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WTF? Who You Calling a Feminist?

Steve Russell
11 min readOct 22, 2019

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WTF? Illustrated on Pixabay

How Can There Still be Controversy Over Equal Pay for Equal Work?

Wired is carrying an excerpt from a book by Marc Benioff and Monica Langley about Benioff’s experience as CEO of Salesforce. While it’s a bit immodest to call the book Trailblazer, I must confess that I read about his experiences with a generous dose of WTF?

So-called “women’s issues” have been one WTF? after another from the time I emerged from rural Oklahoma. I grew up there with employment ad classifications that don’t exist anymore, but it seemed to me that “Help Wanted — Negro” disappeared more quickly than “Help Wanted — Women.”

It wasn’t exactly that I had been sold on the ideas of “men’s work” and “women’s work.” It’s more that they were in the air and the drinking water and to me is was no small thing that they were in the newspapers. So I never questioned the division.

Still, I had learned to be a pretty good touch typist and typing was supposed to be “women’s work.” That skill is the only useful thing I carried away from my brief and futile struggle with high school. I fancied myself a writer and I knew I could not afford to hire a typist even if I were disposed to allow somebody to see my early drafts.

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Steve Russell
Steve Russell

Written by Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)

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