A Quote by Martha C. Nussbaum
When I came to Harvard, there were no tenured women except one, who was in a chair reserved for a woman. It's still an uphill battle, and I encountered great sexism in parts of my career, but I have to say that things are a lot better than they used to be. There are many women today doing wonderful work all over the academy.
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For women, no matter what career, what path you choose, it's still an uphill battle to work your way up to these top leadership positions. And you're much more closely scrutinized for everything - for things that men are not.
Women are capable of doing so many things these days, physically, emotionally, within relationships and career. There are so many things that women have evolved into and I feel really proud about where women are right now.
When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60's and early 70's, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors - bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother - to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who'd gone before us.
I've been fighting for nine years and in the beginning there was a lot of backlash and non-supporters of women fighters. We could never find many women fighters and when we did sometimes we were put on the card for the wrong reasons. It was frustrating. When I'd go train in gyms, it seemed like the guys at the gym were skeptical and didn't think I was as serious as they were because I was a woman, but today things are different.
I think if you were to talk to women who have run, both successfully and unsuccessfully, nearly all of them would say, "You learn so much." You learn about yourself, what you're capable of doing.... And it doesn't have to all happen when you're young - I mean, one of the most powerful women in American politics is Nancy Pelosi. She had five children. She didn't go into politics until her youngest child was in high school.... That's one of the great things about being a woman in today's world: You have a much longer potential work life than our mothers or our grandmothers did.
What's surprising to me now is that now that I'm talking to a lot of women about this, so many women are doing this. Straight women, lesbian women, bisexual women, poor women, White women, immigrant women. This does not affect one group.
Humans who see something different than them want to hate it and tear it down. Britain had a government policy that allowed prejudice to destroy someone's life, and today there is still homophobia at home and elsewhere, like Russia or Greece. It's still a relevant discussion. While women have it better than the 1940s or '50s, sexism is still prevalent.
Today, nobody has a problem with a women working, but every woman invariably faces casual sexism at work.
We say women have made great strides: in biology, in many areas of chemistry, in many places, women are now the majority of medical students. But when I began my career, that wasn't the case. There were very strong stereotypes in biology and medicine.
There were a lot of different things [in The Women's Room ]. I don't really want to summarize it in this way. It's about a woman's awakening, a woman who came of age in the '50s and is a teenager - actually, she's a little bit older - in the '60s and part of the women's movement and how she ends up there.
You have to understand that the Bible is really a library of books and it has different categories of material. There are certain parts which you have to say no to. The Bible accepted slavery. St Paul said women should not speak in church at all and there are people who have used that to say women should not be ordained. There are many things that you shouldn't accept.
Throughout my career I've played a lot of parts that might've been played by a man. They're human roles rather than specifically men or women. I've never been as hooked into that as a lot of women are, you know, like, 'There aren't enough roles for women.' There aren't necessarily a lot of good roles for anybody.
What I like about the American woman is she usually has a lot of dynamism. In the U.S., women have a tendency to go forward, to be more exaggerated than in Europe. Many times the rough ideas come from the States, then they are refined in Europe. The American women and the French women are still the best-dressed.
Until the day she died, my mother continued to fight for the rights of women. She joined all the women's movements of the time; she stirred up a lot of revolts. She was a great woman, a great figure. Women today would like her immensely.
For me, I've gotten away from feeling I'm too dark. we're all women of color, and a lot of us are doing some great things. I think it's important the great things that we all do instead of asking, 'Why didn't I get this?' or 'Why did the light-skinned girl get that?' instead of focusing on the positive. That what I and some girlfriends of mine are doing, celebrating all colors and all ethnicities of women of color. That's a better way to go, rather than bringing all the negativities into it. It so much easier to smile and have fun than it is to hold grudges.
I do think we have a long way to go in terms of the culture around women still being career women, and asking a woman about her career and her work, just seeing them as fully validated human beings in the workplace.
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