Marissa Mayer v. Shirley Chisolm

(photo courtesy chisolmproject.com)

I wish I could ignore the weird marketing tags that permeate media advertising. Honestly, I try to avoid watching TV, because the prevalence of ads makes me feel so bloody manipulated. Last year, I railed against the overuse of Black History Month. It seemed like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola were its biggest promoters. This February, it didn’t bother me as much. Maybe it wasn’t as ubiquitous this time around. Or maybe the push to heighten black history awareness seems more valid; now that we’ve re-elected our first black American president, I’m sensing a strange complacency in our midst.

com pla cen cy |kəmˈplāsənsē|(also complacence )nouna feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's achievements: the figures are better, but there are no grounds for complacency.ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from medieval Latin complacentia, from Latin complacere ‘to please.’

(source: The New Oxford American Dictionary)

The “uncritical” part scares me.

It’s March, and we’re well into Women’s History Month. Which doesn’t get the same General Mills cereal box attention that Black History Month does. So far, the best coverage I’ve seen was the 3-hour documentary “The Makers” on PBS. I missed the first hour; the show was well into the 1960’s when I jumped in. The Women’s Lib Movement  was in full swing. College co-eds burning bras, worshipping at the heels of Shirley Chisolm and Bella Abzug. That was an energy I grew up in. My mother was fully committed.

(photo courtesy atlanticwire.com)

The film was loaded with memorable images and sound bites. But what has stayed clearest in my mind is a statement from a young, blonde, confident and clearly ambitious woman of today, a face I’d never seen before. Marissa Mayer is the President and CEO of Yahoo. In a very short segment, in which she appears to be answering an unseen interviewer, she says that she doesn’t have “that chip on the shoulder” that the feminists have.

And my first thought was, You complacent little twit.

I had to google her up. I learned that she was raised by two well-educated, doting parents in what sounded like an upper-middle-class environment. She ranked top of her class, a fierce participant in high-level ballet, debate team, etc. Born in 1975, she thinks feminism is passé.  In the wake of becoming a new mother, she has proposed that Yahoo employees stop working from home. Her remarks have the pundits writhing in their Aeron chairs, calling her bad names, accusing her of hypocrisy as well as self-entitled complacency. Right. That dirty C-word again.

Her attitude reminds me that I have two young daughters, born in this century, whose only exposure to modern-day activism lives in the stories and photographs they see in the newspaper, depicting distant lands they can’t quite pronounce. They associate American struggles for civil rights with a bygone era, their lives too comfortable to foster any real disillusionment. Like Marissa Mayer, who didn’t have to fight for admission into the male dominated computer science department at Stanford. Others had already fought that battle for her. The door was open.

Back to “The Makers”: I was reminded that the famous faces behind the Equal Rights Amendment were my mother’s peers. I grew up knowing their names, marching in their rallies. Now those same heroes are worried for us. They’re worried that, in our complacency, we are failing to appreciate how good we have it. And that if we’re not mindful, all the good that’s been achieved on our behalf will be undone.

Reproductive rights are being challenged again.

Affirmative Action is being degraded.

One of our brightest, young, female business leaders is flaunting her complacency.

We owe it to ourselves to remain critical, and to teach our children well.