My Dad was a quiet Second Wave feminist

It’s Father’s Day weekend - a time for tokens of love and appreciation. I have 2 tributes: below, and at a story slam TODAY. See details at the end of the article

Dear Friends,

My dad, Bill to the world, was a one-man, mid-century Trojan Horse in the battle for gender equality. Like those ancient Greeks, he was strategic.

But unlike the Greeks, his goal wasn’t to siege and capture.

His goal was to lay the groundwork for me, the oldest of three and only daughter, to navigate the world.

He was an unassuming, well-liked, traditional midwestern Eisenhower Republican. An unlikely champion of Second Wave feminism.

He wouldn’t have known who Betty Friedan was if she had walked into our living room and introduced herself. Her politics would have been repellent to him. He probably would have found The Feminine Mystique cringeworthy.

Bill surely expected that I’d follow the norms of the era - marry and have kids - but he equipped me with essential tools: a serious approach to higher education, financial literacy, and, importantly, a knowledge of car operation.

This was, after all, middle America in the mid-century. The Interstate era.

Learning about cars

In retrospect, I think my automotive education was, in large part, learning to manage the car-and-boy thing he feared.

Lesson #1 was mastering, really mastering, manual transmission. He made certain that not knowing how to drive a “stick” wouldn’t leave me vulnerable or stranded.

I was never going to be that girl who couldn’t drive her way out of a situation.

We did hands-on tutorials and practice drills despite my insistence that I’d “never need to know that.” He wanted me battle-ready.

It didn’t end there: I learned the fine arts of changing a tire, the oil, filling the windshield wiper reservoir, the importance of anti-freeze, and, before all-wheel drive, snow tires.

Any boy would be expected to know this stuff. And so was I.

When it was time for college…

My parents disagreed on an appropriate college setting. My mother campaigned for a “nice” women’s college, a thinly veiled scheme to find the “right boy.”

My father was steadfastly opposed to single-sex education in college. He believed an all-girl environment did not prepare nor capture the nuances of competing with males in the real world. He didn’t see it as a training ground for leadership. He was stuck in the “how to pour tea” version of women’s colleges.

Of course, he missed the part where the cards were often stacked against women anyway, but his instincts - preparing for an equitable footing in the professional market- were right.

At any rate, he wanted me in the rough-and-tumble world of co-education.

He was steadfast against choosing a major that aligned with the “Mrs.” degree, elementary education in particular. Had I demonstrated a passion for Maria Montessori’s philosophy of early childhood development, he might have relented. Otherwise, he was strongly in favor of a more rigorous liberal arts curriculum.

Bill’s Financial Literacy Course: real time with real money.

He patiently yet unrelentingly held me to account for college spending. Rounded to the dollar, from tuition to travel. We were financially comfortable; the expense of a private college was within our means. Still, he was insistent. The “all other” category on the dreaded handwritten spreadsheet was especially scrutinized.

In the end, without realizing it, I learned the fundamentals of both a Balance Sheet and an Income Statement. What, girls don’t “do” math? Or, “I must have money; I still have checks.”

No room for that in Bill’s Financial Literacy Course.

My God, I hated this exercise. I resented him for making me do it. Nobody else’s Father did that. But it kept me accountable. It taught me that a college education, and the entitled luxury of living out of state, with the emerging freedoms of the late 1960s, came with responsibilities. He couldn’t oversee my behavior, but it wasn’t a free ride, either.

Much later, when the chips were down, those lessons proved invaluable.

Not bad for a guy of his generation, an unlikely stealth fighter for gender equality, imparting core life skills, financial literacy, and basic auto mechanics.

Not every girl was so lucky.

I was no match for Ms. Vito in My Cousin Vinny, but I knew my model years.

Thanks, Dad.

Love to fathers everywhere,

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