Generations

I have been reading Stephanie Staal's book Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life. In it, Stall describes her progress through feminism in terms that are very similar to my own. She says she grew up fairly confident that the gains of second wave feminism had been won. She had a working mother, was expected to get a good education and have a career and did not feel any obstacles to her success based on gender. Rather than a complacent post-feminist, she describes herself as being energized by feminism in the late 1980s, in relation to Anita Hill and other contemporary events. She transferred to a women's college, and took women's studies classes. But, she says, it wasn't until she got married, then had a child, that she truly experienced any of the issues related to feminism -- that she felt the burden of being a woman in expectations about household chores, maternity leave, work vs. home divides, parenting, etc. She re-encounters Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique at a crisis point in her life, and finds it surprisingly relevant in ways she had not when she was an undergraduate. So, she decides to go back to school and audit the year-long Feminist Texts course she took as an undergraduate at Barnard. What she finds through her participation in the class is both how much she has changed and how different the current generation of feminists are from when she was young.

In many ways, this book is one of those about which I think "Oh, I wish I had written this" and "Oh my goodness, she is writing about me." As I have said, my own experience of feminism was largely academic until I hit my thirties, got married and had kids. And now, I feel all the issues and contradictions of feminism's gains and limitations daily. Like Stall, I have had the opportunity to revisit feminist texts, but, in my case, as a professor not as a student. While I had been teaching feminist theory in film studies for years, just last year, as Director of Gender Studies, I had to teach a survey of feminist theory ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the present. Some of it was material I had never read and some I had not read in decades.

We talk a lot about generations in relation to feminism -- dividing feminist history into first, second and third waves, and worrying about post-feminist and whether the gains of feminism have been lost or what the future will be. In my class (and in all my classes), the divide is enacted often between the teacher and students. My students are sometimes much more hooked into contemporary gender issues than I am. For example, they have a working everyday familiarity with transgender people that I do not. At the same time, they have adopted many attitudes I would view as post or anti-feminist, such as the idea that stripping or making out with another woman at a bar for male pleasure is "empowering" and a question of "choice." Most professors I know have expressed some frustration that students do not "get" it, that they think all our problems are solved; and many students I know have reverted to a view of feminism and feminists (meaning us, their teachers) as whiny or as forcing issues unnecessarily.

But my experience of reading or re-reading feminist texts has also put me in a dialectic with my younger self and with younger stages of feminism. Like Staal, I have found some texts that had seemed dated to me before to be newly relevant. In other cases, texts that carried radical promise and were exciting to me when I was younger can sometimes feel dated because they did not lead anywhere.

More than anything, though, what I love about dipping back into the history of feminism is accessing the anger. I miss the sense of righteous indignation and moral certainty in the current climate of irony, eye rolling, and complacency. I love reading something like "The Redstockings Manifesto" from 1969 that says "Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men's lives." Compare this to the "Riot Grrrl Philosophy" of 1995 which exists "because us girls crave records and books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel included in and can understand in our own ways" or "The Third Wave Manifesta" of 2000 that addresses a host of issues including health care, access to the military, equality in the workplace, reproductive rights and more, but all in gingerly inclusive language such as this: "To have equal access to health care, regardless of income, which includes coverage equivalent to men's, and keeping in mind that women use the system more often than men do because of our reproductive capacity." If the 70s gave us the film A Question of Silence in which a group of women who have never met before jointly beat a man to death, then refuse to speak about it and laugh hysterically in court -- a film I find bizarrely exhilarating and that my students find deeply offensive and immoral -- today we have Bridesmaids or Sex in the City which articulate female frustration but suggest that it can be solved through better friendships, better men, and a good drink.

These newer forms of feminism address many of the issues that were seen as failures of second wave feminism. They aim to include a diverse range of positions, and people, including not just women of color, or women in poverty, but also men, and the many diverse and expanding LBGT and queer communities. The enemy is no longer obvious, the issues are complex and contradictory, and the goals are unclear. As Staal discusses, the students in today's Fem Texts class parse every situation with incredible sophistication. But they lack the sense of friction and anger that initiated many movements and that drives many of us old gals back to the old texts and old ways of thinking.

Boobs

I have been thinking a lot lately about breasts. A few months ago, at the start of the school year, I bought my ten-year old daughter her first training bra. Part of me worried that her "buds," as they are called these days, were a bad sign of excessive milk hormones. Ten seemed young to me for breasts, or any other signs of puberty. But for today's girl, it is normal. Beyond this slight concern, part of me also felt pride. In what? In seeing her grow up, certainly, but also, I think, in seeing that she seems to have inherited at least that part of my shape. I have never been an especially sexy or conventionally attractive girl -- never had the long limbs, indented waist, or overall skinniness of contemporary ideals. But I always had decent boobs. Of course, lately, they have been changing. When I was young, they were a perfect C. Then, after two pregnancies and two combined years of breastfeeding, I thought -- as books told me -- they might get smaller. But, no, they grew, to double Ds, without the rest of my body getting bigger. Rather than growing out, or up, I think they began to spread and descend. Soon, I feared, they'd hit the stomach level one sees in older women. So, I partly looked to my daughter as the promise of youth. And I liked sharing the experience of being people with boobs with her -- like when she confided in me that they hurt when she bumped them into things, or told me which other girls were sporting bras in class.

