The Feminist Grandma

The First Week - Dealing with It

I vote a week early. I get tears in my eyes as I black the little oval next to Hillary's name. On election night I am excited, set up my computer to watch the numbers roll in. But they’re rolling the wrong way. Hope eroding with the numbers, I go to bed at 10:30. Maybe I’ll wake up to good news in the morning.

 

 I wake at 12:30. It looks worse. At 1:15 I go to Facebook; I have to say something, anything.  Judging by the response, many of my Facebook "friends" are awake. I stay up until 4.

Before she went to bed I had told Amanda, “Don’t worry about it honey. She’s going to win.” When she wakes up in the morning I have to tell her. In the car I try to acknowledge our outrage while warding off despair. “Why do you have to talk about it. You know I’m mad; leave me alone.”

For a couple of days it doesn’t seem real. I shake my head as if to clear the bad dream. Then for a little while I think - maybe the president won’t be as awful as the candidate. After all, he has no firm opinions. But I know he is a racist, a misogynist, hateful, impulsive, still a two-year-old at 70. I fear his ignorance, his incompetence, his willingness to exploit what is worst in us to win.

I try to avoid information, but the New York Times and Facebook keep drawing me in. I see in the Times the committee that will manage the transition - I recognize Steve Bannon from Breitbart News, and Pam Bondi, the Florida Attorney General who received $25,000 from the Trump Foundation and then did not investigate fraud allegations against Trump University - and realize things may be as bad as I fear.

Bondi and friend  image:NYTimes.com

 

A few weeks before the election I had started writing about Michelle Obama’s New Hampshire speech - the one about Trump boasting of assaults on women - trying to understand my response to it. On Friday - has it only been three days? - I watch it again on YouTube, download the transcript. And now the crying begins, on and off for two days, until it feels like this new reality has loomed forever.

 

The looming horror: image of Hurricane Matthew in news-press.com

 

I’ve long thought that it’s past time for the American Century, the American Empire, to be over. Maybe this is just a marker on that road. But the crumbling won’t be painless, and most of the rubble will fall on the poorest, the least powerful.

 

image:bbc.com/gettyimages

I watch David Chappell, Steven Colbert, Seth Meyers, Whoopie Goldberg. I cry. I have to do something. What can I do?

Wednesday is the HOME Van food pantry at Arupa’s house. I hand out medicines, tents, sundries. To my surprise - usually the political views I hear there are right wing - most of the talk in the long line is dismayed, or outraged. I go to the annual celebration at Grace Marketplace, our two year old homeless services campus, knowing I’ll see familiar faces. I go to collect hugs. I get plenty. I ask a friend about the mayor’s book circle - first they read Ta Nahisi Coates, now they’re going to read Ibram Kendi. I'm going to read it. Good old progressive, prosperous, white me, I want to learn more, I want to connect. 

 

 

From my car I wave and smile in the rural southern way at pedestrians, especially non-whites. I wish I had a Clinton bumper sticker. We go for an evening walk and pass the home of the two gallumphing Great Danes. In their yard is a Trump sign. I call to the neighbor. “I love your dogs. But they’re not big enough!” - and she laughs. We walk on and I mutter to Joe, “But I hate your sign.”

 

image:danesonline.com

 

Everything makes me think of the election. Sunday afternoon we go to the new Depot Park to hear some reggae - it’s been open a couple of months but this is our first time. It was built on a brownfield full of contaminated soil and water, which was treated and removed. How much its recent opening influenced the latest eviction of nearby homeless camps, I can't say. In Gainesville we have big camp evictions every few years, with no provision for the campers to go anywhere else, no regard for the functioning community they have created. The people scatter and find new sites.

Despite my misgivings, the park is as wonderful as I’ve heard - still new and raw, but when the trees grow up it will be glorious. Plenty of seating - rocks, benches, concrete risers - and curved walking paths. In the center is the playground, full of delights. Fossils planted in the sandbox. Little digging machines that kids can sit on, the sand shovel controlled by the pedals and handlebars. A wet area where water spurts from the ground, slides down a wall, sprays out from moveable metal tubing. This is Florida, mid-November; we can still play in the water.

 

image:independentfloridaalligator.com

 

Joe and I sit by the sandbox and watch the children, parents, grandparents. It’s like an advertisement for multicultural diversity. Asian faces, faces framed by hijabs, children black and brown and white, talking English and Spanish, and is that Chinese? A 7-year-old blonde girl makes sand angels. A 2-year-old brown boy with glistening black curls stamps his feet in the water. I nod and smile at everyone I pass. This is not Trumpworld, this is America.

 

 

 image:sandia national laboratory

 

Light a candle and curse the darkness - it’s been my motto for many years. What can I do? There is a Progressive Women’s Meeting Sunday afternoon, but meetings?... Oh God, I can’t anymore. A Million Woman March January 21. Possibly. The last big demonstration I went to in DC was for abortion rights. I remember the exhilaration -seeing clusters of women in Atlanta at the gate for the DC flight, masses of women on the DC subway. But I was 45 then - I could stand for hours and hours. And I hate crowds. 

image: huffingtonpost

 

The news keeps getting worse;  Bannon will be chief advisor. What can I do? What can I do?

 

It’s been a week. At 3AM Tuesday morning I see two posts on Facebook:

Amanda Debour Bartlett asks people to protest to Congress about the appointment of Steve Bannon as Trump’s senior advisor, followed by much discussion regarding Congress’ lack of power in this matter. I think, and say, that if we protest as often as we can on the truly horrible decisions (and with Bannon in charge there will be many of them) Congress may believe it has to resist the executive when possible. I share the user-friendly Common Cause website to “find your representative.” click I resolve to keep addresses and stamped envelopes by my writing chair, and dash off notes whenever I feel the outrage.

 

 
from Common Cause website: my representatives - alas (mostly)

 

 Another post:
“...Join me in showing love and respect to others. Find your way to swing the pendulum in the direction of love. Because today, sadly, hate is gaining ground.” (Mara Carrizo Scalise on Instagram, posted on FB by Karen Epple, shared by Arupa, and comically mocked by her husband) I vow to work hard on kindness, friendliness, civility. To wear the safety pin. click

 

 

 

Is it all silly? I don’t know. Will it help? Probably not. Maybe only to assuage my feelings, to save my own soul. I am still crying.

 

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Political Fiction: West Wing and House of Cards

In this year of totally distressing, not to say horrifying, political campaigns click, Joe and I turned to West Wing. He brought home DVDS from the law school library, and we binge-watched, together and separately. (I fall asleep when I watch anything after 8pm.)

image:twinversity.com

After five seasons, the show lost steam and we lost interest. But now I had the TV habit, and, fearing I wouldn’t get enough exposure to politics, I turned to House of Cards. I had watched one episode a few years ago, but I found the characters so loathsome I didn’t want them occupying my living room or my mind.

