Response to comment

Well, March 8th is International Women's Day, and it's widely celebrated throughout the world, outside of the U.S.

As for bowing down in homage, nobody--or perhaps few people--are calling for that. What's more appropriate is acknowledging, recognizing that freedoms were fought for and didn't come automatically. And if we're not careful, they can go away. We don't know what will and won't be again, although I agree with you that it's highly unlikely that women in America will have trouble getting credit cards the way they did in the 1960s. Ask any woman living in Afghanistan in the early 1990s if she thought her daughters would have to risk their lives to go to school ten years later. Ask Chileans who survived the Pinochet regime whether they thought, beforehand, that there was a remote possibility they'd live in a police state. Think about some of the policies that still exist in U.S. states--Virginia, for example, is pretty backward in terms of women's rights in divorce cases. A friend of mine, whose husband cheated on her, was ordered by her lawyers not to leave their house before the divorce was final, or else he could accuse her of abandonment and gain advantage in the proceedings.

I agree--and I've written so on these pages many times--that guilt, lecturing, etc. are counterproductive. Nonetheless, it's important, for the sake of future progress, to acknowledge that change takes work, and initiative, and that things once unimaginable can be achieved. I think few of the pioneering women who got us from the 1960s to today are demanding "gratitude." What Gail Collins is saying is that it's great that we find it unfathomable that our mothers had trouble getting credit cards or were directed to the cafeteria when they applied for editing jobs. For that reason, it's worthwhile to take conscious note of how far we've come.