We Are All Wonderwomen
"Why can't she stand up, Mama? She needs to stand up!"
In his hands my six-year old son holds a shrunken version of my childhood idol: Wonder Woman. He's trying to get her to stand on her own two iconic winged feet. But it's an ergonomic impossibility: her legs are too skinny, her posterior and bust too ample, her plastic boots misshapen. She is neither sturdy nor balanced. Definitely not powerful. Less Linda Carter. More Barbie at a Fourth of July picnic.
I take Wonder Woman from him and try to stand her up. She falls down. I adjust a limb or two, perform some deep tissue work on her legs and try again. No luck. The only way this Wonder Woman facsimile can stand on her own two feet is if you bend her over 90 degrees so that her behind and her bosom are on the same horizontal plane and she's facing the ground. And, well, given the optics of that particular posture I suggest to my son that perhaps Wonder Woman would be more comfortable seated.
Twenty years ago this spring I, too, sat unceremoniously. On a metal bench on the sidelines of the finals of the Women's Lacrosse World Cup in Tokyo. I was one of 16 women on the US Team tasked with defending its World title. But I was not a star. Definitely no Wonder Woman. In the semifinals the day before I hadn't played a single minute. And deep into the finals against Australia, with all of our starters still on the field and the game deadlocked, I didn't expect to be pressed into service. That is, until Sue Stahl, our coach and a giant in stature and reputation—deliverer of four prior World Cup titles to the United States—eyed me through glasses as thick as the quarter-dollar Coca Cola bottles of my youth, and asked if I wanted to get in the game. Stunned and maybe a little afraid, I didn't reply right away. So she reached down and grabbed the shoulders of my jersey and hoisted me to my feet. She stood me up. As only a coach can. She put a hand heavy with purpose on my back. Grounded me on the turf. Let me feel my feet under me. Barked a few instructions. And sent me into the game.
Later, after a victory in double overtime, in which this young and decidedly unstellar player improbably netted the winning goal, Sue wrapped me in a bear hug so tight I couldn't breathe. She squeezed and lifted me off the ground. And I stayed there, suspended in the grip of my coach who, just moments earlier, had taught me to stand. I felt as if I had wings on my shoes.
History is not made sitting down. Children are admonished to sit down. The misbehaved and the untalented are told to sit down. The demure and the dissembling sit down. For a long time, women sat down: in kitchens, parlors, nurseries and drawing rooms. A question of circumstance more than choice. It’s taken two American centuries for women to stand up and take their place in the pantheon of legislators in the Capitol, as well as at the helm of American corporations, universities and other bastions of civil society. And yet it’s still an idea that is subversively unpalatable to the men accustomed to holding the floor sotto voce.
Recall that according to several sources, the aspect of Saturday Night Live’s recent send-up of Press Secretary Sean Spicer that President Trump found most insulting was that it was carried out by a woman. Is that also what got under the skin of the usually cool-headed Senate Majority Leader last night when he called for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to sit down? Could Mitch McConnell not abide the sight and sound of a woman standing in the well of the Senate making her controversial opinion known? Plenty of other senators declined to invoke Rule XIX when Senator Ted Cruz called McConnell a liar on the floor of the Senate in 2015. But then that was a man speaking ill of another man. They’ve been doing that for centuries. But a woman? Daring to do the same? Must be against the rules.
Elizabeth Warren is my senator. When you sit her down you sit down a commonwealth’s worth of women who have spent generations getting to their feet, often while working against the prevailing pressures of politics and industry. Mitch McConnell may have sat down Elizabeth Warren for the duration of Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing, but in so doing he brought a phalanx of women to our winged feet. Put us in, coach, we’re ready to play.