 

THE WEST WING

 image:theatlantic.com

In West Wing, the liberal’s wet dream, various domestic or international crises force the characters to reconcile their ideals with the need for political compromise. The President is just one of many major characters in the show, which focuses on senior White House staff. Each episode has multiple story lines, which may reflect each other, and there is often a humorous side story.

The scripts are stuffed with policy discussion presented in rapid-fire arguments, but at the core of the show are the almost-family relationships among a group of people working long hours towards usually common and often elusive high-stakes goals. They argue and get really angry, cover their caring with teasing and jokes, and support each other through tough times.

I enjoy these struggles. Not everyone does. In Wikipedia I found critic Heather Havrilesky: "What rock did these morally pure creatures crawl out from under and, more important, how do you go from innocent millipede to White House staffer without becoming soiled or disillusioned by the dirty realities of politics along the way?"

an innocent creature   image(leopard gecko): dreamstime.com

a soiled politician  image:izquotes.com

 

HOUSE OF CARDS

Frank and Claire Underwood  image: netflixlife.com

In House of Cards, the paranoid cynic’s delight, everybody does heinous deeds and then they blackmail each other. The show is about two ruthless people with one ambition: to reach the top. They remind me of a law student I once interviewed for a public service internship whose ambition was to “be a leader.” I kept trying to find out what issues he cared about, what he wanted to achieve; he just kept saying he wanted to be a leader. Finally I asked, “But where do you want to lead people?” He had no answer.

 

Whither the wethers?  image:gapemogotsi.com

 

The show is also about visual style. No matter where it takes us - homes, offices, cars, stores, motels - the entire world is decorated in shades of brown and gray and ivory. Everyone is thin. Everyone’s clothes match the decor. Two exceptions to the neutral pallette: outside we may see a touch of green, and the blood is always red.

 

image: businessinsider.com

Robin Wright, as Claire Underwood, wears very high needle-thin heels and tailored suits (sometimes tailored dresses) regardless of what she’s doing, unless she’s running or rowing. Then it’s a skin tight black workout suit.

image:pinterest.com

Obviously these costumes reflect and enhance her characterization, and my friends might say I’m in no position to criticize someone’s attire click, but as with the set design, they distract me. When a viewer is more intrigued by the show’s design than by the characters, there’s something wrong.

And that brings me to Kevin Spacey, an actor I usually admire. In House of Cards he seems to have two notes, sneering contempt and instrumental charm. The former is the major note - he can’t say he wants a cup of tea without scorn dripping from the line. In the later episodes, he rounds out the character a bit, but that over-the-top contempt still dominates. Robin Wright’s character seems more layered than Spacey’s. Doubt and second thoughts sometimes shimmer in her face. She is also considerably less talkative than her husband, and therefore less transparent.

 

It should be obvious that I preferred West Wing to House of Cards. West Wing is made for me, a left-of-liberal with a fairly positive view of people (in sum: few of us are evil, most do the best we can, but we are led astray by self-interest, ignorance, blind spots, and incompetence).

 
image:cathtatecards.com

But I don’t think my preference is only because of my politics and world view. I think it comes down to the difference between character-driven and plot-driven fiction.

The West Wing crew, both major and minor characters, are complex. They grow in each episode. Though I binge-watched the show three months ago, I remember the names of many of the West Wing staff. I finished watching House of Cards just a few weeks ago, but while I can picture the faces, I can only name the two major villains. 

House of Cards is all about plot, the more outlandish, the better. Old plots (both stories and dastardly schemes) return from time to time, giving the series continuity and depth. I continued watching to the bitter end because I was curious about what melodrama the writers would devise next. But I sometimes had trouble remembering who did what to whom, and why it mattered.

I think that’s because, while heavy on plot, House of Cards is light on character. Everyone is cynical and ruthless, or a hapless victim, and not much beyond that. Villains are supposed to be more interesting than saints; good guys can be insipid. But villains with no redeeming features are as flat as heroes with no flaws. You can show their vulnerabilities, and throw in some back story to explain how they got that way, but it's not enough.

images: wikia.com, somesaints.tumblr.com

I am neither cynical nor paranoid (though I sometimes wonder whether Donald Trump was hired by the DNC to destroy the Republicans). I understand that loathsome heroes are currently a popular trend in television series. At the risk of being called a goody two-shoes, I think that consuming large doses of evil as entertainment promotes cynicism and despair.

image:wikipedia.org

I don’t have to be inspired, but I do prefer characters with more than one note, and characters I can like, or at least care about. If I’m going to let them into my living room, they should be people I’m willing to hang out with for a while.

 

Pro-Abortion

 

I have always been pro-choice and pro-abortion. Having a baby transforms a woman’s life, and abortion is often the best solution to an unwanted pregnancy. I have participated in a few demonstrations about abortion rights.  

I am ambivalent about the value of demonstrations. But the latest outrageous attacks on Planned Parenthood have really pissed me off, and when I see a notice on Facebook that the anti-abortionists are picketing our local affiliate (which doesn’t provide abortions), I decide to join the counter-protest.

 

Planned Parenthood in Gainesville

 

The event is at 9am on a Saturday in August. I arrive at 8:50 and nobody’s there. ‘Shit,’ I think. ‘What if the Anti’s show up and I’m the only Pro? I gotta have a sign.’ I had thought Someone Else, as in ‘let someone else do it,’ would bring signs.

I park at Office Depot, across the street from Planned Parenthood, to buy supplies. Three SUV’s pull in, two with out-of-state license plates. I read the bumper stickers: They’re all about Jesus. Probably not my allies.

In the store I buy a giant foam board and a pack of six colored Sharpies on sale for three bucks. I’ll move my car to a shady spot and make my sign. Oh. The foam board doesn’t fit in my car. I lay it on the sidewalk in the blazing sun and open the Sharpies. They’re super-fine, and barely make a mark. I go back into Office Depot to exchange them for jumbos. Can’t leave the foam board outside where the Anti’s might steal it. (I don’t think they’re all as righteous as their signs and prayers imply). I take it inside with me and ask the clerk to keep an eye on it.                    

I need to write something brief, visible, and to the point. Support Planned Parenthood?  I Support Choice? Both too fuzzy. Support Abortion Rights. That’s what I write, in black block letters . Fill them in with black zigzags, crossed over with red zigzags. I’m pleased - it’s very visible, if a little crooked.

I cross Tenth Avenue, holding the sign so drivers can see.  I cringe a little at expressing myself publicly. What if somebody doesn’t like me? I lift the sign higher and feel good, if self-conscious. As I cross Thirteenth Street I see about twenty-five people. I recognize some from Occupy Gainesville, and see that old chestnut, the coat hanger sign. I’m greatly relieved - I won’t be just one crazy old lady in muumuu, big hat, and sunglasses. A little farther down the sidewalk are four or five Anti’s with signs. Oh boy, we outnumber them.

image:rackjite.com

It doesn’t last. Within half an hour, a few more Pro’s have arrived, and maybe sixty Anti’s. Most of the Anti’s line up across the street, in the shade, while two small groups split off and stand on either side of us in the merciless sun.

