If You Wait Long Enough, Your Bidding Will Be Done

[itsallovernow]

Hee - before you do anything else, go forth and read elishavah's Five Kisses story for My Name is Earl. It's just lovely and funny and spot on and can be found Here.

I really, really love this story meme, and other people who wished to do my bidding, or to just make me deliriously happy, would write some five kisses of their own!!

I've been trying to think of what to say in the past few days to mark the passage of Betty Friedan, and mostly I come up wordless. It's hard for me to imagine much of my experience in the world absent her work and words.

My mother raised me to be a feminist, and hard as it is to believe, that was a radical concept in my conservative town. Particularly in our radically religious and military dominated suburb where young women mostly dated cadets and got knocked up or moved into base housing or went to the state university and never much questioned anything that was expected of them. Not to say that everyone thought women should stay home, or be seen and not heard, or any of the myriad stereotypes that I'm pretty damn sure that women and girls 10 to 15 years my junior can't quite conceive of. And let me tell you, I'm not that old. But there was a pervasive attitude towards asserting strength as a woman, towards raising issues that concerned female power and position and status, let alone definitions of feminity.

Feminist was a dirty word, something fraught with a filthy edge of radicalism, of man hating. And this was from people who knew better. For me, being continuously in search of a way to go against the majority, to subvert authority without actually getting into trouble, it was easy to embrace the term, to define it for myself. I realize now that I was lucky in my parents, that their own confidence and pride in me helped me to do this. And I realize that different words mean different things to different people. But I also believe in embracing the power of words and terminology, acknowledging how much power they do have.

Friedan's work was radical because she identified a false construct of expected feminity, zeroed in on this set of expectations and identities that women were being force fed. She found out that women wanted more than they were expected to want, and that they had a vague sense of dismay, of unhappiness based upon the roles being wrapped around them. It was revolutionary in that it identified the failed social experiement, traced the roots of feminism and allowed women to own their unhappiness and offered them a set of definitions and possibilities that would let them move away from those narrowed expectations and make choices based more upon their own needs and wants.

I'd love to hear how other women - both older and younger than I am - look at the feminist movement and its impact on their lives as well as on our society. What female role models, what thinkers, scholars, artists, individuals have helped shape your life? I know there are a few women who are far more politically conservative than I am, and I'd be very interested in your responses as well because I think that social change is more about the way we live our lives than politics.

I'd say, for me, that my mother had a far stronger influence on me than Betty Friedan, but I honestly believe that if it wasn't for work like The Feminine Mystique, my mother wouldn't have been able to raise me to be the person I became.

Comments

[leadensky.livejournal.com]

And I realize that different words mean different things to different people. But I also believe in embracing the power of words and terminology, acknowledging how much power they do have. [snip]

I'd love to hear how other women - both older and younger than I am - look at the feminist movement and its impact on their lives as well as on our society. What female role models, what thinkers, scholars, artists, individuals have helped shape your life?

Let me think about how I want to answer this.

- hg

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I'd definitely love to hear what you come up with.

[kerlin.livejournal.com]

I think I count as the more politically conservative, too. *g*

I said a while back that I don't consider myself a feminist, and I suppose that's still true. I don't self-label as a feminist; I think others would give me that label, but it's not something I would ever call myself. I'm a product of a younger generation, as well as a mother who really and truly didn't consider these things necessary to voice. I grew up as a tomboy, and took a certain pride in *that* label, but only in contrast to more "girly" girls, not necessarily as a way to prove myself to boys.

Women's history and gender studies in general bores me silly. I tell people that I LIKE studying dead white men and their wars. I'm entering a field in which I will be one of a handful of women *worldwide* who study what I study, but I have to say, the only time that's led me to think on my gender in relation to my future career is to have a horror of the possibility that someday I will be hired as a novelty and as a quota-filler. It looks awfully good on paper to have a woman doing military history.

I do the dishes and vacuum because I like a clean house; I cook because I enjoy it; I fence and ride and will soon be learning to shoot because I enjoy those things as well. I think that makes me one of the "or any of the myriad stereotypes that I'm pretty damn sure that women and girls 10 to 15 years my junior can't quite conceive of" that you speak of.

