This morning I was reading an op-ed about how gender equality has stalled in America and two things struck me.  The first was that I’ve never understood the impulse to pay “the little ladies” less or to treat them vastly differently than men in any other way.  The second was the realization that somehow my relatively conservative parents had raised me to be a progressive.  

I’ll admit we weren’t a typical Donna Reed or even Brady Bunch family of the 60’s or 70’s.  Mom and Dad both worked the whole time I was growing up and even though I knew lots of moms stayed home, they were the ones that seemed like odd, exotic birds to me.  I remember a commercial that ran when I was a kid that showed a mom serving breakfast to her family and getting lots of love because she served the right bacon – Oscar Mayer, I think.  The dad was in a shirt and tie, so I knew it was a weekday and I was fascinated that the clock in the background said it was 7:55.  Like most people on the West Coast, my folks both had to be at work by 8:00, so I couldn’t even conceive of the world I was seeing.  It was like watching the SyFy channel.

As I got older, I became aware that Mom did have pay equity issues – enough to know that it wasn’t right, though she was traditional enough and enough of a good soldier that she mostly shrugged it off with only a hint of bitterness.  That may be why another TV memory sticks with me.

In the early 70’s there was an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in which Mary found out she made less than the guy who was executive producer before her.  When she brought it up to Lou Grant, he brushed it off, saying of course he made more – he had a wife and kids to support.  I was a little disappointed in Mary when she had no response and walked quietly out of Lou’s office.  I could tell by the look on her face that she knew there was one.  Then came the high-pitched “Wait just a minute!” that let me know she’d figured it out.  I cheered a little when she came back and told him his argument made no sense, since that would mean he’d have to pay a guy with three kids more than a guy with two kids  and a guy with four kids more than a guy with three kids, and so on.

Yes, I was a big MTM fan.  Still am.

For a while I thought exchanges like Mary and Lou’s meant we’d moved beyond such things.  That was the world thought I was seeing.  My first boss was a woman.  And the second.  And the third.  In fact, I went almost 15 years before I reported to a man.  Some of those women were great; some weren’t – just like most bosses.  Over time, I just figured that my boss’s gender was a 50-50 proposition.  Now that I think of it, I’ve still only worked for two men.

On the home front, Mom and Dad did have fairly traditional duties.  The thing is they were never written in stone.  Sure, Dad was the one to patch the roof or build a deck on the back of the house, but it wasn’t a big, unusual event when he made dinner or did a load of laundry.  By the same token, when they were first married, they loved to go deer hunting together and – hard as it was for me to imagine – Dad always said Mom could clean and dress a carcass with the best of them.

My folks were from the “do what needs to be done” school.  “Just do it” could have been their motto as well as Nike’s.  Possibly because of that, along with the “guy” skills of carpentry and masonry,  I also learned how to cook, how to iron and how to fold a fitted sheet (yes, it can be done – and it’s not that hard).

Mom and Dad weren’t progressives or reformers themselves and they were bound by plenty of conventions that bugged me.  They didn’t raise me or my siblings gender neutral.  But they did OK.  They just did what needed to be done and threw a little respect into the mix.

It was a good recipe.