the power of women
by robilee mcintyre

I believe in the power of women. I believe in our strength. I believe in our wisdom. I believe in what we are able to accomplish. I believe in our dreams. I believe in our gumption.

When I was about eight or nine, my class went on a field trip to the local firehouse in town. The entire class was taken to every corner of the firehouse: we slid down the fire pole, climbed up in the trucks, tried on the boots of the real firefighters. We were shown the kitchen where the men cooked their meals, the bunk room where the men slept, the shower facilities where the men cleaned themselves up after a fire. We had a great time and soon enough the tour was over and it was time for questions. I asked where the girl firefighters slept, ate, and bathed. The fireman who had given the tour sort of snurkled and said “Oh honey, there are no women firefighters.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh,” he replied “women just aren’t strong enough to pass the fitness test that is required to become a firefighter.”

I stewed for a minute and raised my hand again. Still smirking, the fireman came back to me with a patronizing look. I wanted to know: “What if a woman could pass the test? Would you have to let her fight fires?”

Our tour guide got a little short tempered with me and tersely responded that a woman just simply does not have the upper body strength to carry all of the heavy equipment that needs carrying. “Besides,” he said as he patted my head, “the protective gear itself weighs about forty pounds and what woman could carry someone out of a burning building when she is using all of her strength to carry her gear? Women just aren’t cut out for firefighting, there will never be female firefighters,” he said. “Never.”

A stubbornness rose up in me—I remember it to this day. I knew what he had said to me wasn’t true. But with no women firefighters, how could I prove that he was wrong? Stupidly, arrogantly, insanely wrong. Women are equal to men, aren’t they? I had been raised thus far to understand that I could do anything and I had just heard that I wouldn’t be allowed to do something just because I was female. This was the first time in my life I had ever heard such a silly thing and it made me mad. Well, I would become the first female firefighter. I would be strong enough and I would work hard. I would save lives and rescue people from burning buildings and carry my own gear. I would show him. I was as resolute as any eight year old can be. I could change his mind. I would change his mind.I knew that women could do things that men thought that they couldn’t do. I watched as my mother broke down barrier after barrier in the early seventies workplace: becoming the first female chairperson for the local chamber of commerce; the first female president of the local hospital board; the first female vice president of the corporation that she worked for.

My mother’s father told her all her life that she could be President of the United States if she only wanted it and worked hard enough.She came into the workplace like millions of other women at that time, believing in her own equality and value. Bolstered by her father’s words and her drive to be her best, she put her head down and did the work that the men in her company didn’t want to do. They called her a women's libber, they asked her if she could be reliable, what with having to deal with "that time of the month" and all of those female emotions. She fought for maternity leave: they said she could come back to her job if she would do her work from home the four days she was out with her new baby.

She did the work. She had her babies. She got her MBA at night. She felt lucky to work for such a progressive company.

She says now that she felt a similar stubbornness to the feeling that rose up in me on that field trip to the firehouse. She felt it every day, and says that her stubbornness is what fed her when "they were trying to keep her in the secretarial pool." Her stick-to-it-get-it-done-no-matter-what attitude eventually impressed her boss enough for a raise and a title. She knew that she made about twenty thousand less a year than her nearest male co-worker, but she kept on working. Because of women like her there is no question about whether a woman can do the job when she interviews. No worries about menstrual states and crying in the boardroom. No questions about babies and their interference with the work at hand. No doubts about strength.

I feel such pride in the millions of women who found closed doors and glass ceilings and fought their way around or kicked right through them. It was a lot of work: even a locked hollow core door takes more than one kick to break through it. Like the glass ceiling in the firehouse, the glass ceilings in corporate America were made of shatter-resistant safety glass. It took the determination of women like my mother and millions of others to finally shatter those ceilings.

Equality in the work place was accomplished en masse by a generation of women working as agents of change, working to ensure a place for themselves, carving a path to wide open entrances that every woman could go through or not—as she chose.Yet the doors broken through were standing in front of individuals. Individual women like my mother. Individual women like Margaret Thatcher and Gloria Steinem and Oprah Winfrey. Individual women like you and me. Individual women who have shown us all what it means to be an agent of change. Individual women writing herstory with the prose that fills my heart with gratitude, pride and empowerment. Individual women like Priscilla E. Barry who since her passing of the physical test in 1992, has been a firefighter in the very station house where my eight-year old self was told that women would NEVER be allowed to don a suit.

 

Robilee McIntyre is proud to be a women’s libber. She is an artist, actress and writer living in theAsheville area. [ Robilee1111@hotmail.com ]