For role models? My mother and my grandmother; my mother who doesn't ever, ever shut up when she's supposed to, and by contrast my grandmother, who was about as conservative as you get, very firmly entrenched in her Greatest Generation and a housewife. My aunt often says that I don't know how lucky I am that my grandparents had mellowed by the time I was born, but I never had a single moment of disapproval, and I never felt the slightest need to temper myself for her (or for my grandfather, of the same mindset). My role models were all activity based: anyone who got to do anything with horses, for most of my childhood. Authors - male or female, I didn't really care.

OTOH, I just recently gave up on a series of books that came highly recommended by a frend because, as I explained, there was a complete lack of sympathetic women. Not a single female character that was anything but purely evil. So I suppose that says that at some deeper level I do have a feminist radar, I'm just not conscious of it.

...right, and I'm sure that's way more ramble than you were looking for. *g*

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Nope, that's exactly what I'm looking for!!

And it's not so much the practical aspects of living in your environment - cleaning, cooking - that I think of as stereotypical. It's the idea that as a woman, it's your role. You have the luxury of choice. You choose to do these things, they're not expected of you as a result of your gender.

Same with riding and fencing, although I'd argue against those being the sorts of stereotypes I'm talking about:) They do, however, make you an excellent candidate for inhabiting a regency novel:) Hee.

I find white men and their wars excruciatingly boring. But I'd find white women and their wars equally boring. Military history does nothing for me, and studying it in Latin was fun only because the translations make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER:) However, that's personal preference, and I'm more interested in social history because that has more relevance to my interest. And, in that vein, social history tends to be more about everyone - men, women and children, and I like the minutiae. But again, that's personal interest.

[raithen.livejournal.com]

truly didn't consider these things necessary to voice.

you know, it wasn't voiced when I was growing up, either. Though I am 10 years older than you, and my mother WAS of a generation that thought it might be. My upbringing counts as conservative, and my role models were more quiet and stereotypically female (mother and grandmother placing own careers second to husbands, reacting to male needs and action and inaction instead of proactively living thier own lives, dad's staff only including women in admin roles etc).

And yet, I grew up to be an outspoken feminist who increasingly believes that this belief that we don't need to voice such things is troubling. And who struggles everyday in thought and deed with the concerns of equality versus difference, and yet who kinda digs being one of few women on the mats at aikido and who gets frustrated at the prevalence of women in equine activities. Who has a gay sister, and who herself gets turned on by the female form, yet knows she is heterosexual, and that that is OK. And who hasn't had sex in years for reasons that could have to do with being outspoken and intimidating men, or could just have to do with being me or could just be what is, and that the right guy will or won't come along to date/love/fuck/marry.

And who, in the end WISHES gender didn't matter. In the same way she wishes race and religion and all the other things that make us different, that make us wonderful and that make us violent, didn't matter. But who also knows that it DOES matter, and that is why, since I can't change the world, I advocate for women, and I embrace men and women who do the same, whether they take the label feminist to do so, or whether they choose not to.

Words matter, lord knows, I've spent many years showing that. and labels have power. But if we only attribute power to words and labels, we are truly lost.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I wish gender didn't matter in terms of perceptions of capability and rights. But I'm very glad to not be male:)

[raithen.livejournal.com]

you and me both. I have always wanted to do whatever I want to, and I was frustrated as a girl when I would inevitably play second fiddle to my Dad's latest MALE protege from work (and even at 10 years old, I knew that a big part of it was that the protege was a guy, and that made me SO. MAD.) But I NEVER EVER wanted to BE a boy.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Never wanted to be a boy, never wanted to be a tomboy, and one of the huge benefits of being an only child of a bunch of lefty hippies was that there was never a suggestion that I couldn't do anything because I was a girl. I was favored son and daughter both - learning physics and baseball and the guitar and Star Trek along with Rimbau and Yeats and how to make chicken cordon bleu.

[raithen.livejournal.com]

yep. as the oldest girl, even with the underlying gender issues, there was never a question: I could be CEO, mechanic, and chief cook and bottle washer. Still can be.

[barkley.livejournal.com]

The other month, I got an alumni newsletter from my high school, and in it was an article about the robotics team and a picture of the team and their award winning robot. The team was all girls. This is not surprising as it is an all girls high school. But it was the first time I began to realize what an influence that had on me.

Theoretically I had always known that the one plus of attending a single sex school was that women hold all the roles. They are the science geeks, the jocks, the student class presidents, the valedictorians and they get called on all the damned time. But theory didn't help me to realize how engrained that was in my brain that I was relatively fearless when it came to thinking of what I could and couldn't do. The only men in the whole school were the French and Drama teachers. All the science and math and computer experts were all women and anyone that didn't think that was a proper subject for a woman never really entered my sphere of influence.

