The Center for American Progress told the world something Louisiana women already knew when it empirically proved the Bayou State to be the worst for women last Wednesday.
By the numbers, we’re 50th of all 50 states based on the economics of female jobs, the number of women in leadership positions and women’s health provisions.
We should be ashamed. There’s a mother pelican with all her little babies on our flag. That should merit some sort of concrete esteem for the women in this state.
Maryland is the best state in these same categories, and their flag doesn’t even make sense. It’s an English heraldic banner, and honestly, that should’ve died after the Revolutionary War.
So we’ve been beat out by some British-loving sliver of a Northeastern state.
I guess this data is the final sign that women in the South should give up on their progressive expectations. The stretch of states from Georgia to Texas on the American Progress map is solid red, meaning each of those states is in the bottom 10 along with Utah, South Dakota and Indiana.
There’s no escape, unless you want to travel up North, where people recommend Chili’s as a good restaurant.
That’s one area in which the South excels. We do have the best cooking in the United States, and that’s probably because women are so oppressed everywhere else that we have nowhere to go but the kitchen.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend my days baking bread and making gumbo instead of advocating endlessly for a bunch of old men to consider me in their lawmaking.
I don’t think I’d get as much of a headache making food.
Here’s the sad thing: I’m really bad at cooking, so I guess I’ll just have to go with continued attempts to get this state to listen.
Honestly, I think college women live in a bubble of critical thinking and have the outlets to remain untouched by Louisiana generalities.
That, and most of us don’t have functional kitchens.
We do have a chance to be outraged, though. As the future Southern businesspeople — and I do mean people, not just women — we have the chance to make sure that next time this happens, Louisiana doesn’t top the charts as the worst state.
Maybe in 20 years, we’ll still be pretty bad. Progress moves slowly. We might even still be the worst. But any movement from here will be toward a more positive future.
At least I hope so. If we end up with less than 12 percent of our Congressional leaders being women, we as a state will have failed.
As much as this is a human issue not just affecting women, but the men in their lives as well, those men in leadership roles don’t seem to understand that what they do doesn’t exactly follow their good intentions to treat their wives and mothers well.
I’m pretty sure the 88 percent male contingent of Louisianians in Congress doesn’t hold a weekly meeting about how best to marginalize females. I’m not blaming them for doing something with rage in their hearts.
I’m blaming them for not having a rage, a passion for equality that could lead them to address our state’s wrongdoing. I’m sure they have talking points that could argue circles around Louisiana not being the worst state.
That’s fine. They can keep their speeches while Louisiana women live out the truth of Congressional action.
We will bite back. There’s a generation of women biding their time in college, watching our mothers battle through the workplace and our friends battle through medical red tape.
As soon as there are enough of us, someone will listen.
Megan Dunbar is a 20-year-old English senior from Greenville, S.C.