Many of us Boomers grew up with mothers who had been taught a very specific definition of what a woman was supposed to be.

She cooked and kept a clean house. She dressed conservatively. She didn’t have too many opinions or make a man feel small. She put her husband’s needs ahead of her own. In fact, she put most men’s needs above her own. She had and then raised children, supported her husband and tried hard not to let anybody see the cracks.

“Never air your dirty laundry in public” was the byword.

Ambition could be acceptable—as long as it didn’t interfere with being a wife and mother. And only for some. Having a career definitely interfered with a woman’s “natural” duties.

And sex? Respectable women didn’t talk about it.

We Baby Boomers took it all in and it impacted us in ways we never noticed. For example, why did I want to be a nurse and not a doctor, when my father was a doctor? It never even occurred to me that I could be a physician.

And then, as we came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, we asked questions and fought back.

We questioned authority.

We began to look at the rules we’d inherited and asked: Why?

Why couldn’t a woman have a career and a family? We were certainly smart enough.

Why wasn’t it ok to just choose a career?

Why was a divorced woman suspect while a divorced man was simply single?

Why did women have to ask permission to make decisions about their own bodies? Why was female sexuality something to be controlled or shamed? Why was a husband automatically considered the head of the household simply because he was male?

So many double standards in the era.

We challenged assumptions.

Every one of them.

We got good educations. We entered professions our mothers had barely been allowed to enter., such as medicine, law and business at the managerial level. We demanded and got equal opportunity. We embraced birth control. We talked openly about sex. We marched. We protested. We divorced. We questioned authority—including the authority of the people who had raised us.

Some of us burned bras. I didn’t dare (I needed the structure) but I supported the movement.

More importantly, we burned through some of the assumptions that had kept women in their place.

And we thought we’d won.

That’s what makes what is happening now so difficult to watch.

Why are we going backward?

So much of the progress we fought for is being rolled backward through policy and law.

After decades in which reproductive decisions became part of a woman’s fundamental autonomy, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Today, 41 states have abortion bans in effect, including 13 with total bans. Legislatures are continuing to restrict medication abortion, telehealth care and other avenues of reproductive health care. Some have even introduced measures that would criminalize pregnant people who obtain abortions.

Think about that for a moment. CRIMINALIZE THEM.

We were the generation that said my body is mine.

Now we are watching government reclaim authority over women’s bodies that we once fought to establish as our own.

Diabolically strategic language

What’s more, the language sounds deceptively different from the language our mothers heard. It isn’t always, “Women belong in the home.” Instead, it comes wrapped in words like protection, morality, family values or the rights of the unborn. Or my favorite: “trad-wife.”

I mean. “Pro-life”? Who isn’t pro-life? Even those of us who are more accurately pro-abortion rights are pro-life.. Language matters.

But when the practical result is that a woman has less authority over her own body, her own pregnancy and her own future, the underlying question is hauntingly familiar:

Who gets to decide what a woman may do with her own life?

We Boomers remember what it felt like when the answer was assumed to be everyone but the woman herself.

We challenged that answer.

We changed laws. We changed workplaces. We changed marriages. We changed expectations. We changed what our daughters believed was possible.

To those in younger generations fond of Boomer-bashing, you have no idea. None at all.

We didn’t do it perfectly. We made mistakes. We sometimes pushed too far and sometimes not far enough. The ERA has never been ratified, for example. Still. To this day.

But we opened doors.

And now some of those doors are being quietly—or not so quietly—closed.

That should make every woman who remembers the 1970s pay attention. And those who weren’t born yet? They need to wake up.

Because progress is not a trophy we put on a shelf.

It is something every generation has to defend.

And perhaps the most Boomer thing we can do now is ask the question we asked back then:

Wait. Why are we going backward?