The day is a cloudless ninety degrees. I’m perfectly attired in my big straw hat and breezy muumuu with no underwear, and I have a water bottle full of minted iced tea. But sweat runs down my face and all down my torso.

 

ready for action

 

I see a lot of familiar faces. Sharon, who used to be head of Planned Parenthood.  She was a leader in Voices for Choice in 1988, when Gov. Martinez responded to the Supreme Court’s Webster decision by proposing many restrictions on abortion, and women around the state organized to fight him off.  Shirley, who’s now working to save Payne’s Prairie from an even loonier governor. Linda, who put out the call on Facebook for the demonstration. She was a volunteer at the domestic violence shelter when I was president of the board, and stood in angry solidarity with staff against the board when we hired a new director in a process they felt excluded them. Joe, who founded the Civic Media Center, hub of radical and progressive action in Gainesville. And wonderful Zot, tireless advocate for the homeless, currently working with the residents of Dignity Village. It feels good to see them all, to feel connected to my 35-year history in Gainesville, to know we’ve all kept on keeping on.

And it feels good to see a lot of young women with hand-made signs like mine - one says “My Choice and No Regrets.” She hadn’t heard about the demonstrations, but tells me that when she drove past she had to make a sign and join in.

 

image: Shirley Lasseter

Oh my, the signs. Many are too tiny or cluttered to read. On their side we have “Aborted 2nd Trimester embryo” with a large bright red photo of an embryo. On our side we have a very neatly lettered sign that says, “Every ____________ deserves health care.” In the space is an odd pink object, like a child’s stuffed animal. I can't tell if it's a pig or some kind of Pokemon character.  Across the street is a well-lettered sign, easy to read: “Men Regret Lost Fatherhood.” I can't help it, all I can think is ‘Tough shit.’

 

It's a uterus. Image: Helen Strain

 

It all takes me back, though I’ve only been an occasional demonstrator. On both sides you have your Aggressive Protesters, who yell at each other. “Baby-killer.” “Religious fascist.” They like to get up close in each others' faces and make all sorts of accusations.

 

image: bostonglobe.com

I’ve never liked the hateful ones. I can’t stand self-righteous closed minds. I’m too deeply imbued with “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” from my mother. And I’m a great believer in ‘You catch more flies with honey...’

image: pitara.com

Finally, I don’t think any of us can say or do anything that will change each others’ minds. By definition, protesters are among the more opinionated people about any particular cause. In fact, I have to wonder why we do it. For me, this time I was just fed up, so I wanted to speak up. And perhaps waving signs at passing drivers will call attention to the issue, and remind them that, over fifty years after Roe v Wade, it still matters.

One woman comes along our line holding a truly beautiful 3-month-old baby - one of those plump, bald, round-headed ones. She looks at each of our signs and asks if she may give us a hug.  At first I think she's pro-choice, but soon realize she's an Anti. I give her a hug anyway, and whisper, “I don’t want to interfere, but PLEASE put something on that baby’s head. The sun is brutal.” She thanks me and goes on down the line, hugging whoever is willing. Then she puts the baby in its stroller, covers it with a cloth, and leaves it in the sun. She sets up a folding chair for herself and begins saying Hail Mary’s and other prayers to the Virgin.

 

Get that baby out of the sun! image:havebabywilltravel.com

Meanwhile I, and several others, are becoming increasingly distressed about the baby in the stroller. “Please put the stroller in the shade,” say Polite Protesters. “That’s child abuse.” “You don’t give a shit about babies.” “I raised three children and I’d never do that.” “Fuck Jesus Christ,” says Aggressive Protester.

Finally someone calls the police to report the baking baby situation. When the police car arrives, the mother promptly pulls out her breast and begins nursing, leading Aggressive Protestor to say, “Oh right, stick in the nipple when the cops come.”

image: coolmompicks.com

 The police officer walks along the lines on both sides of the street and
ensures that nobody's blocking the sidewalk or trespassing on property, and then approaches the mother. He speaks to her for awhile, and then leaves, suggesting that she put the stroller in the shade. As he passes me I hear him say into his radio, “The baby is breathing, its heart rate is normal and it shows no signs of distress.” The mother switches from praying to singing, in a very pretty voice, though I can't make out the song.

Sharon says they want a couple of “point people” to talk to TV 20 when they arrive. They have Erica, from Wild Iris Books. Will I do it too? Of course I will - the old warhorse smells the cannon smoke and is chomping at the bit. Or something like that. As we wait, I think of what I want to say.

 

image: benjaminhale.tumblr

We had planned to leave at eleven, but we wait in the sun till 11:40. Then the organizers (a loose term) say they don't think TV 20 is coming, and Joe of the Civic Media Center says it's just as well because it would publicize their big crowd, and we gratefully gather our stuff and leave. I'm pleased to see the Anti’s trooping into the Office Depot parking lot with their signs too.

Here’s what I planned to say: "The anti-choice people have been relentless and very well-organized, and statute by statute, case by case, have eroded our right to abortion, and also succeeded in making people think abortion is shameful. I’m 68, and I had an abortion in my early thirties, and again in my early forties. Both were complicated decisions, which no one else could have or should have made for me, and I’ve never regretted either one."

The constitutional right to privacy is the legal underpinning of abortion rights. But thanks to years of effort and propaganda by anti-abortion forces, privacy has become shame.

Katha Pollitt calls for everyone who has had an abortion, or participated in an abortion as a father or friend, to tell their story. “...[T]oo many pro-choice people are way too quiet...Nearly one in three women will have had at least one abortion by the time she reaches menopause. Why don’t we hear more from them?...It’s not that they think they did something wrong: A recent study ...finds that more than 95 percent of women felt the abortion was the right decision, both immediately after the procedure and three years later. They’ve been shamed into silence by stigma.” (NY Times, August 5,2015)

It’s been fun to write a light-hearted story, complete with illustrations, about all us earnest people on both sides of the street. But I don’t take this issue lightly. I was 41, and deeply involved with Voices for Choice in the fight against the Webster decision. I was driving to Tallahassee for a meeting, when I suddenly realized, in the way you do, that all the tiny signs -  sleepiness, a missed period, a rash - meant I was pregnant. In the next couple of weeks I weighed many factors, including a boyfriend who didn’t want a child. It brought home to me the absurdity, the outrageousness, of a bunch of legislators or anyone else presuming to interfere in my choice of whether to have a baby. This is truly a decision that belongs to the pregnant woman, and whomever she chooses to involve.

