Equal Rights the Hard Way: Pushing for what you want

Equal Rights the Hard Way: Pushing for what you want

reprinted from The Davidsonian (the Davidson College student newspaper)

Davidson, North Carolina, September 24, 1982

This past summer I worked in the laundry at Yellowstone Park, only five hundred feet from Old Faithful. Old Faithful continued to build pressure and erupt every 72 minutes or so, but I noticed a different pressure rise in me and other women who had everything to gain and nothing to lose from the ratification of the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. At the laundry I saw firsthand the need for sexual equality on the job, but I didn’t expect such frustration dealing with these problems. Davidson has probably made me more of a feminist than I might be if I attended a more liberal school. My alma mater displays chambermaids on pedestals, and its women’s tennis team hitchhikes to tournaments, all of which forces me to oppose vehemently its sexist nature. Unfortunately, the state of nature out west reflects sexism elsewhere in the world.

There are two sections in the Yellowstone laundry—a wash floor and a finish floor. The finish floor consists of the drying, ironing, folding, stacking, counting, and loading of 15,000 pieces of linen a day—from towels to napkins to pillow cases. We also checked sheets for stains of various types, but I’ll save those stories for another week. Tedious and unstraining, finish floor proved to be the same day after day.

Wash floor, on the other hand, tests not only one’s strength and endurance but also one’s mental capacity to operate steam valves and 350-pound washers and work with chemicals. Usually the big guys, like Yogi and Boo Boo, work wash floor. Yet my first day at the laundry I was told some women in the past had worked wash floor. I said I would like to work wash floor. No response. Not until the middle of July did I finally learn the mechanics of lifting five-hundred-pound bins into extractors using a two-ton crane and experience strained muscles, aching feet, and hands covered with chemical burns, blisters, and broken skin. Being a masochist, I asked to work wash floor the next day but was refused:

You aren’t strong enough. You don’t have the muscles in your arms, chest and back that you need. You’d have to give 150 percent to match a guy physically. Men and women don’t labor well together. It’s too strenuous mentally as well as physically—you need time to recover.

This reply infuriated me. Who could tell me what I could and could not do? Who had the right to dictate my physical limitations?

After working finish floor diligently a few weeks, I again asked to work wash floor.

No, we can’t afford to replace one of the regular wash floor guys with you, and anyway, you’ll be leaving in a month, and we don’t have time to train you.

Why outdo myself and run my body ragged just to prove I could do the work? All laundry workers were paid the same, worked the same hours, and enjoyed the same watermelon at break. My friends on finish floor were singing, laughing, and having a rollicking time. Why work a wash floor position that would put me in contention for the Miss Body Building contest or Davidson Homecoming Queen!

The week before leaving I figured I had nothing to lose and asked to work wash floor one last time. Again I was refused. Upset, I went to my female supervisor and asked for help. This is what she said:

You can talk all you want about an equal rights amendment and equal opportunity. You can go to the head of personnel and claim sexual discrimination. You can think you have the right to work wash floor and shouldn’t have to beg for the job. Fine. But unless you are willing to push for what you want, equal rights doesn’t mean a thing. Men have to push for what they want, and so do women. Nothing gets handed to you on a silver platter. You have to get in there, work until it kills you, and push! Then and only then will you achieve equality.

The next morning, my day off, I was called to the laundry; a guy didn’t show for work, and the needed an extra person on wash floor. Of all the people with the day off, they asked me! I was ecstatic! And even with a full crew, I kept working wash floor that last week.

Laundry work, usually associated with subjection of women, became my liberation, for although laundry work is sex-biased, it forced me to overcome the norm and be aggressive. Despite ERA’s defeat, I personally ensured my rights as a woman. And until an equal rights amendment is ratified, individual struggles for equality must suffice. Where does that leave us here at Davidson College with its sexist admissions policies? [For every three males admitted, only one female was admitted.] I figure we can either turn the laundry into an admissions office or turn the admissions office into a laundry.

Lindsay Biddle

Class of 1983

Unforgettable Communion

Unforgettable Communion

I was born on the Mississippi River, in Memphis, Tennessee, and my last residence in the U.S.A.—before moving to Scotland in 2004—was approximately 900 miles upstream, in Hennepin County, Minnesota. The difference between Southern culture and northern ways is still as vast as the difference between the early 1960’s of my childhood and today half a century later.

For example, whenever I hosted a meal at my home in the Twin Cities area, guests often took it upon themselves to bring a “salad” (if a concoction of canned fruit and whipped cream and mini marshmallows truly qualified as such, but that’s what they called it) or a casserole (which should be renamed a “cannerole” since most of the ingredients came out of cans), even after I had politely turned down their polite offers to contribute a side dish. I, of course, thanked them and made room on my already-crowded serving table. Later, I had to tell myself that these Scandinavian types were not being rude by arming themselves with extra food. When I had said, No, you don’t need to bring anything, they probably thought I was just being modest and meant, You don’t need to bring anything but it’s fine if you do.

Where I grew up it would have been an insult to the hostess—not that she would’ve shown it—to arrive with an unexpected dish. Even at a potluck the hostess was in charge of the menu. However it was customary to ask a Southern hostess if she would like some assistance in the kitchen. It’s not that she needed assistance—she was perfectly capable of turning out the meal by herself—but it was a matter of courtesy. Yet in Minnesota I had to be assertive if I needed a helping hand; only on one rare occasion did a guest hop up from the table and help me clear the dishes—and I married him.

Having lived all over the United States and now residing in a foreign country, where we enjoy hosting people from different backgrounds, I like to play anthropologist and study various styles of hospitality. “Etiquette” sits right beside “Religion” in the Dewey Decimal library cataloging system—and rightly so, as religion could be defined as social organization in the big picture (that is, our relationship to God, oneself, and others), while etiquette could be defined as social organization in the details (how we behave and relate to one another in particular situations). One has to do with the world-wide table we might call Creation, around which all of us creatures are gathered by God to co-exist. The other pertains to the tables around which we gather for purposes of social recreation: the tables in a church hall for Christian fellowship, the table in a boardroom for conducting business, or our dining tables where rules and expectations are graciously set aside in favor of unforgettable communion that transcends time and place.

Dream Notebook

Dream Notebook

I keep a blank notebook and a pen beside my bed. Whenever I have a dream, the next morning—first thing—I describe as much of the dream as I can remember in the notebook.

Once I dreamed that I needed some money to exit a parking garage, only my change purse had pounds, dollars, and euros all mixed together. In my dream I grew frustrated trying to sort the various coins.

I know what spurred this dream. I spent the first four decades of my life living in the United States before moving to Glasgow where I’ve stayed the past ten years, with occasional trips to other countries. And my Tennessee accent—which I had tried to tone down all the while I lived in Minnesota—has come back, in contrast to the lilting Glasgow patter that I hear and understand more each day but will never be able to speak.

Changing cultures is challenging. Often I’ve wished my new life in Glasgow came with a rule book to help me sort it out. But it doesn’t. Only a dream notebook. And it’s filling up fast.