Girls Today

Remind me of my generation. (I'm not necessarily talking about my daughter, or my niece, because neither of them is necessarily a whole lot like me.)  I'm talking about the girls on Girls, the HBO show, and assuming that they are at least somewhat representative. One obvious difference is the word girls--it was anathema to us. We had grown up with girls being the only word used for women, of any age; and it absolutely did have pejorative connotations. There were millions of things that girls were not allowed to do. I'm happy that the young women of today have taken the word back.

My generation, graduating from college around 1970 plus or minus a few, was determined to NOT follow any traditions: we were different, we would say how it was, not listen to our mothers or fathers about it. Some of us were hippies and some of us were feminists of various stripes. I was in a "consciousness-raising group" in New York City in which the other members were way more radical than me--militant and heavily gay. Then later I was in a consciousness-raising group as an employee at the Bechtel Engineering Company in San Francisco. This organization was called Bechtel Women for Affirmative Action (BWAA), and in this group I was more radical than other people. A lot of the other women were still just figuring out how they felt about the whole thing. I remember being shocked and affronted when one of the (male) engineers told me that the executives on the fourteenth floor sent some of their secretaries down to the meetings to see what we were up to; knowing people and corporations as I do now: of course they would do that. I would probably do it myself. Anyway, both of these groups were fun and cool to look back on.

In the 80's it was all about Dress for Success and let's make the big bucks, which had a lot of conformity implications, and what I remember of the 90's is smooth small hair and the semi-casual urban uniform, and multi-tasking and having it all. The girls of the 90's didn't have time to make waves.

What I'm seeing on Girls, as I said before, reminds me of my time: girls who are sort of feeling their way into life, not really sure what their values are, determined to decide for themselves how to live their lives--and having some trouble knowing what to make of the work world. I had a lot of trouble fitting in to the work world, from clothes to being quiet and respectful to petty control issues like which way to line up the staples on a document.

And we were fighting for equal rights then, more than you modern girls can imagine. One of my deepest reasons for being a feminist was "no man is going to tell me what to do". For example: At Bechtel I was an Engineering Aide, which was kind of like a secretary with a calculator. Most of us had no relevant qualifications for this, but there was one woman who had an engineering degree, with honors, from UC Berkeley, and she was also working as an engineering aide, not an engineer. There was one man I worked for who wanted to take me (among several other people, males) to live in Beirut on a project, and the executives said "are you crazy? you can't take a young single woman to Beirut". Which actually worked out not too badly since the Lebanese civil war began a couple of years later, but it was disappointing at the time.

Lena Dunham, this blog is for you.