Every semester for the past several years, The University of Hartford has contracted me to teach a particular course in their “All University Curriculum.” All students, regardless of their major, are required to take come AUC courses. The intent is to provide a measure of exposure to information that helps to build the more “well-rounded” student. The course is The Adult Journey: The Search for Meaning. It's an entry level course. Teaching – or attempting to teach – today’s college “kid” is not as satisfying for me as interacting with the students in my other courses, many of whom are non-traditional students or adult learners. Nevertheless, it's a challenging opportunity for me – childless by choice – to have some contact with our older teens. [No doubt it’s a challenge for them as well, since they are spending time with someone perhaps older than their parents…]

Without maligning public education and the state of literacy in this country, the effort to engage with these young students is complicated by the lack of a common context or historical perspective. This gives rise to the “eye openers” that occur in each semester. For example, it’s difficult for them to fathom the fact that a women may have credit in her own name is a recent development. It’s difficult for them to grasp the significance of the disparity in employment pay between men and women. [In truth, I cannot come to terms with that one either…] So, many times throughout each semester these students are provided what for most are “eye openers.” But sometimes they provide me “eye poppers” – an absence of knowledge or view from their world screen which catches me truly off guard. The “winner” in that category so far came about as follows: I knew that most of the voting-eligible students in this semester’s class had not voted. One of the three leading reasons for this was their Conviction that the outcome of the election (Nov. 2000) really didn't matter. I tried to provide them the “bigger picture” of such outcomes.

To that end, I asked what reproductive rights were. Up popped a hand in the back of the room and a young man confidently reported “reproductive rights” were about whether or not you could photocopy something. It took me a nanosecond or two to recover. Then I asked what women's reproductive rights were, and we moved closer to the expected answer. (No one in the class had any idea that his answer was not the one I was looking for…)

What message can be gained from this anecdote? That young people and older people occupy different planes? Well that's not new. For me, this was a clear and powerful demonstration of the ball being dropped when it comes to helping the current cohorts of young people understand how much of what they take for granted is even in place. For me, that ball has been dropped in our court – the court of today's maturing cohorts. If the present is built on the past, and the future is built on the present, there needs to be a bridge crossing the divide between “then” and “now.” You don't have to be a feminist – raging or otherwise – to grasp that without an understanding of how we got “here” no one will much care what the content of “there” may be. Somewhere during the roller coaster ride of the 1980s, the substance of the feminist movement of the 1970s got lost. To the extent those 1970s issues – such as economic equality - remain in flux or in peril, we, women in midlife today, have a duty to open the eyes of others.