Word: ridings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...need to start asking why the boss isn't a woman and forgetting about the established models that seem carved in stone until women like Sally Ride brush them aside. We need to become the Sally Rides of our own generation, renovating health care and workplace systems tailored to men's life-patterns, not to mention the workplaces themselves. Sally set me wondering, and the process never quite stopped. After all, somebody had to have designed that shuttle bathroom. The why's abound...
...diversity, with women gaining on the majority, sex-based elitism is about as out as acid-wash, as dingy as Ride's old hairdo. Yet it still manages to get by, scrubbing up for battle and then sneaking out the back door under the guise of "good fun" or "tradition." I would not be true to my promise as a reporter who has covered the life and times of this school if I did not end this piece by answering why this situation has persisted. Congress is and has been a big fat boys club...
...things could pan out the way they did when Sally Ride shook things up on the space shuttle. With her bad '80s flyaway and skintight jumpsuit, Ride seemed as unlikely a candidate for equal rights crusader as Senator Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). But just as Thurmond found the wherewithal this year to pat Nelson Mandela's back under a statue of Abraham Lincoln after calling the esteemed South African leader a terrorist thug a few years back, Ride surprised observers, especially those of us in elementary school at the time...
...CONTACT" tour of the shuttle began when a smiley, peachy-cheeked Ride made a bee-line for the bathroom. Peeing in space: the timeless stuff of which third grade humor is made, no doubt prompted conjectures amongst Ride's under-age audience at homes across America concerning fluid volume weightlessness. But Ride explained the mechanics well enough that it became evident, even to us minors, that women couldn't use the standard apparatus. But that's all the mothership offered. No ladies room; zero gravity. Not known for cliffhangers, "3-2-1 CONTACT" suddenly had its target demographic male...
...hold it for the whole trip? Resort to ziplock? But wait, what was that behind the men's contraption, a white plastic post right next to it but beyond the frame of vision? That was the space-age ladies' room, invented in lieu of ziplocks and because Ride was worth...