It's often said that hindsight is 20-20, meaning that we can see the past with a kind of perfect clarity that is unavailable to us when we are caught up in the present, or attempting to see into the murk of the future.
In this birthday issue of MWP we begin our twentieth year by looking at the world and women's place in it through three sets of eyes, and exploring their visions of the past, the present and the future.
Arvonne Fraser, a local force for global change, articulated a vision for women around the world in one of MWP's first issues. We've caught up with her to see what she thinks now, with the benefit of her 20-20 hindsight.
Elizabeth Russell, a student at the College of St. Catherine, was 20 when this year began: she turns 21 this month. She tells us what the world looks like through the eyes of a young woman today.
To tell our future, or at least a little piece of it, we turn to a scientist who has been busy these past 20 years at making the future happen: Dr. Ted Nagel, director of the University of Minnesota Reproductive Medicine Clinic.
1984
Arvonne Fraser
The women's movement goes global; in the U.S., we're "in the trough"
by Elizabeth Noll
Nineteen years ago, when the Minnesota Women's Press was about six months old, the fledgling paper carried a commentary from Arvonne Fraser, then director of the Women and Public Policy project at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, about her experiences at the United Nations Women's Conference in Nairobi, Kenya.
Fraser wrote, "The world is far from perfect and women have learned they can do something about it. The future is brighter because 15,000 women got themselves to Nairobi‹a miracle in itself. As a rural Kenyan woman said, "women now feel better about themselves and are working together.'"
The exuberance of that time had a profound effect on Fraser, who's now a senior fellow emerita of the Humphrey. In a recent interview, Fraser reminisced about how the women's movement has changed, in the U.S. and around the world, since 1984.
"It's hard to verbalize the kind of excitement that the women's movement was creating at that time," said Fraser. "Twenty years ago we were all involved in trying to get Mondale to select a woman vice-president‹and he did!"
That excitement, said Fraser, helped engineer much social progress for U.S. women over the next two decades, including advances in the workplace and in education, and continued reproductive freedom. "We haven't lost Roe v. Wade," she said.
On the flip side, women still have enormous challenges to tackle, Fraser said, and we've lost a lot of momentum since the 1980s. "Frankly, I think that we're kind of in the trough of the wave now, simply because there've been so many gains." She laughed. "And because we're 20 years older."
Global shift
Fraser, who co-founded the Humphrey's Center on Women and Public Policy and was a U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women in 1993 and 1994, used the energy of the 1980s to launch a global project.
"In 1985 we founded the Women's Rights Action Watch at the world conference. That became what I did at the Humphrey," she remembered.
Fraser started WRAW to produce accurate reports about the status of women in countries that had ratified the U.N. treaty called CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) and promised to live up to its terms. The "official" reports coming in to the U.N. were often flawed, said Fraser. "A lot of countries ratify just to make the women happy and don't do much. So we did counter-reports. We looked at the real situation of women in their country and what the countries had done to conform to the treaty."
The group was very successful‹so successful they've just about worked themselves out of a job, said a proud Fraser. "Now everybody knows about this treaty. Now all kinds of groups are putting in these kinds of reports."
In the last 10 years, said Fraser, the excitement that once powered U.S. women's groups has become visible in many other countries. "We've seen an explosion of women's organizations," she said. "I don't think we would've got what we got in the Iraq and Afghan constitutions without this explosion of [interest in] women's rights. Now is about where we were 20 years ago in the U.S."
Almost all the organizing has been done at a grassroots level, said Fraser‹and sometimes, by necessity, from outside the women's home country. For instance, one group of expatriates called Women Living Under Muslim Law operated out of France for several years, working for change in their homelands via secret communication networks. Efforts like this are now bearing fruit, said Fraser.
"The result is that here's Shirin Ebadi who got the Nobel Peace Prize last year. She was a lawyer in Iran and she worked to defend women's and children's rights. The fact she got the Nobel Peace Prize showed just how far women's human rights have come."
The next hurdle
Today the main obstacle to women's equality in the U.S., said Fraser, is the continuation of traditional gender roles in the home.
"We still haven't solved child care. Young women are primarily responsible for raising kids and working outside the home. That really has to be worked out, because women have two jobs and men have one, and it's not fair. That is the issue of the future, that kind of sharing the work."
Unfortunately, said Fraser, it's not likely to be settled any time soon.
"It takes so long to change a culture. I think the young men are doing a lot more: I see it in my kids and their contemporaries. But society hasn't caught up. It's the way we think that's got to be changed."
2004
Elizabeth Russell
The inheritance: she has the tools to change what doesn't work
by Elizabeth Noll
When Elizabeth Russell was growing up in Great Falls, Mont., her mom and dad kept telling her, "If you want something, go for it. Don't sell yourself short. Don't let anyone get in your way."
"I got a lot of my attitude from [my mom]," said Russell, a student at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. "She's always been a hard worker. She always encouraged me, at all ages. If I wanted to try something she let me do it and that kind of instilled in me to always go for it."
That's not to say that everything always worked out. But her mom, a high school French teacher for many years and now the vice-principal, had a fallback plan too. "She always said to me, "If it's not working, change it,'" recalled Russell.
Those words still echo and that message has been reinforced at college, said Russell, who is studying business administration and working two part-time jobs at St. Catherine. "Maybe I'm a little biased because I'm at an all women's college, but I think it's pretty empowering to be a woman alive today," said Russell.
She thinks women her age benefit from the struggles of past generations: for one thing, they've inherited a social climate in which their innate abilities are taken more for granted. "You're not fighting as much. It's more about recognition than fighting to be recognized as even as capable. I don't think it's as intense as it was before."