I don’t think we need to tell our full stories. Why a woman has an abortion is entirely her business. She doesn't have to justify it to anyone. But maybe if everyone who has had an abortion acknowledged it openly the stigma would fade. Your mother, your sister, your Catholic girlfriend, your fundamentalist boss - any one of them is likely to have had an abortion. I’m not brave enough to go on Facebook with it; I’m afraid I’d drown in ugliness. But at least I will say so here.

__________________

To read a very moving, anti-abortion and pro-choice essay by a wonderful writer, click here. click

 

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NEXT POST: NOVEMBER 6

Old Woman

I began calling myself old at about sixty-five, but I wanted to claim the title even earlier than that.

My friends in their eighties laugh at the notion that I’m old at sixty-seven. Still, how long can one go on being middle-aged? Middle-aged carries all sorts of responsibilities and burdens - working for a living, saving for retirement, caring for teenagers and parents. Old brings freedom and power.

image:usatoday.com

As an old woman, I’m free from hoping that men will find me sexually attractive. When I was younger  I was on an everlasting honey-hunt. I  dressed and walked and talked to entice the male of the species. 

the honey-hunt  image:businessinsider.com

I’m free from trying to be what other people expect me to be. I can’t say I’m free from worrying what other people think - ‘How can she let her daughter dress like that?’ ‘She only reads bits and pieces of the Times’ ‘She doesn’t compost’- but I no longer expect perfection of myself, having long since stopped expecting it of anyone else.

I don't let her dress like THIS.  image: amazon.com

I am aware that when I simply act like myself - blunt, profane, opinionated - some people enjoy it because I don’t fit their notion of sweet old grandma. But as I have told Amanda, who is in middle school and at the painful peak of self-consciousness, the only person who pays much attention to me is me. Everyone else is far too busy worrying about themselves.

As an old woman, I feel powerful despite the crumbling - the whiny joints, hole-y memory and various other ailments. When my hair began to go gray, it was a tweedy pepper and salt. I died it purple for a couple of years, and when I let it  grow out it had become a lovely puffy white.  Irrationally, I gained confidence from my white hair. I walk into a meeting and believe people think I know what I’m talking about and am worth listening to. This may be delusional; it is  contrary to the common notion that old women become invisible.

 
worth listening to  image:nydailynews.com

The world doesn’t want me to call myself old (insofar as it’s paying attention, having rather more pressing matters to attend to.). Huge amounts of internet verbiage are dedicated to avoiding the word. As soon as people find out that one or another synonym means old, and refers to them, they apparently get pissed off and the word becomes verboten in its turn.

I believe people shy away from the word out of fear. Along with freedom and power, aging brings loss. Regardless of what you call it,  the last twenty years or so of the journey will have challenges and growth that we never imagined when we were younger.  

One of the lesser challenges is how to respond to young people who insist on denying we are old. A waiter recently asked, “And what will the young lady have?” Finally fed up with this sort of thing, I said, “I’m sure you don’t mean to offend, but I’m not a young lady. I’m old.” He actually began to argue. I insisted, “I’m proud to be old,” and he retreated, looking very uncomfortable. I left a good tip to make up for it.

 
image: huffingtonpost.com

A group of journalists interested in aging issues surveyed 100 journalists about appropriate ways to refer to old people. (They didn’t say whether any of these 100 were nearing 100.) In Words to Age by: a Brief Glossary and Tips on Usage, they came up with guidelines “intended to help journalists represent midlife and older people in socially neutral language that respects their individuality without appending presumptuous labels to them, either directly or indirectly.”

The favorite term was “older.” Than whom, I have to ask?  They also approved, with much discussion and many cautions: elder, middle-aged, midlife, boomers, senior.  They disapproved of: baby boomers, senior citizen, elderly. After a while of reading all this I stood up and yelled “OLD, OLD, OLD.”

So if I’m rejecting synonyms and euphemisms, and insist on old, is it old lady or old woman?

Hip young men used to refer to a lover as “my old lady.” Though the phrase has a nice musical sound, ‘lady’ belongs to a class system and a set of rules. The concept puts women on a pedestal. It's a great place to be if you want to be revered, but it restricts travel. I never heard those hip young men call themselves gentlemen.

old lady  image:enchantedserenityperiodfilms.blogspot.com

As a young feminist I rejected the sense of ownership, the elitism, and all the strictures that come with the name. My father used to tell me to sit like a lady - ie legs down and closed. A lady doesn’t admit to having  genitals, or if she does, she calls them private parts. She doesn’t ever use bad language. Now, as an old feminist, I can’t possibly call myself a lady, since I’ve taken to dressing inappropriately, in warm weather wearing nothing but a caftan all over town, letting my body take the air.

Just half the collection
 

 Old woman. The words come to a full stop. The sound is forceful, not flowery. Woman is strong, generative, sexual. Since I stopped being a girl I’ve been a young woman, middle-aged woman, and now I’m happy to call myself old woman.

Old is a proud title. By the time we are old most of us have walked many miles and climbed many mountains. We have survived our own mistakes. We’ve had lots of sorrow and lots of joy, some triumphs and accomplishments. We may have the wisdom to keep regret and pride in proper proportion. We have a lot to think about: our past is a multi-volume novel, and our future looms close with some of the biggest challenges of our life. I am awed, and yes, scared. I know I may have a very hard journey toward the big End. It will be no easier if I try to deny it.

 

 

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NEXT POST: NOVEMBER 28

 

Feminist

In 1970 I was a 22-year-old hippie with a 3-month-old son. The baby's father had gone off to Tahiti to build us a hut on the beach - his dream of the week.  In the previous week’s dream I would support us while he finished high school, college, and a PhD in nuclear physics. The morning he left for Tahiti I told him I would not follow him.  I had my own inchoate dreams.  I was going back to Ann Arbor, where I had friends to help me get started again.

With other young mothers, mostly single, I formed a baby group.  We talked while the children played, and it soon became a consciousness-raising group. We read Our Bodies Our Selves. We examined each others’ cervices with a transparent plastic speculum, and tried to see our own in the mirror.

 

click

We all tried to figure out where we were going, and what we would do next.  Even the married women didn’t want to be “just” wives and mothers.  We would not be defined by a relationship to a man, nor hitch our wagons to a man’s life, but make our own course.

I had not been raised to support myself.  The  goal was a husband and children - I would take care of the home, he would bring in the money.  That was what my mother did.

Now it was obviously up to me.  So I went back to college.  I would become either a children’s librarian or a lawyer, the former because I loved children’s books, and the latter because I wanted to change the world.  By the time I finished college I had decided on law school.

I was a full-blown feminist, bristling with outrage.  When I wasn’t wearing flamboyant minidresses, I used to wear brown overalls and hiking boots.  I was quick to flare up at a man who assumed I was looking for a leader rather than a lay.