I have always been in male dominated careers and disciplines, but the military was the first place where there were very public discussions and federal laws about what my place should be as a woman and in which there were people who vocally did not want me(general) there. And so my role models were not scientists because as far as I was concerned there always were and always will be women. My role models were the first women through the service academies because that happened in my life time, and that action opened the way for me twenty years later. That I did not go to a service academy was not the point. I had the option and I never chose to not do so on a basis of gender.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I distinctly remember the young woman who went to West Point, and what a disappointment her tenure there was.

I had a virulent reaction to the military already, and that didn't make it better, but I find it sort of awe inspiring that the role of women - hell the sheer presence of women - in the service has changed so radically in our lifetime.

[barkley.livejournal.com]

Yes. (And also, I can't do math even when I know it's wrong when I'm typing it since I was 17 when I went to college. But 1988-1976 does not equal twenty years. *g*) But it changed so much from when I was six years old to the time I was actually considering it. I went to one of the week long summer programs they offer to certain high school kids. And at the time, I had no concept of the fact that it was just eleven years later because I was still under the illusion that the world didn't care what I should and shouldn't do as a female.

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear how other women - both older and younger than I am - look at the feminist movement and its impact on their lives as well as on our society. What female role models, what thinkers, scholars, artists, individuals have helped shape your life?

Oh, I think I was shaped by mother and my insensitivity as a child to social cues. (No, really.) My mother actually didn't work for pay while I was at home beyond the very occasional part-time thing--she worked for a camp I attended a couple of summers, that kind of thing. She did do a lot of volunteer work, particularly with the schools--school board, etc.--and, I think more importantly, I never saw her and my father as anything other than equal partners. I think I was in my early twenties before I finally believed that there really were women out there who would suppress themselves for a guy (I was shocked by the idea of single-sex education, and am still kind of freaked by it, honestly) and that's because I never saw it happen in my home. Of course gender has nothing to do with anything! Who thinks it does?

And I'm twenty-nine. FWIW.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing it says a lot about your parent's relationship (in a good way) that you always saw them as equal partners.

I think the suppression of self in the educational system is more subtle than one suspects. If you are outspoken, it effects your relationship with your male peers, if you're quiet, it effects your teacher's perception of you. I always chose the former. But my dad, as a high school Physics and Chemistry teacher frequently observed girls who were reluctant to voice the answers, who were uncertain of their understanding and capabilities in his advanced classes, and that comes from a whole variety of societal conditioning that's hard as hell to overcome when you're a teenage girl.

[fourteenlines.livejournal.com]

If you're outspoken, it effects your relationship with all of your peers. *g* The girls were way cattier to me than the boys were; not because I was subverting gender norms but because they all thought I was stuck-up or a showoff or whatever. But girls are just cattier to each other in general at that age.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Girls are cattier at that age, but I never got much of it on an academic level. Social, sure, but not academic, and that was by virtue of the classes I was in. I'd been in the same classes with the same people for so long that we all knew who was good at what. But what flack I got, I usually got from boys who thought I was arrogant, or a know it all. Unsurprisingly, that didn't bother me much.

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

But my dad, as a high school Physics and Chemistry teacher frequently observed girls who were reluctant to voice the answers, who were uncertain of their understanding and capabilities in his advanced classes, and that comes from a whole variety of societal conditioning that's hard as hell to overcome when you're a teenage girl.

Oh, I believe it exists. I was just such a socially inept teenager that I would never in a million years have noticed. (I did learn to keep my mouth shut in Spanish, but only after the boys sitting behind me threatened to cut off my hair if I didn't stop answering questions.)

[cofax7]

It's very odd. I cannot point to any one person who is my role model, or explain what made me what I am -- which is a feminist, among many other things.

I grew up in a fairly traditional family--my dad worked (as an engineer), my mother raised the kids until I was 11 and she went back to work as a nurse. There were many moments when I was a child where the boys received preferential treatment compared to the girls -- my sister wanted karate lessons but got dance class instead, that sort of thing. I wasn't ever required to mow the lawn, but I did have to vacuum and do laundry and babysit, which I don't recall my brothers ever doing.

However there was always a fierce and equal level of attention paid to our academics. We all were expected to do our best in school, and we all were expected to go to college. There was no gender differential there, and my dad would have been very pleased if my sister and I had become engineers. My failure to properly handle calculus was something of a disappointment. (He found anthropology unsettlingly vague as a field of study, but approved mildly of my sister's economics degree. I redeemed his concerns with the J.D., though, and now I can geek with him about the trials of being a government contractor.)