There's no question in Russell's mind she'll reach her professional goals: "In 20 years," she said, "ideally, I'd like to be a senior vice president in a corporation that I enjoyed working for. I want to be successful in my career and also in my relationships."
She expects to marry and have children. "Thirty would be maybe when I'd start thinking about having kids‹no sooner. I'd want to make sure I have the finances to make it work. I do kind of plan on doing the master juggling of career and family."
In the mean time, she plays clarinet, makes pottery and enjoys camping and skiing. The environment is one of her passions. "It seems like when I was younger there were pro-environment messages everywhere, and now it seems people just don't really care. The [proposals for] oil drilling in Alaska really bothered me, and that comes from growing up in Montana and really having an appreciation for natural beauty. I think of somebody coming to Montana and ripping it up and that really breaks my heart."
Though she's generally very satisfied with her own life and its possibilities and promises, Russell does have a few ideas about how she'd like things to be different for a daughter of hers.
"I have a passion for education, so I would definitely want her to be able to gain an education that was valuable to her and that was fair, and that tried to include topics that were relevant, not just stuff in the past. We got to World War II in high school and that was it. So that would be one. Two is, I would want her to feel good about herself. I would want her to not have all the worry about living up to the Barbie doll image. Hopefully in 20 years society would be past that and able to appreciate women for how they are, curves and all. And three would be to encourage her to dream, like my mom did me. "Go all the way. If something's not working, change it, because you can do it.'"
2024
dr. ted nagel
Womb for rent: when life begins in the lab
by J. Trout Lowen
A little more than 20 years ago, Dr. Ted Nagel and Dr. George Tagatz performed the first in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state at the University of Minnesota. At the time, the marriage of sperm and egg outside the womb was cutting-edge science. These days, it's markedly routine. Worldwide, there have been more than 1 million IVF births.
In 2004, scientists are debating the viability of artificial wombs, the ethics of cloning and exploring ways to extend women's fertility well past what we know as menopause. What is science fiction today could easily become accepted science in another 20 years, or less. Just last month, South Korean researchers announced that they had cloned a human embryo.
Throughout history, women and their roles in society have been defined by their biological ability to give birth. But what will happen if a woman's womb is no longer necessary? If life begins in the lab? We put that question and several others to Dr. Nagel, director of the U's Reproductive Medicine Center.
A womb's place is in the lab
In 2002, researchers at Cornell University's Weill Medical College in New York successfully introduced embryos to an engineered womb and they began to grow. The experiments were stopped after a few days because of regulations governing in vitro fertilization, but can the first artificial-womb baby be far behind?
Nagel thinks so. "I don't think we're going to see that in our lifetime, and I say that for a lot of reasons."
Back in 1983, after the first IVF success, Nagel says he and Tagatz were confident that they could get anybody pregnant. It was now just a question of money. "Of course it hasn't panned out that way," he points out. "There are still pregnancies we cannot achieve and we don't know why."
A successful pregnancy in an artificial womb is infinitely more complex, he said. Women provide an incredibly complex mixture of growth factors and immunological things that will be difficult to duplicate in an artificial culture media that provides the fetus with everything it needs to grow.
"If we add the wrong stuff," warned Nagel, "we may induce genetic expression, or what's been termed imprinting, which is what genes get turned on and turned off, that may be adverse in their consequences. So monkeying with this media Š it has to be done very carefully. A lot of this stuff that's done with animals doesn't always translate to what's done with people.
"People like myself have been very wrong before, but I would be skeptical we're going to see that anytime soonŠ I think it's going to be fraught with a lot of risk of having kids born with abnormalities Š things like immunological failures. That the kids will be like the bubble boy, or have all kinds of susceptibility to disease because they haven't gotten a lot of these things from Mom that maybe we don't even know about yet."
The egg and I
One of the most viable ideas on the scientific horizon, said Nagel, is freezing and preserving a woman's unfertilized eggs for later use.
"Many more women have pursued a career and put off childbearing, and I think that is a very big, big issue. Unfortunately, the way the biology goes you cannot beat being young for pregnancy," Nagel said. "So some dopey kid gets pregnant on the first try when she's 16 and when she's 36 and really set in deciding to have kids, all of a sudden it's become more difficult.
"A couple of things that are in the near offing, I think, one might be the ability to retrieve eggs or to actually move a piece of ovary and cryopreserve it in an effort to mature those eggs and fertilize them at a later date. So you can retrieve the eggs or the ovary in a woman's 20s and use that in her late 30s and early 40s to become pregnant and have the potential of the younger egg. Because as you get older, not only do the number of eggs decline, but the risk of having a genetic abnormality in the offspring goes upŠSo if we could have the egg comparable to a 25-year-old, the age of the uterus is pretty irrelevant."
My daughter myself
We've already seen Dolly the sheep and other cloned animals, and ethics rather than technology may be the biggest thing standing in the way of the first human clone. But there are other things that should stop us, Nagel says, including common sense.
"Who the hell really wants to be cloned? I'm thinking, this is the ultimate narcissism," he said, laughing.
And even though we can do it, it's clear we can't do it well, yet.
"Cloning hasn't worked quite as wellŠ.If you look at the animal cloning there have been a lot of animals that have been born that do not look exactly like what they were cloned from. Let's take a cow, because you know they've cloned cows. So you have a Holstein cow that's white with black spots, or black with white spots, however you want to call it, but they're black and white and the offspring don't have the spots in all of the same places. So from that point of view it's not identical. And there have been a lot of anomalies in these animals, so that they haven't all been so healthy. That part of it hasn't been worked out."
"And clearly there are in utero influences we're only beginning to understand."
