In the home where I grew up, even if the radio were off, you could always hear the music. You see, my parents are both professional classical musicians—I myself studied piano fairly seriously for over twelve years—and so the sounds of someone practicing their instrument were never far away. Whether it was my father playing through the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy for the thousandth time that winter season or, more rarely, my mother standing where she thought we couldn’t see her, her back turned, her long hair tumbling down the way she refused to wear it outside, I was fortunate enough to be constantly exposed to music—even better, to be constantly exposed to live music.
For me and my family, music is also profoundly connected to social justice, gender equality, and movements advocating on behalf of workers. In addition to our background in classical music, I was practically raised on old CDs and tape recordings of Pete Seeger’s folk and activist songs. One piece whose angry exposé of misogyny and sexism struck me even as a child (it was a perennial favorite of me and my little brother as kids) was originally written by his sister Peggy and titled “I’m Gonna Be An Engineer.” The song follows the speaker throughout her life, from childhood to motherhood, as she dreams of becoming an accomplished engineer. As a young woman, she “studied on the sly,” but by day worked as a typist to support her new husband’s education and professional career. At work, though, not only did she make “crummy” wages (much less than her male colleagues), but, egregiously, “every time the boss came in, he pinched me on the thigh and said, ‘I’ve never had an engineer!’”.
Even as a little girl, I would flinch at the inherent violation and degradation of a powerful man pinching the thigh of a young woman, degrading and belittling her, seeing her as a sexualized set of body parts rather than a human being with a mind and intellect to be valued and nourished. I knew I would one day, in some context, feel like that young woman in front of that old man, and thus I dreaded the day my hips and breasts would develop. Simultaneously, though, I felt strangely validated to hear a man sing—on behalf of women but not in place of women—the final, triumphant lyric that promises a commitment to lasting social change: “I’ll fight them as a woman, not a lady / I’ll fight them as an engineer!”.
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