Inspired by the Democratic National Convention 2020, I am thinking of the multitude of women rising to the top in every field of endeavor. It’s an exciting time to be alive. While most of the time it appears that everything is going to hell in a handbasket, the emergence of female excellence gives me hope.

I am 68. I was born before Roe v. Wade, before Title IX sports, before the abolishment of miscegenation laws, before the pill was invented. I have witnessed the codification of LGBTQ rights, the first all-female moon-walk, the magnificent US women’s soccer team, and Oprah. I have yet to see passage of the ERA, equal pay, free daycare, and safe streets after dark. I am resolved to wait until I’m 72 for the first female American president, -- not happy, but resolved.

What overwhelmed me during the videos of powerful women leaders in the DNC– Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Sally Yates, Kamala Harris, and many others – is that no one talks about how hard it is to be female. Period. If challenges are mentioned, they are passed over briefly – “She raised four children,” or “she commanded troops,” – in the chase for titles, ranks, degrees, and awards. In the chase for attaining male standards of achievement.

If I have achieved anything in my two-thirds century of a life, it is that I survived being female. And I am privileged, white, affluent, well-educated, and healthy. How come being female doesn’t get the commendation it deserves? How come the focus is always on the comparisons with males? Since when are they the standard by which to judge? Since forever.

I offer here a series of vignettes illustrating the challenges of being female. My claim to fame is that I’m nobody, I’ve done nothing exceptional, and my experience is common to most of us XX’s. I speak from my personal experience in the hopes of spotlighting how terrific these women are by broader standards. I seek words to create a different standard, a space that acknowledges the full breadth of female accomplishment.

The male standard is not adequate. In these times, the male standard fails to address the urgency, the subtlety, the complexity of the challenges we face. The fastest man in the world cannot beat the coronavirus . The richest man in the world can do nothing about rising suicides. The most powerful man in the world is helpless against melting ice tracts.

There have always been males with great compassion and deep understanding. We know their names: Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. Why, the personification of Love is Jesus Christ himself! Himself? The only child of God. Where are the female counterparts? Michelle Obama, there need to be armies of you. And there will be, if we can let them be.

If we can identify them. I don’t mean name them. I mean articulate the fullness of the female experience, study it as seriously as we study battle movements in history, listen to its songs as closely as the Ode to Joy, weigh its impact as judiciously as we weigh the Constitution, pray to it as devoutly as we pray to the Almighty Father.

My vignettes are numbered from 12 to 68, the years of my womanhood so far. It’s not a biographical order; this is not a biography. These are just thoughts about what it was and is to be female, written between the Democratic National Convention and the November election of 2020.