A HUNDRED MORE YEARS OF PROGRESS AND THEY'LL BE GONE :

Check, please : Some argue that the convention of men paying for women is a harmless gallantry, like holding a door open. I beg to differ. (Ann Marlowe, May 4, 2002, Salon)

We were in a small Greenwich Village restaurant, my boyfriend Scott and I, and our conversation lagged as we waited for the check. You could get pasta
and a salad here for under $10, and the room was pleasant enough, so the place was packed with people in their 20s. As we waited, I calculated my share of the bill, reassured that I'd still have enough for lunch tomorrow, the subway, the Wall Street Journal. Payday, I could not forget, was the day after that.

Every workday I bought the Journal because I couldn't take enough from any one paycheck to buy a subscription. I lived very modestly and close to the financial edge. I found this poverty as surprising as my friends did, for as a financial analyst at an investment bank, I made more money than most 23-year-olds. But even in those days 20 grand did not go far in New York.

The waiter, about our age, tall, thin and actorly, smiled over our table and presented the bill squarely to Scott.

This casual gesture stung like a slap in the face. I wanted to object that the bill belonged in the middle. How could this young, hip-looking waiter, my contemporary, assume I wasn't paying for my own dinner? No, no, I wanted to tell him: I make more than Scott, I'm on Wall Street.

My good mood had dissolved. I knew I wasn't supposed to get upset over trivialities like where the bill was placed; I knew that feminism was about equal pay for equal work, abortion rights and legal issues. Waiters who gave the man the bill were doomed to go the way of ladies' menus without prices. It was just a matter of time.

Okay, hop in your Wayback Machine, travel to the 1890s, find a suffragette and a chauvanist pig, and explain to them that in 100 years women will provide at least equal financial support to their husbands, will offer sex without commitment, will abort any child that results, and will even pay for their own meals on a date, and tell me which one thinks their vision will have prevailed. Is all this really progress for women? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2002 9:56 PM