 

My father and brother teased me when I visited. “Look at the feminist fixing breakfast for her baby.”  “You’d better shut up or somebody will get kicked in the balls,” I snarled, and raced off to tell my sister what I'd said.  We didn’t speak like that in our family.

The bristles are soft now, the edges and prickly bits smoothed out.  Forty  years and raising a son have done that. 

Some 70's feminism seems comical now.  Popular media defined the movement through symbolic acts, sometimes invented by the media, without acknowledging what the symbols represented.

Bra burning. Flikr.com click

The movement suffered from internal politics, and from a perception that it ignored issues of class, race, and sexual identity, and addressed only white, middle-class, heterosexual women’s issues.  But though certain organizations were self-annointed or selected by the media to represent feminism, the movement of the 70's was anarchic, and way broader than any group.  Women of all kinds were telling the truth as they saw it: Robin Morgan, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich.

 

True, these were intellectuals, mostly not subject to the indignities of welfare or the hourly wage.  And many middle class women did focus on their own issues.  Some professors, free to come and go on their own schedule, complained when a secretary stayed home too often with a sick child.  They organized around barriers to tenure rather than the abysmally low pay of custodial staff. 

9to5org.blogspot.com click

But others: writers, lawyers, community activists and organizers, took on welfare, childcare, health care, domestic violence and rape. The women's movement I knew was not about a few leaders selected by and filtered through the media.  It was about women supporting and valuing women.  It was about changing the world so that women could be self-supporting and achieve power in the workplace while still valuing motherhood.  It was about encouraging men to expand their role in the family and share as equal partners.

Some of the changes fueled by the movement are minuscule, some are being eroded by reactionary forces.  Some made things worse for poor women.  Welfare reform's fraudulent veneer of empowering women to work failed to conceal the intent to reduce welfare roles by any means necessary.  But without the feminist movement of the 70's we would not have domestic violence shelters, rape shield laws, the glorious flowering of women’s history, and younger generations of women who assume they are equal to men: equally entitled, equally capable.

 Peaceful Paths - Gainesville's domestic violence program

click  click

From feminism I learned the significance of being an outsider.  For me the most important issues are still those affecting the least powerful.  I know that poverty and injustice crush men as well as women, and I am thrilled to work with the (mostly) guys living in tents in the woods.  I care more about what happens to them than I do about access to tenure, or a glass ceiling at the top of a business ladder, though I know those matter too.

coursepark.com

But as a group, I like women more than men.  I understand and forgive our foibles.  I see the world through a female lens, and value “women’s work.”   My heroes are the suffragists, the welfare rights organizers, the women in the civil rights movement, and the countless women in the third world struggling against all the brutal forms of patriarchy.  I am still a feminist, and proud of the name.

Johnnie Tillmon - welfare rights organizer  click

 

COMMENTS: Are you a feminist? Click below to comment. I'd love to hear from you.

NEXT POST: March 15

 

 

 

 

We Shall Overcome

Our Martin Luther King holiday weekend was filled with the sounds of "We Shall Overcome."  Three men sang it in church, accompanying themselves with guitars and trumpet.  At the birthday rally at the Bo Diddly Community Plaza, we all joined hands and sang it together.  I turned around and was thrilled to see Amanda holding hands with her two friends, and singing out.

Lamont Wallace speaks at rally; singing the song. Erica Brough.The Gainesville Sun

 

I have always thought of We Shall Overcome as a gospel song, but it never mentions God or Jesus. According to Wikipedia, it was a union protest song derived from a gospel song, and part of its tune is from the spiritual, No More Auction Block for Me.  It shares with gospel the expression of faith, and like gospel it offers the solace and encouragement of a candle in the darkness.

I was 17 the first time I heard the song: January, 1965, my first semester at the University of Michigan, an all-night teach-in against the war in Vietnam.  What 17-year-old, new to college, wouldn’t welcome the chance to stay out all night? 

There were informative workshops, with maps and pointers, in small seminar rooms.  I went to a couple, but mostly I joined the crowds of students milling around outside in the cold.  At midnight we stood in a big circle on the Diag, holding lighted candles and singing We Shall Overcome.

 
Candles on the Diag, this time for Mumbai. ur.umich.edu

 

In high school I had longed to join the freedom riders on the buses going south, though I was probably secretly glad my parents would never allow it.  The teach-in was my first taste of protest, and it fed my inchoate longing to make a better world.  I only dabbled in those days - a few protests in Ann Arbor and Detroit, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago - but the spirit caught me.

A freedom ride. blackpast.org

 

In my 60's I'm still a child of the 60's, though the media claims we've all moved on.  My watchword is “Light a candle AND curse the darkness.”  I haven't lost an ounce of idealism, and most people I care about haven’t either.  I know a whole bunch of gray-haired, wrinkled-y people who feed the homeless, carry peace signs, act for social justice and speak truth to power.

 
minnpost.com

 

Amanda first heard "We Shall Overcome" a couple of months before, when we watched Eyes on the Prize.  She had come home from school angry.  “Why do they always have to talk about Black people and slaves and all those bad things that happened to them?”  I had the sense that beyond Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, she had heard nothing of the Black heros and achievers.  I stammered something about Dr. Charles Drew and blood banks, Benjamin Banneker and the design of Washington D.C., but I especially wanted her to know of the many thousands of people who were the Civil Rights Movement.  So I bought Eyes on the Prize from PBS.

 
    zazzle.com        aaregistry.com
  

I should have screened it myself first.  I had forgotten that it included the graphic image of Emmitt Till’s body, the pictures of the strange fruit hanging from southern lynching trees.  But most of the first hour was about courage and strength and organizing.  Our conversations since then, as well as her frequent singing of Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, reassure me that the movie, though strong medicine, was helpful to her.

After we came home from the rally and march, I told Amanda that many of the old people she saw there had been part of the Civil Rights Movement she learned about in the movie.  They had marched, sat in at lunch counters, been the first black kids at all-white schools, gone to jail for the cause.  And she said, “This might be wrong to say, but they were lucky.  I wish I could have been there and seen how it was.  I wish I could be part of it.” 

Arlington, VA sit-in. crmvet.org

She has the idealism of so many  children, the fierce desire to help, to do something that matters.  When Joe can’t be home to watch her on Thursday nights, she rides the HOME Van with me. click click She’s happy as long as she gets to distribute candles and batteries, and she connects with polite friendliness to everyone she encounters.

I assured her the struggle is not over.  There’s still plenty of work to be done, plenty of justice yet to be achieved. Who knows what Amanda will become - I can see her as a comedian, a child-care worker, a track star.  I will be delighted if she grows up to be competent, kind and reasonably happy, with a life full of challenges and joys.  And just maybe she will join the community of those who work for justice.

I'd love to hear from you! Click 'comments', below.

Next post: February 15 "A Valentine for Joe"

What's in a Name?

