FMLA’s First Birthday

Marie Antoinette once famously said, “Let them eat cake.” I doubt that she envisioned feminists more than two hundred years later across the Atlantic Ocean taking her advice for a reason she didn’t even consider.

In Marie’s time, women were objects of desire and receptacles of semen in the process of conception. Women were free to have pseudo-relationships with each other, though public lesbianism was inconceivable at the time. Certainly, women didn’t have the right to vote, to hold an executive office or be in a position of influence. In fact, Joan of Arc was killed for presuming to wear men’s clothes, despite the fact that she won victories in the Hundred Year’s War and led to the coronation of King Charles VII. Although she was killed by France’s enemies in England, the phobia surrounding a woman who assumes a position of power and proves competent at what she’s doing was very rampant in that time.

Fast forward to 2010. 579 years after Joan of Arc died, the FMLA chapter of Shippensburg University sits in a room in the women’s center. Music is playing in the background on a portable stereo, two pizza boxes lay mostly empty and the cake, sitting off by itself in a corner, patiently waits to be cut. The people who have come are celebrating one year of FMLA being in existence and while there are only seven people altogether, our commitment is strong. The director of the women’s center on campus has a position of authority and leadership. So too does FMLA’s first and current president. As the secretary of the group, I feel a sense of pride that we’ve come this far. For today, no one is talking about how much work needs to be done, for we are all basking in the knowledge of how far we have come.

A woman ran for president and lost in the primaries to the eventual winner. Women are now the CEO’s of various companies and hold important governmental positions. The voices of women grow stronger with each passing year as more women are going to college in a disproportionate number to men and what women are learning is that the world is unfair. Women may have felt the unfairness of the world before, but may have been unable to name what was wrong or be unable to do anything about it. Women had to write novels under male pseudonyms for fear their work would not be published on account of their having ovaries. Today, women not only publish novels, they can publish novels that are spectacular successes, such as Harry Potter and Twilight. Millions of dollars are coming to the women who use the pens (or their computers) to tell interesting stories that people enjoy.

At FMLA’s first birthday party, we are celebrating the accomplishments that women have made while giving out prizes like lip gloss and facial cream to the winners of a trivia game. We tape names to each other’s backs and play a guessing game to see if we can figure out who our famous feminists are. We talk about Manifesta and the advancement of the feminist cause. We might be the choir, but when someone preaches the message to us, we listen attentively and appreciatively.

As a group, FMLA itself would be largely improbable in years past. The advancement of women’s rights was, and remains to be, a tough sell to everyone. On the surface, it appears that society has already granted women a lot of rights. If only women would pull themselves up by their pantyhose, they have an equal chance of getting to the upper echelons of society just as much as any man does. The unspoken- and therefore unknown- reality is that women have to fight harder just to get something that ought to be theirs by right to begin with. Sexism and ageism combine to make older women appear to be useless to society, despite the fact that many older women are just as smart and hard-working as many younger women. We live in a society that values women by their appearance not their ability and in this context, a positive valuation of a woman can only last so long- exactly the amount of time she has to flaunt her beauty to the world.

There are many other problems too, most of them stemming from the idea that women just aren’t as good. America as a nation is behind Afghanistan on the percentage of women in the legislature, though this number does not represent the number of disproportionate administrative assistants whose job it is to take orders from some putz in Congress that the majority of the citizenry didn’t vote for anyway. This situation represents a systemic problem that women have to overcome: they are only allowed in positions that imply servitude to an authority who is likely male.

At FMLA, we have four women, two men and one transgender person. No one is in a subjugated position to anyone else. Each person has an equal say in what happens in the group. All they have to do is speak up. We are ahead of our time. In this room on the far side of campus, we already have a model for good government, though it will likely never be put into practice in Washington. We already have a model of social equality of the sexes, though it may be a long time before our particular system is adopted at the highest levels of power.

FMLA has lasted one year, and it’s been a year where we were laying down our roots and setting things up. Now, I feel like we are ready. The future awaits us, and it’s ours for the taking. The cake is finally cut.

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