You can write all the children's books you want about famous women and how girls can be whatever they want to be, but right here in the real world our country can't elect a woman President, these little girls' mommies and daddies are struggling with day care, unequal pay, the lion's share of the responsibility for children still falling on women, and the fact that the poor are mostly women and children struggling to feed themselves without enough flexibility, vacation, and maternity leave. These kids see their mothers and grandmothers and aunts are penalized by being a female, and that attention is mainly given to women who agree to be sex objects. These girls are going to find themselves pressured and targeted by bullies, then by aggressive male sexual pressures. They are going to go off to college hopeful, and find themselves raped at a party by people they thought were friends in places they thought were safe. And the nuclear families they participate in become terror cages with one in four of them being battered.
I'm not exaggerating. I worked in safehouses for twelve years. This country, this world, turns away from abuse of women. And it begins with speech. Don't let anyone berate a woman in your presence. Object when a little girl is sexualized. Help a battered woman and her children get to safety and get their new lives started. Forget Madame Curie. Cultivate some real live women who are change makers right here and now. Support them, join them. Bring your children and grandchildren (male and female) to events where women are the speakers or the performers or the readers of their own writing. Do something.
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