The first time I married I was twenty-one.  I married a French-Canadian man I had known eight days, and I became Mme. Lessard.  The second time I married I was fifty-two.  I married a man I had known four years, and I remained Elizabeth McCulloch.

The first marriage lasted fifteen months, until I moved from Montreal back to Ann Arbor with our 3-month-old son. I delayed getting a divorce to protect myself from another impulsive marriage.  But when I finished college and applied for law school I wanted my own name.  So I filed for divorce and a name change.

By that time I was a full-force feminist.  I wasn’t going to give up my husband’s name and take back my father’s.  Instead, I took a name from my late mother’s side.  I remembered her telling me that her grandmother McCulloch was a suffragist.  With all those syllables, Elizabeth McCulloch sounds strong and determined, a name not to be ignored.  So I changed my name, and Elizabeth McCulloch I have been ever since.      

 

In the courtroom it only takes a moment to change your name.  In reality, it takes years. At first you don’t recognize it.  A law professor calls the roll.  There is a silence, and then you say, “Oh, that’s me.”  You sign your name and  absent-mindedly use the old one, the way you write the wrong year on a check in January.

It was a few years after the divorce that I learned I had chosen the wrong grandmother.  Chambliss was the suffragist. McCulloch was the daughter of the Confederacy who hid in a cave and ate rats during the siege of Vicksburg.  No slouch, certainly, but I would not knowingly have named myself for a Confederate hero. 

CIVILIANS UNDER FIRE AT VICKSBURG. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

FRANCIS MILLET'S PAINTING OF FOURTH MINNESOTA INFANTRY REGIMENT ENTERING VICKSBURG. MINNESOTA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS

click

 

By the time I discovered my mistake, however, the name was mine.  It had blended into the new woman I was becoming. I still struggled with self-doubt, and was still a chameleon in love, coloring myself to match each man.  But at home I was the only decider, and at work I had to assert my client’s cause.  I was learning enough about a particular piece of the world - poor people in the justice system - to hold my own with the opinionated and knowledgeable men of my family.

Name changes run in my family.  My father rejected his father’s surname and took his mother’s, changing from Jacobs to Eder.  My nephew did the same, going from Eder to Garcia.  My sister Luli changed from Eder to Gray, my mother’s maiden name. 

When we adopted our granddaughter Amanda she was eight.  We didn’t think she should or would want to change her name, but on the other hand, we didn’t want her to feel we were unwilling to share names with her.  With great delicacy, we told her that the adoption judge could change her name if she wanted him to.  She didn’t hesitate. “I want him to name me Jasmine Victoria Barnhill.” We get the straight-face medal for not laughing.  We explained that she can take that name when she is eighteen, but in the adoption she could only choose our names. She decided to keep her name.

I began writing fiction years ago, and thought I would use the pseudonym Elizabeth Gladly, a name inspired by Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Jolley.  That way I could protect my privacy from the hordes of fans who would want to follow my every move, and I could write honestly without jeopardizing my professional standing.  But when I retired, I didn’t have to think about professional standing anymore, and I’ve long since given up fantasies of hordes of fans.            

My husband Joe married Elizabeth McCulloch.  I don’t recall discussing it; I don’t think it ever occurred to him that I would change my name.  We get junk mail addressed to Joseph McCulloch or Elizabeth Jackson.  But people who know us know our names.

We tempt the fates if we say never, but I believe I’ll never change my name again.  It is part of me the way food and drink, the air we breathe and the life we live become part of us.  I am Elizabeth McCulloch. 

 

I'd love to hear from you! Click "comments," below  

Next post September 28:  Curmudgeoning, or Going with the Floe

Sheela-na-gigs

(The information below, as well as the photographs of ancient sheela-na-gigs, comes from Eamon P. Kelly, Sheela-na-gigs, Origins and Functions. 1996. Country House, Dublin. It’s available used from Amazon; I couldn’t find it anywhere else.)

Have you ever seen Celtic Woman, the wildly popular Irish music group?  They are five young women: wispy, sweet-voiced fairies in flowing diaphanous gowns. Though the membership of the group changes, the face on all their albums remains the same - a fresh-faced redhead with a  flirtatious smile half-concealed by her long curly locks.

 

click

 

Celtic Woman is to Irish culture as the Kingston Trio were to folk music. Lush instrumentals soar behind them; their movements and facial expressions are carefully choreographed. They perform at night in old Irish castles lit by flaming torches, with dry ice sending fog into the air. But if you visit those castles and look carefully, you may find a different Celtic woman, earthier and more vital than these five, despite her 900 years.

Sheela-na-gigs are carved into the cornerstones and keystones of Irish churches and castles. Their legs are spread and their hands point to or hold open the vulva. The figures are emaciated, with big heads.  Breasts, if any, are small.  The meaning of the name is uncertain; it may mean old hag of the breasts, or old woman on her hunkers. 

Sheela-na-gigs seem to have evolved from ancient exhibitionist friezes in Ireland and along pilgrimage routes in Europe.  The grotesque bodies with swollen vulva showed Hell’s punishment for lust, a sin particularly attributed to women.

The Church considered the Irish sinful and licentious, and disapproved of their married priests, as well as their customary laws on divorce and remarriage.  The Norman invasion of Ireland in 1146 was part of Rome’s attempt to rein in the Irish church.  The sheela-na-gigs, single figures carved on blocks, began to appear in the next century, first on the cornerstones of churches, and later on keystones of castles above the entrance, apparently as a protective figure.  From the 17th century onward many were deliberately destroyed, and only about a hundred remain.  These have been well-rubbed around the vulva, indicating they were considered fertility symbols.

Eamon Kelly says “It is clear that a deliberate effort has been made to represent sheela-na-gigs as grotesque, hideous and scary.”

I guess it’s in the eye of the beholder.  I like the lady with the braids - but is that a moustache, or teeth?  This other one looks quite contented, and given the position of the fingers of her left hand, may be about to be positively blissful.

I never liked the crotch shots in Hustler magazine; their airbrushed smiles and curves seemed unconnected to the wrinkly folds and openings below, as though the women had no idea what was going on down there.  But I love the sheela-na-gigs.  To me they say “This is mine, like it or lump it.”

Our sexual organs are hidden from view, and many young women may not know what they look like.  When I was fourteen, about a year after I started my period, I decided to try tampons. Though I had examined the little drawing on the Tampax instructions, I didn’t realize there were three different holes.  With great difficulty and a lot of pain I inserted the tampon in my urethra.  I knew something was wrong but didn’t know what until I tried to pee and the tampon emerged soaked with urine.  Fifty years later the memory still makes me squirm.

