Sad little girls

At work yesterday, I rang a doorbell and was greeted by a young girl who looked up at me in surprise and exclaimed, "I didn't know girls could work for (national pizza chain)!" Her dad pushed her back and said, "Of course they can," and proceeded to pay me and take his pizza. As I was walking to my car, I turned around and there she was, face pressed up against the glass staring at me, so I smiled and waved, and she grinned and waved back.

This kind of broke my heart. Even in this time, little girls aren't aware that they can have any job a boy can. And it's not as if this were a four-year-old, she was at least seven or eight, so she's had some time in school.

I'm starting to wonder if the majority of people in the U.S. are getting too complacent about feminism and sexism. We figure we're in a pretty good place. I'm guilty of it myself. Earlier this year as I was watching one of Obama's speeches, he mentioned we need to get women's pay equal to men's, and my first reaction was, "Huh? You mean we haven't yet?" For some reason, I thought that we'd already cleared that hurdle. It really woke me up to the fact that I hadn't been paying attention.

So many people believe that we can't backslide; that since we've come this far, we can never go back to outlandish, cruel oppression of women. One needs only to look at Iran to see that it's quite possible, and with the ultra-conservative religious right trying to grab all the power they can, I don't think it's completely out of the question in the U.S.

It's a really small thing, but I'm happy that I have a job which is traditionally male-dominated, especially if it'll remind a few little girls that they can have any job they want; that they're every bit as important as little boys.