Much has changed for women since Sept. 16, 1910, the day that Bessica Raiche, a 1903 graduate of Tufts University School of Medicine and one of the first female OB/GYN specialists in the United States, went down in history.
That day, she became the first American woman to pilot and crash a solo flight. The number of female pilots has stayed about the same since that time, however, reflecting some of the gender discrepancies that still exist in the American workforce.
Since Raiche's time, women have come to make up half of the American workforce. America now has a female Secretary of State and a female Speaker of the House. According to the 2009 Shriver report, in nearly 40 percent of families women are the breadwinners, and, in 24 percent of families, women are co-breadwinners.
For every empowering statistic, however, there is another that proves there is still much ground for working women to cover.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 2.6 percent of pilots in 2008 were female, not too different from the percentage of female pilots in Raiche and Amelia Earhart's days. Furthermore, American women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.
Though the number of working women has increased, the workforce is gender-segregated, with men dominating the professional fields. The most prevalent occupation for a woman in 2008 was secretary or administrative assistant, followed by other positions in the "lower-paid echelons" of social services, said Bettina Aptheker, professor of feminist studies and history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"Gender segregation in the workplace is old news," Aptheker said. Discrepancies are glaringly obvious in some areas. For example, less than 10 percent of construction workers are female, even though the field of consturction requires a comprable amount of education and training to that required of fields dominated by women.
"In the late 19th century, when the typewriter was first invented, all clerical workers were men," Aptheker said. "Typewriters were considered too complicated a machine for women to use. It used to be considered an entry point … you could get to be a banker from there. For women now, it's just a nine-to-five thing that you do."
These days, most women don't end work after five p.m. They go home to what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls the "second shift" in her book of the same title — an evening full of the domestic work still primarily performed by women.
"They come home from work; that's one shift and they still have everything left to do," said sophomore Cory Faragon, co-chair of the Tufts Feminist Alliance (TFA). "It's very rare that a man does an equal share of the housework."
According to Desole, TFA is planning a panel discussion for later this year about working women and the challenges they face in balancing their double shifts.
"It's about juggling, about agreements they have with their partner — who cooks dinner, who takes care of the kids, who cleans up — these are important questions," Faragon said. "Most work traditionally done by women is completely undervalued."
Shari Cantor faced this type of challenge before she was elected to town council in West Hartford, Conn. After giving birth to her fourth son, she left her job as a certified public accountant to become what her son, freshman Sam Cantor, refers to as "the most active anti-homemaker homemaker."
"They appointed her partly because women and especially women with children are underrepresented in the council," he said. "It's important to have people like my mom in the government. A man cannot know the values that mothers hold to the extent that they think they can or say they can. Mothers shape societies. Fathers do as well, but mothers are a vital component in shaping a society."
Aptheker sees the influence of second-wave feminist mothers on this generation of students in each of her classes.
"I have found among my male students here a greater openness to feminism than some of my female students," she said. "[The male students] were raised by feminist mothers and have an attachment to the movement, and have much less hesitancy to call themselves feminists."
Despite openness to feminism, however, a Gallup/USA Today poll in September 2008 found that only 30 percent of Americans would call themselves feminists. In fact, TFA hosted a panel last year titled "The F-Word," noting the hesitancy of women to associate themselves with radical bra burners and of men to call themselves feminists "because that's not a usual label for a dude," Sam Cantor said.
He believes that feminism is based on experience, not on the label.
"I think you learn about feminism more by experience than anything else," Sam Cantor said. "I don't think I ever heard my mom say she was a feminist. She always taught me to respect women, but I don't think she ever used the word to describe herself."
Aptheker attributes to self-image the caution that young women exercise with regards to feminism. The connotation of feminists as angry and unreasonable is unattractive, especially when one "wants to be able to have relationships with men," Aptheker said.
"But the thing is that we don't make up the statistics," she added. "It's going to catch up to these young women. At some point, everybody has to deal with that. It's better to deal with it with your eyes open than to get to some horrific situation and not know how to handle it."
