October 14, 2002

• Women's Lives . . .

  
  

  Fugitive and I talk a lot.  Recently, we've been talking about our lives as women and the roles we play.  How free are we to make and be responsible for our choices?  How much of an impact has the Women's Movement had on our lives?  We have different ideas about what it means to be a woman in today's world.  So I'm starting with my own story.

  
  

  June 18, 1963 . . . It's a girl!  My parents brought me home, wrapped me in soft blankets and set about loving me to adulthood.  Growing up in the 1970's, it never occurred to me that there might be opportunities or choices forbidden me because of my sex.

  
  

  I was in the honors program at my High School and became a National Merit Scholar.  As far as I was concerned when I left home I had not only the opportunity but the obligation to do something "significant."  I remember that a good friend of mine decided that she was going to be librarian.  I was appalled.  How could she waste herself that way?  She could have been a doctor or a lawyer or something really important.

  
  

  I earned a Bachelor's in Business Adminstration which I have never used.  I graduated from a program that put it's focus on the bottom line.  Anything and everything could and should be sacrificed, time, family, resources, and ethics all went into the grinder of good business and cranked out profits.  As much as I disliked the philosophical underpinnings of my classes I liked my job as a Resident Assistant in the dorm.  My senior year, I spent my time in volunteer programs with Rape Crisis and working as a court appointed Big Sister to teens in trouble.  At that time I had fulfilled all but a few credit hours for my degree so I signed up for classes that intrigued me.  Philosophy, history, science, and political science.  By the time I walked off the campus for the last time, I wanted nothing to do with corporate life but I was afire with ideas and concepts fo changing the world, one person at a time. 

  
  

  I felt that I could do or be anything I wanted.  Through jobs that offered inservice training and some post-graduate work, I qualified to work in adolescent psychiatry.  In the last of my six years in this field, I partnered with a Social Worker to create a therapy group for patients who had been sexually abused.  Researching current hypothesis and treatment methods, I had my first brush with Official Feminist Theory.  In my opinion then and now, the offerings from the official women's organizations were the least helpful.  Feminists focused on a vaguely defined 'Patriarchy' as the root cause of sexual violation with a pessimistic view that there was no individual recovery as long as the society and culture in which we live continues to be "man-centered".  Writers such as Andrea Dworkin and Susan Faludi who railed against men and pornography, and defined all heteresexual sex as rape. They considered any criticism to be a sign of "backlash" against their obviously correct reading of the situation.  They derided women who fought to live their lives on equal terms with men as collaborators.  

  
  

  Feminists seemed to have much in common with right wing reactionaries.  They did a lot of yelling, they spewed a lot of indignation about the unfairness of the world.  The feminism I encountered was anti-male, anti-pornography, and victim centered. I felt no anger toward the men in my life, the anti-pornography stand conflicted with my ideas about free speech, and I didn't feel vicitmized.   Feminist writers faced with critique from people with my views responded that we were simply misinformed and naive, which I found to be an insulting evasion of the real concerns of women. 

  
  

  Many feminist notions struck me as contradictory and silly.  They seemed to define womanhood as much by who I slept with as any other yardstick.  Since I slept with my husband, I was a traitor of the worst kind, a married heterosexual.

  
  

  I became one of those women who says, I believe in equal opportunity for employment and education.  I believe in the right to accessible birth control.  I believe in paid family leave for both men and women.  I believe that families should have affordable childcare, and health insurance.  I believe that women have the right to work free from fear of sexual harrassment.  I believe women have the right to bring rape charges without their sexual history being used against them.  I believe that people's wages should be reflective of the profits generated by the business they are in, not the pittance left over after the top executives and shareholders have ransacked the general fund.  But, I refuse to call myself a feminist.

  
  

  Fast-forward to my life, today.  I'm a Stay At Home Mom, Homeschooling my kids.  For me the decision to leave the workforce and devote myself to my family was a weird one to say the least.  Remember, I thought that a career as a librarian was a demeaning capitulation to a stereotypical role.  In my first years out of the workforce I felt a need to keep my head down and mumble when people asked me what I do.  Wouldn't you expect based on the externals of my life, that my view would be the conservative, traditional one.  Instead, I'm a champion of rights.  

  
  

  In my conversation with Fugitive last week, I was shocked that she expressed great anger over the impact of feminism on her life.  She can tell her story much better than I can, so I'll leave that part to her.  One thing that she said got my attention.  She pointed out that as a well-educated woman, married to a man who makes a decent living, the women's movement made it possible for me to choose whether I would work or stay home.  She sees my view of a woman's choice to work as a romanticized vision divorced from the real life trap that many women (including herself) find themselves in.  If she didn't work, her family couldn't afford basic housing, medical care, or other necessities.

  
  

  She sees herself as outside the women's movement for entirely different reasons than I do.  She says that feminists are weathy women who have the luxury of being concerned over the message of films and books that she nor any of her friends are likely to ever see or read.  The gains of feminism, (legalized abortion and careers for women,) put her in a position where the subtle message is "you didn't have to have those kids, but since you did, caring for them is your problem and not our concern." 

  
  

  She and I have talked a lot about the differences between homeschool and public school.  She feels she has no choice but to send her kids to Public schools.  She can neither quit her job, nor afford to send them to Private schools.  She's facing the reality of a world in which economics is a much bigger concern than Nike commercials.  Educational opportunity sounds like a great thing, but she doesn't know how she can pay to send her kids to college when she can barely pay to clothe them for elementary school. 

  
  

  Is women's rights a dead issue?  Or worse is it an issue that rose just long enough to make the lives of real women far worse than the lives, circumscribed as they were, of our mothers and grandmothers?  Has reproductive rights been translated into blame toward those families who choose to have children?  Has legalized abortion made children and mothers adversaries of men and employers?

  
  

  In 1970, the year that Fugitive was born, the bottom 20 percent of families received 5.4 percent of the national income, by 1994 their share had fallen to 4.2 percent.  This is in spite of an increase from 20% of married women with children working full-time in 1970 to 60% in 1994.   In 1970 the typical CEO of a Fortune 500 company earned 35 times the wage of the average manufacturing employee.  By 1994 the ration was 187 to 1.  In the same time period the middle class shrank from 57 to 47 percent of the population.  I haven't found figures for the past eight years but all the discussion of the recession indicates that they are the bleak continuation of the trend.

  
  

  So for completely different reasons, neither I nor my sister see ourselves as feminists, nor do we identify with the concerns of feminist leaders.  Neither of us are satisfied with the state of the world in which we try to live as women, although I'm admittedly more content than my sister.  Over the next few days we are going to open our Xanga blogs and admit you into the discussion we have regarding the issues we face.  Please comment, raise issues, ask questions, and generally feel free to participate in our talk.  We ask only that you remember that this isn't an academic discussion.  We look forward to your opinions with respect and interest but do not intend this discussion to be a debate. 

  
  

  

  
  

  My bad, I accidentally submitted the rough draft of this blog earlier, so those of you who receive posts in your email are getting two versions.  Please pay no attention to the blog behind door number one. 

  • 11:59 am
  • 25 Comments