The word pudenda derives from pudere, Latin for “to be ashamed.”  In the early 1970's feminists celebrated female sexuality.  In our consciousness-raising-cum-baby-group in Ann Arbor our bible was Our Bodies, Ourselves. We were determined to overcome shame and self-consciousness. With a hand mirror and a transparent plastic speculum, and a lot of laughter, we took turns trying to see our cervices.  

click

My sister Luli has spent a lifetime being outrageous.  One Christmas she gave me a delicately molded silver pendant of a vagina dentata.  (A toothed vagina, and you don’t want to know.)  It resembled a shark’s mouth.  I wore it for about an hour, but I had to take it off - it felt too hostile.

When I told Luli of my discovery of sheela-na-gigs, she naturally had to make some, out of Sculpey®  baking clay.  Mine is delightfully exuberant.  I used to hide it in a drawer, but now that Amanda is older I keep it on my desk.  I have given her a hand mirror. I hope she will explore every part of her body, and rejoice in her sexual self.

 I'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU.  CLICK "COMMENTS," BELOW

NEXT POST JUNE 29

Women in Bold

For your amusement and edification, here is a compilation of anecdotes, quotations, and a bit of poetry in honor of Women’s History Month.  At the end of this post I've included links to buy the books  I used.

 

 

Mehitabel Haskell, speaking at the Worcester Convention, October 15, 1851:
“...This meeting, as I understand it, was called to discuss Woman's Rights.  Well, I do not pretend to know exactly what woman's rights are; but I do know that I have groaned for forty years, yea, for fifty years, under a sense of woman's wrongs.  I know that even when a girl, I groaned under the idea that I could not receive as much instruction as my brothers could.  I wanted to be what I felt I was capable of becoming, but opportunity was denied me.  I rejoice in the progress that has been made.  I rejoice that so many women are here; it denotes that they are waking up to some sense of their situation...”  (Tanner, Leslie B.,ed.  Voices from Women's Liberation, p.63.  Signet. New York.1970)

VICTORIAN SCHOOLGIRLS                    SCHOOLGIRLS IN AFGHANISTAN

 

 Sojourner Truth, speaking at the Broadway Tabernacle, September 6, 1853:
“...Now, women do not ask half of a kingdom, but their rights, and they don't get them.  When she comes to demand them, don't you hear how sons hiss their mothers like snakes, because they ask for their rights; and can they ask for anything less? ... But we'll have our rights; see if we don't; and you can't stop us from them; see if you can.  You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming.  Women don't get half as much rights as they ought to; we want more, and we will have it...”
(Tanner, p. 73)

PHOTOBUCKET.COM by WOMAN-HEART

 

Reverend Olympia Brown was the first woman ordained by the Universalist Church. In 1867 Lucy Stone asked her to go to Kansas to work for suffrage there: a referendum was coming up on a constitutional amendement granting suffrage to Blacks and women. She tells us about that summer and fall:
"Kansas was just then emerging from the great struggle for freedom which culminated in the civil war.  Many of her men had been killed... The crops that season had been destroyed by grass hoppers. Many of the pioneers were suffering from malaria and other diseases incident to the settlement of a new country.  There were few public conveyances, either by rail or stage or livery.  The outlook was not encouraging. [The party had made the speaking engagements without any knowledge of the country, and they were often fifty miles apart].... In many places there were no roads, only a trail across the prairie and sometimes not even that.  Under such circumstances, to lose our way became almost a daily experience...  But on we went, and the most remarkable thing about the campaign was that notwithstanding all these difficulties, the speaker did not, during the whole four months, miss one appointment.” [The amendment was rejected.]  (Stratton, Joanna L.  Pioneer Women:Voices from the Kansas Frontier, p. 261.  Simon and Shuster, NY. 198l.)
 

       
KONZA PRAIRIE TRAIL, KANSAS                      RAKING AND BURNING GRASSHOPPERS

                                                             

                                                                                                                             

                                       Mississippi Winter IV, by Alice Walker:

                                          My father and mother both
                                          used to warn me
                                          that "a whistling woman and a crowing
                                          hen would surely come to
                                          no good end."  And perhaps I should
                                          have listened to them.
                                          But even at the time I knew
                                          that though my end probably might
                                          not
                                          be good
                                          I must whistle
                                          like a woman undaunted
                                          until I reached it.
                                                       
 (Walker, Alice, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful,  p. 22. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. New York. 1984.)

             
At the founding meeting of The National Colored Labor Union in 1869, the needs of working women were ignored, and the women challenged the group.  A delegate from Newport, Rhode Island, spoke:
"...Are we to be left out? we who have suffered all the evils of which you justly complain?  Are our daughters to be denied the privilege of honestly earning a livelihood by being excluded from the milliner, dressmaker, tailor, or dry good store, in fact every calling that an intelligent, respectable industrious female may strive to obtain, and this merely because her skin is dusky?  These privileges are all denied colored females of Newport.  However well they may be fitted for other positions, they are compelled to accept the meanest drudgeries or starve... Therefore the colored women of Newport would ask that you remember us in your deliberations so that when you mount the chariot of equality, in industrial and mechanical pursuits, we may at least be permitted to cling to the wheels.”  (Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter, p.69.  Bantam Books. Toronto. 1984.)

NATIONAL COLORED LABOR UNION CONVENTION

 

 

Ida B.Wells, a Black journalist from Memphis, is best-known as leader of a campaign against lynching.  “It was 1884, and Ida B. Wells took her seat in the "Ladies Coach" of a train bound for Memphis from Woodstock, Tennessee.  But by that year, customs in the South were changing.  A conductor demanded that Wells leave the first class section for the smoking car.  When she refused, the conductor attempted to force her from her seat - a mistake, he quickly realized when he felt a vicelike bite on the back of his hand.  He called more conductors to his aid, and to the standing cheers of the White passengers on the train, the three men dragged [her] out of the car.”
    Wells sued the railroad.   She won, and the railroad appealed.  They offered her more money than the court had awarded her if she would just not contest the appeal. She refused.  The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the award. (Giddings, p. 22)

           
IDA B. WELLS

 

Here is an anonymous pioneer on the Kansas frontier, speaking about the marriage vows:
I already had ideas of my own about the husband being the head of the family.  I had taken the precaution to sound him on 'obey' in the marriage pact and found he did not approve of the term.  Approval or no approval, that word 'obey' would have to be left out.  I had served my time of tutelage to my parents as all children are supposed to.  I was a woman now and capable of being the other half of the head of the family.  His word and my word would have equal strength.” (Stratton, p. 58)

 

“Ella May Wiggins was born in 1889 in Appalachia. At sixteen, she married a logger.  A few years later, he was crippled in an accident, leaving her the sole provider for a family of nine children, four of whom died of whooping cough.  She moved the family to cotton mill country and worked for ten years as a spinner.  She joined the National Textile Workers Union, engaged in ferocious struggle with the company bosses and used her own songs for organizing.  In 1929, at the bloodiest moment in the union struggle, she was shot and killed on her way to a union meeting at the mill in Gastonia, North Carolina.”  (Bernikow, Louise, ed.  The World Split Open, p. 309. Vintage Books. New York. 1974)

