive context: name who and what they were struggling against. -- source link
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