Lilly Ledbetter talks about the shame she felt when she realized after 19 years of working at Goodyear Tire and Rubber that all that time she was paid 15 to 40 percent less than her male coworkers doing the same job. She had worked hard, been promoted and received good performance reviews. But until an anonymous coworker tipped her, she didn’t know that despite her good work she was being ripped off by her employer.

When she sued for wage discrimination she won. But Goodyear appealed and sent the case to the Supreme Court which found in favor of the tire company because Ledbetter hadn’t filed her complaint in proper time. The rule was that she had to have filed within six months of getting the diminished paycheck.

It didn’t matter that she didn’t know, hadn’t asked or hadn’t even suspected she was being treated unfairly. That was part of the shame, I’m sure, that she’d been naively duped all along. Well behaved women seldom make history as the saying goes. Well behaved women rarely think to challenge or even suspect authority. They just assume they are being treated fairly.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, passed by an unusually bi-partisan Congress and signed by President Obama when he first took office, expanded the time a worker can file a wage discrimination suit.  Overruled were opponents who argued it would encourage lawsuits by workers who might delay filing claims in the hope of reaping bigger rewards.

Lilly Ledbetter never got the money she would have received had all things been equal. She was cheated out of a higher pension and a bigger Social Security check that should have been hers.

But the Alabama woman with the musical name, now age 73 and with a new book out called “Grace and Grit,” will be forever connected in women’s history with equal pay for equal work. And for speaking out.

Then comes Sandra Fluke.  Who knows where the 30-year-old student will end up in history. She hasn’t even started her law career but she’s already making a mark.

Allow me to imagine how a Fluke entry in women’s history might be written some day.

In 2012 the United States found itself embroiled in a surprising and nasty furor over women and contraception, during a hysterical buildup to a presidential election. When it seemed that the rhetoric could become no more divisive and juvenile Sandra Fluke stood up to a radio giant of radical conservatism.

Accustomed to having his way with powerful men who quaked before him, the large loud  voice of the ultra right attempted to smear Fluke’s reputation after the student told a Congressional committee why she believed her Catholic university should cover birth control in its student health plan.  This set off the powerful puppeteer of far right politicos  who slammed the young woman with vulgar epithets and even creepily called for a video of her sex life. He huffed and he puffed but Fluke did not flinch.

Outraged parents of daughters, including President Obama, rallied to her side. Activist women, already burning over a series of misogynist moves by the far right, went into full Facebook drive against Fluke’s attacker. Even normally silent leaders in his party dared to disavow him although its timid candidates did little more than tsk-tsk. Advertisers withdrew from his show and TV stations dropped his program.

While the name of her attacker has been largely forgotten, the name of Sandra Fluke stands for a period when women talked back to their bruisers and young women were roused from their long apolitical nap. And, in the process a nation climbed out of the mud, washed itself off and realized it is better than its blowhards.  (That last blowhard part is a little fantasy of mine, but why not hope?)

The woman with the white hair in flowered turtleneck and jeans standing on the corner in front of the Occupy Sebastopol tent is quite aware of her relevance.

“I think it’s important that I’m here,” says Geneva Folsom who is 89 and knows she adds a respectable senior visual to the movement that some detractors would dismiss as scruffy, unfocused and played out. But even skeptics might take a second look at Geneva the Occupier, including the drivers who squeal past, curse and raise a middle finger.

For them she offers sympathy.  “They’re angry. Maybe they just received a foreclosure notice, have a sick family member, be bottomed out on their credit cards. They may be relying on the food bank so they don’t have to choose between prescriptions and a meal.”

Geneva is energized by the occupy movement. She first got encouraged by the Arab Spring protests and then came Occupy Wall Street. “And I finally saw the possibility of changing things in this country,” she says in a homey drawl that she defines as more Oklahoman than southern.

Her father worked for an oil company in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Her mother was a teacher. Her father was a Republican.  Her mother was not. Geneva says, “On election day she would walk out the door and tell my father, ‘Walter, I’m going to cancel your vote.’”

Geneva was a therapist, married to a psychiatrist. They lived mostly in the Deep South and while Geneva has known grander digs she is now happily snug in a downtown studio apartment. Her daughter and family live nearby. Her phone message tells solicitors,  “I’m old. I’m poor. And I never buy anything over the telephone.”

She’s proud of the occupy movement. “It’s only been a few months and it’s in everyone’s heads. Everyone knows what people mean by “the one percent” and “the 99 percent.” If you say occupy anything, people know what you mean.”

