Great Women, Bad Times

By Barbara Ehrenreich

TIME's list of the 20 most important "leaders and revolutionaries" of the 20th century contains only three women, or 15% of the total. Expressed as a grade, this is an F-, so that if history were a classroom, women would have to take the 20th century over again. Naturally, my first response was to demand a recount. Where, for example, are the feminist revolutionaries--the Betty Friedans, the Sylvia Pankhursts, the Simone de Beauvoirs? Yes, I know there are still four more categories and 80 more names to go, but it's a pretty boyish definition of revolution that includes only those great social upheavals that involved the storming of palaces and the execution of royal families.

Besides, the American civil rights movement wasn't just Martin Luther King Jr.; it was also Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks. As for nonviolent social activists and leaders--What about Jane Addams, Petra Kelly, Dorothy Day, Aung San Suu Kyi? And why flatter Lenin by leaving out two of his staunchest ideological opponents, the Polish-German socialist Rosa Luxemburg and the American anarchist Emma Goldman?

All right, this list is not a collection of the best and the brightest, much less of the good and the kindest. When you pick the "most important," you get the thugs and the monsters as well as the role models. In fact, it should be noted at once that at least five of the men on the list were opponents, in one way or another, of women's rights: Hitler, with his famed Kinder, Kuche, Kirche policy; Khomeini, the fashion expert who brought back the chador; Reagan, with his hostility to abortion rights and the ERA; the sweet but incorrigibly patriarchal Pope John Paul II.

And then there's Lech Walesa. Those who wonder why there aren't more women on the list should consider the fate of Hanna Suchocka, the first female Prime Minister of Poland--or of any postcommunist state. It was Walesa who derailed her political career, stating, "I can't see a woman above me"--then adding, to the appreciative laughter of the press corps, "Sometimes, maybe."

The point being that if women aren't well represented among the movers and shakers, it isn't just because they've been too shy, too un-self-esteeming or too busy changing diapers. Part of the problem lies with the movers and shakers. For example, some of the job titles held by the males--such as Pope and Ayatullah--have never been open to women. We like to imagine, in the U.S., that guys who occupy corner offices and wear pinstripe suits are more woman-friendly than the ones whose names are stitched on their shirts. So it is depressing to realize that the Vatican and the Pentagon, Wall Street and the Senate Office Buildings, have been as tough to integrate as any coal mine or fire department.

But maybe, and despite all the well-publicized gains, it just wasn't our century. American women only got the vote in 1920 (and a rest room near the Senate chambers only in 1992). For most of the past 98 years, much of the world's female population has been voteless, voiceless, illiterate, ground down by toil and sexist restrictions. When I griped to my daughter about the shortage of our kind among the top 20 leaders, she sighed at my paleofeminist pique: "But, Mom, it's just the 20th century. You know, the bad old days."