R. wrote: **I don't think there ever was a generation that didn't think that the world used to be a better place. Can anyone else think of things that make this time a wonderful time to live in? **

Consider that a mere 150 years ago, women were still legally chattel in the U.S. (Susan B. Anthony was one of the first to advocate for the right of married women to have custody of their own children; to be able to own and control their own property; to be able to divorce abusive and alcoholic spouses. One of the reasons she decided to fight so hard for the right to vote was because after New York passed a law granting such rights to women, it then turned around and revoked it a few years later, when the women's activists were focusing their attention elsewhere. She concluded that until women had political power themselves, they would continue to be vulnerable to such legislative shilly-shallying.)

Consider that thirty or forty years ago, rape was a subject still not discussed, and the phrase "acquaintance rape" or "date rape" wasn't even coined yet, let alone considered a major national issue; that the first modern battered women's shelter was founded about thirty years ago (this was Haven House, in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California), and now we have over 1200 of them nationwide; that sexual harassment in the workplace was taken for granted, not considered an outrage.

Consider that marital rape was not recognized as a concept less than twenty years ago. The "glass ceiling"--another concept coined within the last half-century. (Before that, we couldn't even get into the jobs, let alone middle management.) One hundred years ago, women who had the temerity to speak in public were being hissed down and denounced as "unnatural," "unfeminine"; today, we have our first female U.S. Secretary of State.

Whenever I start feeling depressed about how much further we have to go, and how many barriers stand in our way simply because we were born female, I think of this: for three thousand years, women have been legal chattel, considered intellectually inferior, pets to be taken care of or abused at will. In the last hundred years, we have turned all that upside down. We have taken sexism and misogyny from the fashionable and assumed and changed it to something not accepted in polite society. If that ain't an accomplishment, *nothing* is. And if we've managed to overturn such a long tradition and come so damn far in just 100 years, well--just think of what the FUTURE will look like!

To quote Sojourner Truth: "If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right-side up again."

Damn right, Sojourner. :-)

I personally think that, even with all the flaws in society today, we are living in the best time women collectively have ever had on this earth (within recorded history anyway), and that the world we leave to our children will be even better. And I don't suffer much from past nostalgia: had I been born even twenty years ago, my alma mater (one of the finest science/engineering schools in the nation) would have denied me admittance; had I been born forty years ago, I would have found myself shoved into an apron and fed Valium until I stopped complaining. 150 years ago--I would have died and been buried at the crossroads right next to Virginia Woolf's Judith Shakespeare (may she rest in peace).

I don't feel there's much to be nostalgic about in the past, personally. I love living in a time of change, even if I sometimes wish I could live 200 years from now, when our daughters will look back on what we're facing now and say "Wow, how could women have lived under those conditions?" And I think the most valuable thing I can do, here and now, is work towards that future.