Out of Left Field: Paths to gender equality in America

For the first time in our history we are likely to see two women, at the ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, leading United States democracy initiatives.
Already at the helm, in “The Jefferson Building,” is the first woman ever to serve as United States Librarian of Congress — there is a particular irony in that long delay because women have always been our most numerous librarians in America.  
However, like other professions in which they served, the relatively few men in their field were the ones given the top leadership jobs.
With Election Day on Nov. 8, more folks than ever are aware of America’s coming transformational development at the western end of Pennsylvania Avenue with our first female President heading to the White House.
“The Times They Are a-Changin’” wrote this year’s Nobel Literature Laureate Bob Dylan in 1964.  
My own journey toward feminism, which is still a work in progress, had several “marker” experiences during the 1960s.  
Some of them may resonate for you.
During my second year at Hofstra in 1961, I was asked to teach several sections of a course on New York History — it was certification mandated for all elementary teachers; and consequently almost all members of the class were females.
My huge problem as a beginning teacher was that I did not know much about New York history.  
In trying to find material to discuss, I discovered, for the first time in my life, the names of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Not many of my students or other faculty knew of them either.  
I was inspired by their activism and their quests for equality and justice.  
My own immigrant family origins had led me to choose American history because of the inclusive dimensions of democracy.
Through college and graduate school, I never had a female teacher — and none of the male professors considered the women’s rights movement. 
Near the time of Dylan’s song, I discovered that the renowned Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison mocked the achievement of the 19th Amendment by placing it in two sentences under a heading “Bootlegging and Other Diversions.”
But by the time I read Morison, I had made Stanton and Seneca Falls and her remarkable protest partnership with Anthony an integral part of my teaching. 
A bit earlier I got added stimulation from Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” and President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women Report — both were issued in 1963.
For me there was a personal connection of knowing Betty Friedan during the late 1950s while she was researching her book.  
She lived along the Hudson River in the appropriately named “Grand View,” while I was in the blue-collar, ethnic, factory enclave of Piermont.
 Because we were adjoining communities, her children participated in some of the youth programs I led.
Betty’s work, linked with my growing awareness of Eleanor Roosevelt, prompted me to develop a talk that I probably delivered 100 times during the 1960s at libraries and conferences. 
I called it “The Rise and Decline of American Women,” drawing on those landmark 1963 publications and expanding studies by female scholars. 
It is not coincidental that it was during the foment of the 1960s that Black writers gave growing attention to their race, as immigrants did to ethnic heritages, and as female scholars did to the shift from “Women’s Rights” to “Women’s Liberation.”
During the 1960s, the small number of females on Hofstra’s faculty formed a “Women’s Studies Network,” and I was honored to be included — I had developed the first class on American women’s history.  
Still, when the only other male in the group, the remarkable Dean David Christman, was absent from a meeting, I got a sense of what it felt like to “look” and to be “different” from the rest of the group — even as I was treated affirmatively.
In January 1970, Great Neck sponsored a program on “Trends for the 70s.”  
I was asked to cover the topic on women.  Frankly, it did not occur to me at the time to suggest that a woman be selected to do the presentation.
My retrospective regret was that I was already working with two exceptional Hofstra scholars, and good friends, who were better prepared than I to address the topic: Shirley Langer from Psychology and Alice Kessler-Harris, who went on to become President of the Organization of American Historians.
At that January 1970 Great Neck conference, I got immediate “feed-back” on how much the “times were a-changin.”  
When I finished my presentation a woman rushed to the podium ahead of others heading in my direction. 
And, face-to-face, she strongly asserted: “How dare you speak about the oppression of women, you are nothing but a White male liberal.”
Some other folks offered various comments and, then, a man, 10 rows away from me, who had a bodybuilders’ physique, wearing a short sleeve shirt in January, stood in the aisle, raised his muscled left arm, and with a clenched fist, exclaimed:  “D’Innocenzo: Is that Italian?”
“I renounce you.”
In my next column, I will consider perspectives from my Columbia classmate, Aileen Kraditor, who wrote “Up From the Pedestal.” 
I will also examine why Helen Fisher believes that the 21st century will be led by women as “The First Sex.”