Occupy Sebastopol has had a pretty mellow presence, partly because it’s in liberal western Sonoma County. Partly too, Geneva says, “Because we’ve had no outside trouble makers and have worked closely with the police department.” As for the violence that has sprung from occupy actions elsewhere Geneva says, “When people have been thrown overboard their anger can get out of control.”

She quickly adds this is her personal opinion. She does not speak for the movement. However, she adds, “If I was running the show I’d figure out a way to occupy Congress and follow all the candidates.”

“Sometimes I think we have a stupid public.”

“I believe in revolution,” she says, “but I try to be polite.” Her style is to carry a placard that says “Tell Obama, the Congress, the banks and corporations we want economic opportunity.” She points to a report that 50 percent of Americans are a crisis away from falling below the poverty line.

“I’ve been waiting for a revolution for four years,” she says, since President Obama’s election. But she’s been on the side of change for a lifetime. The KKK once burned a cross on her front lawn “because they didn’t like that we were friends with black people.”

When her husband became a hospital director in Alabama the job came with a white house with pillars and a maid. Unaccustomed to both, Geneva asked what people in town paid their maids. And then she paid twice as much.

When elders in the local Methodist church invited the family to join, her husband said they would as soon as the church started welcoming black families.

Then and now Geneva says people have disappointed her. “Sometimes I think we have a stupid public.” But there is always reason to hope that people turn around. In her last email to me she wrote, “So happy to see the Girl Scouts are still in business in spite of them being terrorists.”

I think I get it. It’s a 50 year old grudge. They’re still mad about the Pill. The birth control pill turned the power game upside down more than 50 years ago and some people are still honked off about it.  Reliable woman-controlled contraception changed many things.  The Pill became forever linked to the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, cultural change, even consumer activism. All the things some people wish they could reverse.

As the Republican presidential campaign continues its jaw-dropping mission to control women’s bodies it’s clear that one way the hard right would take this country back is to drag women back a half century.

If you weren’t around to remember, ask your mother or grandmother what it was like after the Pill put women in charge of their bodies. They didn’t have to leave birth control up to the man who promised, “Trust me, I’ll take care of it.”

Not anymore. Women took control. Discreetly.  Your man didn’t need to know, or your mother, or the church.

A woman in charge of her future could plan her life, develop a career, start up a rock band, finish med school.  She could decide when or whether to have children. She could enjoy sex. For another pre-Pill reminder,  watch Mad Men.

In her book When Everything Changed, The History of American women from 1960 to the present, Gail Collins quotes the Economist magazine as crediting the Pill for being one invention that historians a thousand years from now will say defined the Twentieth Century.

In 2010 we celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the Pill, confident that reliable birth control was taken care of. Today’s young women could feel assured that reproductive choices were “like the air and water, simply there when you need them,” writes  Gloria Feldt in her book No Excuses, about women and power.

But apparently some weren’t celebrating, but brooding, waiting for their chance to pounce and show women who’s boss.

Our current attackers are not all crusty old guys, the fools who think sexist jokes are funny. Some are young enough to be Phyllis Schlafly’s grandsons.  But their message is the same – that women, the poor dears, are simply incapable of knowing what’s best for their bodies.

The feverish Rick Santorum would get rid of abortion, birth control, prenatal testing and amniocentesis. Who knows what he’ll go after next. Virginia legislators pushed by the governor tried to force women to have an intrusive vaginal ultrasound prior to an abortion. Against her will. Whether she wants it or not. Non-consensual penetration of the vagina or, at worst -  in the case of Virginia – state rape. At best, politicians wanting to play doctor.

Former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder said “If you had told me when I was in law school birth control would be a debate in 2012 I would have thought you were nuts.”

Fortunately women started talking back. In Virginia they organized a silent protest, staring down state legislators going to vote against women. And Gov. Vaginal Ultrasound backed off.  Activists in Ohio labeled their anti-women Republicans “masters of the Uterus.” Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney demanded “Where are the women?” and led a walkout to protest a male-only panel dealing with contraception.

What’s seldom mentioned is that the Pill not only prevents an unwanted pregnancy but helps protect against uterine and ovarian cancer. It’s used to control endometriosis. It lessens migraines. And in its early years it turned women into their own health advocates. Concerned about the side affects from the heavy estrogen dose women pressured manufacturers to adjust the dosage. And they did. And women realized they had power as consumers.

Well, all of this has just been too much for too long for some people, mostly men, I’m sorry to say. Powerful women are obviously a menace to society and must be stopped.

That is our challenge then, for modern women and men to resist these 19^th century throwbacks. If we don’t, we will leave a legacy for our grandchildren that will cause more pain and suffering than any whopping national debt.