 

 

                               Revolutionary Dreams by Nikki Giovanni:

                                     i used to dream militant
                                     dreams of taking
                                     over america to show
                                     these white folks how it should be
                                     done
                                     i used to dream radical dreams
                                     of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
                                     of correct analysis
                                     i even used to think i'd be the one
                                     to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
                                     then i awoke and dug
                                     that if i dreamed natural
                                     dreams of being a natural
                                     woman doing what a woman
                                     does when she's natural
                                     i would have a revolution  

         (Giovanni, Nikki, Re:Creation,, p.20. Broadside Press. Detroit.1970)

Septima Poinsette Clark was born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, and died in 1987.  She was an unsung hero of the civil rights movement, who established citizenship schools throughout the South, recruiting hundreds of teachers who taught thousands of others to read, to register to vote, and to stand up for their rights. She said,
    “I think that the work the women did during the time of civil rights is what really carried the movement along.  The women carried forth the ideas. I think the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn't started to speak up.
    Women need to grab the men by the collar and do more.  That's the way I feel.  We need women who will get these men by the collar and work with them.  We still have a hard time getting them to see what it means to vote.”  (Lanker, Brian.  I Dream a World, p. 164.  Stewart, Tabori, and Chang. New York, 1989.)

SEPTIMA POINSETTE CLARK. IMAGE BY BRIAN LANKER

 

Johnnie Tillmon, born 1926 in Arkansas, is the founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization.  She says:
    “I got this idea of organizing women on welfare who lived in the project.  We stopped a lot of harassment.  There used to be a time when they would look in your dirty clothes hamper for men's clothes.  They used to come to your house at midnight and they used to pump the kids, "Where's your daddy?"
    If your kids look clean or your house looks clean, then you must be doing something fraudulent, because they understand that you really shouldn't be able to do what you do with the money you get.    So when you trade a man for the man, you still got somebody telling you how to live your life.
    There's six white women to every black one on AFDC in this country.  But nobody ever talks about that.  I met a group of white women from Kentucky who said, ‘You cannot leave us out of this organization.  We're having the same problem with our welfare department that you have as a black woman.’  So that's why the organization was made up out of everybody.
    I believe in rhetoric to a certain extent.  But you can only rhetoricize so long and then you have to deal with fact.  Now, I can do as much rhetoricizing as the next person.  But sometimes I had to start a mess to get to the facts.” (Lanker, p.92)

 

                   
JOHNNIE TILLMON. IMAGE FROM BLACK KOS at DAILYKOS.COM

 

This is from comments by Audre Lorde, the poet, at a conference in 1979:

    “As women, we have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change.  Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.  But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
    Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill.  It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.  It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.  For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.  They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”  (Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider, p. 112. The Crossing Press. Freedom, CA. 1984)

 

 
THE MASTER'S HOUSE. IMAGE BY RIYANNICOLE at PHOTOBUCKET.COM

 

 

                                         Remember? by Alice Walker:
                                                                                       

                                          Remember me?
                                          I am the girl
                                          with the dark skin
                                          whose shoes are thin
                                          I am the girl
                                          with rotted teeth
                                          I am the dark
                                          rotten-toothed girl
                                          with the wounded eye
                                          and the melted ear.
              

                                           I am the girl
                                           holding their babies
                                           cooking their meals
                                           sweeping their yards
                                           washing their clothes
                                           Dark and rotting
                                           and wounded, wounded.
               
                                           I would give
                                           to the human race
                                           only hope.
               
                                            I am the woman
                                            with the blessed
                                            dark skin
                                             I am the woman
                                             with teeth repaired
                                             I am the woman
                                             with the healing eye
                                             the ear that hears.

                                             I am the woman: Dark,
                                             repaired, healed
                                             Listening to you.
                      
                                             I would give
                                             to the human race
                                             only hope.
               
                                              I am the woman
                                              offering two flowers
                                              whose roots
                                              are twin
                   
                                              Justice and Hope.
                                                                     Let us begin. 
                       
                                                                                          (Walker, p.1)

 

 

 

Buying the books:

Tanner, Stratton, Giddings, Giovanni, and Lanker are available from the Independent Online Booksellers Association.  click           

For Walker and Lorde try the Independent Booksellers Association website  click. They will hook you up with a bookstore near you, which can order it if it's not in stock. 

Powell's Books has all but Bernikow and Giovanni. click

Amazon has lots of dealers selling the Bernikow.  click

 

NEXT WEEK: A SMALL WHITE ROOM

Who is your favorite heroine from history? I'd love to hear from you, about that or anything else. Click "comments"  below.

 

Introduction to The Feminist Grandma

 

Foster mom:squirrel monkey and night monkey

I have been many kinds of mother - a single mother, raising my son from scratch, a single foster mother for a daughter and a son, a step-mother.  Now I am 64, and with my husband I am raising my eight-year old granddaughter, Amanda. Click here

I was a lawyer for 28 years, always focused on poverty.  I still am.  It’s not just a job; it’s a chronic condition.  I retired to write, and wrote three novels.  I helped start the HOME Van and nine years later we’re still going strong, carrying food and friendship to the people who live in the woods. Click here

When grandparents raise grandchildren there is usually a sad story behind it, but I’m not going to tell it.  That one belongs to my daughter and granddaughter.  Instead I’ll write about my friends and family, past and present.  I’ll write about an old woman raising a young child, a feminist struggling with traditional women’s roles, a writer who is suddenly a mother again.  It all sounds terribly serious, but everything has its lighter side.  I'll try to keep my professorial self under control.

When my son was growing up, I felt inadequate as a mother, and overwhelmed doing it alone.  In the1968 edition Dr. Spock included single mothers and “working” mothers in his  chapter on special problems.  I was both.  I used to read that passage to my family law students to show them how dramatically times had changed.  Yet people still speak of “working mothers,” a ridiculous phrase that implies mothering is not work.   

                                                  Is motherhood work?  Vandmoderen by Kai Nielsen                                    
                                    

Now, for the first time, I have a partner, and I can do the job thoroughly.  I take Amanda to soccer and gymnastics and therapy.  I meet with her teacher, volunteer at the school, keep her at home when she’s sick.  I see that she tidies her room and brushes her teeth. 

I don’t feel inadequate.  But like any mother I come to the end of a busy day and can't understand what I did with my time.  Like any writer I struggle for discipline and focus, idle time to let my thoughts wander, work time to put the writing front and center.  Like any stay-at-home wife I negotiate jobs with my husband, and wonder if he understands what I do all day.

When Amanda came to live with us I put my fourth novel aside.  I’m not ready to pick it up yet; it’s simmering on the back of the stove.  Instead, now that she is settled and happy, no longer bouncing off and knocking down walls, I will write these mini-essays, send them out in my blog, and hope you will read and respond.