Today, the women's movement is asleep at exactly the moment that the country most needs skilled women to stimulate our economy. With women outpacing men in college and advanced degrees, they have proven their competitive advantage. And with the majority of married households depending on dual incomes, both women and men need to be paid what they deserve.
Younger Boomer women — now in their mid-40s to mid-50s — took for granted the opportunities opened up by pioneers of the Boomer and Silent generations. Many are not aware that the old disparities are stuck fairly close to where they were when my generation of feminist leaders passed the baton. Today white women make an average of about 78 cents for every dollar earned by men; for women of color it's worse: about 71 cents for African-American women and 62 cents for Latino women. Is it any wonder that female-headed households have the lowest incomes?
What will it take for younger Boomer women, suffering record levels of low well-being, to insist upon income parity? They must organize to elect women to represent their interests. For the first time in 30 years, the numbers of women elected to Congress declined in 2010. The same trend is seen in corporate boardrooms and state legislatures.
Kristen Gillibrand is 45 years old, a rising star in Congress, mother of two, and determined to wake women up.
The New York senator believes it is vital that women's economic potential be unleashed to bring the country out of its economic malaise. "If women earned dollar for dollar what men do," she says, "it could raise the GDP by 9%! This affects every American family."
Gillibrand has created a website, OfftheSidelines.org, to call women to action. It offers stories of female role models and guidelines on how to organize women at the grass roots. When women join men at the table in the political or corporate arena, they change the conversation.
Gillibrand herself is a model of today's activist working mother. Before she was in the Senate, she was one of five female members of the House of Representativesappointed to the Armed Services Committee by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The men talked mostly about missiles. The women talked mostly about people — how to repair the minds and bodies of soldiers returning from our two wars.
"We elevated the issue of mental health, PTSD, and traumatic brain injury," Gillibrand says proudly. The committee then voted the resources to provide care. Once having gained her seat on that influential committee, she wasn't about to give up her voice during an important markup just because she was nine months pregnant. She sat through a marathon session of 13 hour and started experiencing pre-labor contractions. She laughs about it now, but "it was excruciating." She got her own amendment passed for veterans. A few hours after she got home at 10 p.m., she was rushed to the hospital to deliver her second child.
Rep. Gabby Giffords, another woman on that House Armed Services Committee, did not allow her torturous recovery from a bullet through her brain to keep her from traveling to Washington, D.C., in August to cast her vote on the default.
These are the Rosie the Riveters for this generation. Until women take their rightful place in leadership in the political and corporate arenas, the decisions affecting their lives will not be enlightened and the country's economic recovery will not substantially improve.
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