The following is the 2013 foreword I was honored to write for the anthology Times They Were A’Changing: Women Remember the 60s and 70s, edited by Linda Joy Myers, Amber Lea Starfire and Kate Farrell. Paying tribute to the vibrant decades during which I was a college student and next a mom to two young children was certainly a daunting task, one that put me in the company of women writers I admire. I hope you enjoy this recollection of times past, times that have significant bearing on the freedom women enjoy today, freedom that requires protecting now more than it has for decades.

During the ’60s and ’70s, in every part of our country, women were waking up to their power, intelligence, right to succeed in life and opportunities to contribute their gifts without inhibition. The road ahead was not a smooth one. It was fraught with conflict between offspring and their parents, between students and teachers, and between those questioning the status quo and traditionally civic-minded people. Many women felt conflict between who they were raised and trained to believe they would be and who they wanted to become.

As a college student from 1966 to 1970 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I was involved in antiwar demonstrations that got students beaten and arrested, that called into question the attitudes of the police and state (and are now commemorated with bronze plaques around the campus). As a mother of two children born in 1973 and 1975, I was part of the Lamaze movement and the idea that women could be seen in public, of all things, nursing their babies (how uncomfortable people were when we began doing this, even with our baggy sweaters for privacy). In the tide of energy that followed the events of the anti-war movement in the sixties, women turned toward liberating themselves from second-class citizenship, and by then institutions were listening. Universities that were formerly all male with separate women’s colleges united their campuses into one institution; girls who were led to believe a college education was only for their brothers, insisted on attending schools, and they studied for jobs that were outside of their parents’ comfort zone (women had most usually been encouraged to become teachers or nurses since those were jobs to “fall back on” if one didn’t find a husband or something happened to him).

The birth control pill was approved by the FDA in 1960 and eventually led to higher numbers of women graduating from college (though even today since birth control medication and devices require prescriptions, access is limited). We read and shared the beloved book Our Bodies, Ourselves, published in 1971, and started women’s clinics as we learned to love and understand our bodies. MS magazine began publishing in 1972, making headlines with its story that included the names of women who spoke of having abortions when they were still illegal in this country. A year later, the Roe versus Wade decision legalized abortion, the same year Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique was published, articulating an image for women much different than the one many had grown up with in the ’50s. Daughters raised in the ’50s and ’60s formed consciousness raising groups; women introduced women’s studies and feminist literature into university curricula, helped their mothers stand up for their rights as individuals inside marriages and in the work force and raised their own daughters and sons to respect women’s rights.

We are now well beyond the years the UN dubbed “the decade of women.” We are working at jobs that have clout nationally and internationally,
whether that is as heads of high tech companies or US Cabinet members. We are doctors and lawyers and newscasters. We win literary prizes and hold professorships in greater numbers than in the past. We are awarded grants to continue our research. We have flown in space. I believe there is no going back to the time when women accepted a double standard and lived under the ceiling men lowered on them. Even so, state governments are currently passing laws to abolish women’s rights to choose and the US Congress accuses the Supreme Court of ruling the country when its role is to try cases to determine the constitutionality of new laws.

There are those in government who will fight before they’ll finally accept the changes that women gained in the ’60s and ’70s. And so it is important to read what women lived with, lived through, felt and did when they began this rise to today’s more powerful standing. It is important that this part of our history not be forgotten or be understated or be ignored. Anthologies such as Times They Were A’ Changing are good reading; they are also reading of the utmost importance. For a woman to know herself, she must know whose shoulders she stands upon.

I thank the editors and the authors in Times They Were A’Changing for sharing so much with us, so honestly, and for bringing these two important decades of their lives to the page so readers can experience (and in so many cases re-experience) those years, not always lived with clarity but fully lived, decades that are crucial to our times now. I thank the writers and editors for keeping in our national memory women’s engagement in celebrating a more open, accepting and complex world.

Sheila Bender, Poet and Author

www.writingitreal.com