That said, I wonder if the most important element in it all was my reading. Because I read so compulsively, so hugely, and of course so many novels and stories included women and girls having adventures. Doing things, regardless of what people told them. I read plenty of books with male leads, as well--since I grew up in the days before Robin McKinley--but fiction really was a door to, well, everything. And that some of the writers I was reading were women -- well, I think that was relevant too.

It's an odd thing. We didn't talk about "liberation" when I was growing up, I didn't understand what bra-burning was all about, but when it came to what we would be as adults, I was never told that I couldn't do anything I wanted to. Naturally women have equal rights and responsibilities with men. Naturally women can be soldiers and astronauts and politicians and doctors and longshoremen. Why ever not? I never believed otherwise.

I wonder who I have to thank for that, and how much each of my parents contributed. ::ponders::

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

That said, I wonder if the most important element in it all was my reading. Because I read so compulsively, so hugely, and of course so many novels and stories included women and girls having adventures. Doing things, regardless of what people told them. I read plenty of books with male leads, as well--since I grew up in the days before Robin McKinley--but fiction really was a door to, well, everything. And that some of the writers I was reading were women -- well, I think that was relevant too.

You know, I had a strong role model in my mother, in my grandmothers on my dad's side, but if I had to break it down, it would probably be books that lead the way in the formation of my ideologies, in supporting the subtle signals I got at home from both parents.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

i grew up on the crest of Title 9. i was a freshman in high school when it passed. i'd never heard of it until about 2 years ago.

i was never, and i do mean never, told that i couldn't do or think or say or act anything because i was a girl. ever. so i have no experience with that behavior, not from my parents, my schools, my friends. nothing. i never heard it. i don't know if that's because i have an exceptional strong, stubborn and independent personality or it was some long chain of coincidence, or perhaps a bit of both.

i was raised to take everyone equally, by gender and by race. it was never ever ever discussed in my house. and just to be clear, i was born in 1964.

and it's curiously anomalous because my mother is the peacemaker to the point of nausea and my dad was arguably the most passively sexist man i ever met. it was the way they both were raised, European Catholic refugees from WWII. dad always believed that he was the king in his household because he was raised that way. the American side of his family traces back to the colonization of the country, and German side of his family was Kaiser German. my brother, oddly enough, was not raised that way. again, it was never spoken of. of course, he passively absorbed my dad's behavior but it was never overtly taught as dogma. they were just as open-minded with him as me.

so, i guess that makes me a bit of an oddity, especially in light of the fact that my dad was a wife-beating, son-beating violent drunk, slightly insane alcoholic literal rocket scientist, and my mom was a complete apologistic, zero self-esteem trying to be the "good wife" peacemaker. go figure.

i echo a *lot* of what Kerlin mentioned, and what Shaye adds about girls being catty. i got the same treatment.

as to role models and "feminism", i find feminist dogma...dogmatic. i'm sure that's largely due to the strange bubble i grew up in of not being subjected to gender bias. feminism bores me stupid. aggressive feminism is just as sexist to me as male-enacted gender bias. sexual discrimination is sexual discrimination. i don't care what plumbing you have. it's no different to me than racism. if you're color-biased you're racist. i don't care what side of the aisle you're on.

my mom, perhaps strangely, is my strongest role mode, in both a negative and positive reinforcement kind of way. i know of no person stronger than her, with the possible exception of her mother, who certainly handled it all with more grace. my mom put up with everything, including spousal rape, to provide a "whole" home for my brother and i because she thought it was the right thing to do. after the fact, of course, she realized that wasn't wise, especially given that her parish priest was the one urging her to get a divorce, but she gave up everything she wanted for us. i learned her strength, and from her mistakes i learned what i would not ever tolerate, under any circumstances, from anyone. ever.

as to Betty Friedan herself, i am sad to hear of her passing. she genuinely believed that what she was doing was right, and it *was* necessary, but she rubbed me the wrong way, and to the movement at large i still have reservations. the issue is infinitely more subtle and complicated than is often portrayed, and to a large degree has triggers that go back to WWII. when you take away something foundational to someone and replace it with nothing, you're going to have fallout.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I've found, even in my own experience, that seeing a negative model is often just as powerful as a positive one, and that there's this amazing strength that people have when it comes to their families. It sounds like you've certainly found your own way, and your own path through surviving all of that.

