We have “Battling” Bella Abzug to thank for Women’s Equality Day on August 26. The crusading Congresswoman from New York initiated the legislation that mandated it back in 1971. Writing an oral history of Bella with my late girlfriend and colleague Mary Thom was a lesson in courage, passion, brilliance, humor, and wisdom; when I am searching for inspiration or insight, I ask myself, “What would Bella do?”
A particular piece of wisdom stuck with me. We have gone from DEpendence to INdependence, she observed, but we have one more step: INTERdependence. As always, Bella was speaking of the personal as well as political. On the personal level, that insight helped me understand the new kind of intimacy that I was finding among women of my generation as I researched my book How We Love Now. It also adds perspective to the progress (or lack thereof) toward women’s equality. Until we won the vote in 1920, after 72 years of protests, marches, speeches, and civil disobedience, we were dependent on men for our survival; the passage of the 19th amendment enabled us to speak for ourselves, the first step toward independence. For another seventy-plus years, we broke rules and broke ceilings and broke free.
In recent decades, despite setbacks, we have reached a critical mass, and the breakthroughs we have achieved and the networks we have established, are fostering an interdependence that empowers all of us. Recently I have encountered a handful of the growing number of women — I call them entrepreneurs of empowerment — who are developing specific projects that reflect the spirit of support, sisterhood, and truth-telling that binds us into a formidable force for equality.
Propelling them all is our secret ingredient that becomes more potent with age: the community of women, what I call (in my new ebook You Gotta Have Girlfriends, a “post fifty posse.” I have seen two documentaries that capture that special chemistry.