And I think your reaction to feminism makes sense in light of a lot of things - that it is a dogma, that it can lead to sexism. But for me, it's not either of those things (any more than being a "liberal" is an expression of dogma). It's about having the same rights and opportunities, the same access and possibility. Because for many years, providing equal access for girls and women to jobs, to athletics wasn't about sexism, it was about opening something up that had been violently and definitely closed to them. Hell, women couldn't vote until 1920 in the United States, couldn't divorce, couldn't own property, weren't allowed based upon the fact that they were women and overturning that is feminism, pure and simple.

I personally believe strongly in what Friedan did and said, and can understand a discomfort or a dislike (there are feminist scholars that I HATE - Camille Paglia for one, and bloody Naomi Wolf who has some good stuff to say and makes me absolutely rabid with the facileness of her texts), but as a product of the feminist movement, I feel that it's done more good than harm, and that if the foundation got broken, it was better off that way. I think all "revolutions" have that problem - they recognize a need for change, enact the steps to make change, and then flounder until they can build a foundation again.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

it's totally done more good than harm, which is why i support it and understand the loss of someone of Friedan's caliber. just because the "movement" is flawed doesn't mean it shouldn't still be valid and its goals pursued.

and i'm so right there with you on the Pagilia/Wolf hate, yo. and it's a shame because they have valid points, but like anything else, if it's delivered in reactionary histrionics it's utterly invalidated.

[fourteenlines.livejournal.com]

Wow, this was getting excessively wordy. In short: my early life was defined by women. My mom and my mom's mom were both the type of women who probably got called "pushy broads" more than once, and if traditionally feminine roles made them unhappy, said, "Oh forget THIS" and did what they wanted. They lived in a small, relatively conservative town, and I've never heard that there were any serious problems. (My grandmother was the only mom who had a job when my mom was growing up; it was the 60's, but I've never been given any indication by my grandmother that she thought she was being particularly radical. It was just what she did, you know?)

My father died when I was a baby and even after my stepdad and my sister came on the scene, I always sort of felt like it was my mom and I against the world. In fact, until very recently I kind of had a problem relating to men, because my stepdad was absent for vast tracts of my childhood and I'd never really learned how girls were supposed to interact with boys. (By all accounts, even when my stepdad was around, I'd thought he was a moron since before I turned two.) All of my schoolteachers were women until I hit sixth grade. All of my friends were girls. I never had any serious academic competition from boys (at my public school) until I hit high school. It was almost like I was raised in a matriarchal society where the male of the species was just another unfortunate fact of life. I don't recall the first time I heard the word "feminist" used, but it wasn't something that was a part of our everyday lives; with so much evidence that women are equal to (or, hell, superior to) men, why bother with a qualifier?

I suspect much of this was a strange confluence of events, but my opinionated, fearless, outspoken mother definitely influenced me more than anyone else.

Naturally, after I hit puberty and all of my friends started pairing off (nothing to do in a small town, yeah?) then traditional gender roles came to bear. It was a confusing time for me, partially because my sex drive ddin't kick in until I was, like, nineteen (so I didn't see what the big deal was) and partially because after my gender-blind childhood, this whole "I'm going to get married and my husband is going to take care of me" thing was justifiably boggling.

(When I was sixteen my mom came to me and said, "I hope you don't think you're just going to get married and some man is going to take care of you, because that isn't going to happen" and my response was somewhere between, "Thank you for the vote of confidence," and "Seriously, have you gone crazy?")

Frankly, I find it harder to deal with the whole gender thing now, that I'm twenty-six and possibly terminally single. I'm not sure which part is my favorite; the thing where you get looked at as if something is wrong with you if you're heterosexual but not attached, or the part where people keep saying how brave and unusual it was for me to buy a house on my own, or maybe the part where the industry I'm working in has some desperately frustrating gender biases and sometimes people don't undertand why that makes me angry. And I'm better-educated now, too; things like inequality in pay, and the invisibility of white male privilege, and the madonna/whore dichotomy in fiction really piss me off because they bear absolutely no resemblance to my experience or those of the women I know.

It seemed like it was easier for me to find positive female role models in fiction when I was a kid, too; as an adult, they even managed to do things I didn't like to Dana Scully.

(Trust me, this IS the shorter, clearer version.)

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Hugs you for the wordiness, and for sharing your experience:)