Recently, I had breasts on my mind for a different reason. For the first time, I got a call back on my mammogram. Two weeks after my annual exam, I had to go back, but I turned left to diagnostics instead of right, where the baseline mammograms go. Once in the new space, I felt immediately pathologized. To get to the locker room, I had to be escorted by a volunteer (apparently those of us in the suspicious boob category can't figure out how to walk down a hall anymore). My volunteer was very nice, almost too nice. After showing me where I could stow my things and where to wait, she announced, "I'm a hugger" and offered me one. I accepted, to be polite. But I figured the hug meant I must be dying. It did not help that it was national breast cancer awareness month and everywhere I turned there were pink ribbons!

After three hours of getting additional mammograms and ultrasounds, my doctors still could not determine whether what they saw was cancerous. There were new calcifications and they were "massing" but they hid in my now overly large boobs from the ultrasound. So, we scheduled a biopsy. Another two weeks. Once there, I realized that my focus on the diagnosis had put me in denial about the biopsy itself -- a more elaborate surgical procedure than I had realized. This time, I got taken by another volunteer -- not a hugger -- to an even further locker room. Laying on a bed with my breast hanging through a hole, another mammogram guided the surgeon to vacuum out some material to test. With a small incision and a big bandage, and the instruction to sleep in a sports bra for a day, and avoid any blood thinners, I was left pondering what it would mean to have my breast cut open, even partially, or, in the worst case, removed altogether.

Afterwards, while waiting for results, I went to get my haircut. Allure magazine had a special article on breast reconstruction. Pictures of various women showed different post-surgical solutions, ranging from full blown implants to insertions of fat from the belly into the breast. Intellectually, I thought that all that mattered was my health, and my being around for my family, but, gee, when I saw the tattooed nipples, I felt some deep pangs of fear about losing that part of me that had been so central to my sexuality, my maternity, my understanding of what clothes looked good on me. And I worried that if I lost my breasts or they were perceived as sick in any way, it would ruin my daughter's pleasure in hers.

Lucky for me, the biopsy found only benign material. But now I am pathologized. I have to go back in six months, so they can see . . what? whether the non-cancerous stuff suddenly changed into cancerous stuff? or that there is more non-cancerous stuff? Weirdly, the doctor put some kind of chip in my breast, a signpost that will show future surgeons where the biopsy was. Sort of a "keep off the grass" for radiologists. I am told it will not show up in airport scanners -- something I had not considered, but now will wonder about endlessly.

I'll never look at my breasts the same way again.

The Scatterbrain

Uh oh. It's starting again. Last year, I had a stretch of time when I became quite, well, absent minded, or forgetful. Scatterbrained actually. More than once, in fact, more often than not, I was screwing up dates. I'd book a meeting, then remember that I had already booked another meeting at the same time. In the worst instance, I booked an important speaker to come to campus (a former professor of mine whom I admire but who scares the heebie jeebies out of me, still, almost twenty years after my dreadful presentation in her class), then booked a trip (on a plane!) out of town the same day.

How does this happen? I have a calendar on my phone that syncs with my computer and my iPad. And I have another hard copy calendar at home that the school provides with important school events pre-printed on it. I enter things into my calendar and so does my secretary. But somehow, sometimes, I just don't look, or perhaps don't see what is in front of me.

At some point, I realized that I was having a slight breakdown. I attributed it to peri-menopause (which I don't think I've officially reached but which I find easy to blame a lot of things on) and overwork. At the end of the day, I just had too much to do. I kept collapsing dates because the boundaries between work time and family time were getting harder and harder to keep. So, with my husband, I worked out my schedule so he did some things I would normally do, and I let some things go at work and it all seemed resolved.


Then, this week, it started again. I suddenly realized (and the sudden gasping realization is key to this phenomena) that I had to do some guest teaching on Friday, and had not made arrangements for anyone to get my kids from school. So, I started doing some fancy emailing. I realized that my son had a birthday party to attend that day, so emailed a host of moms to see if anybody could pick him up and take him to the party and had it almost arranged before I discovered that, in fact, the birthday party was a week later, and on a Thursday not a Friday.


Funnily enough, just before my sudden gasping realization, I got a call from a friend who, like me, is a professor, a commuter (and we commute, no joke 100 miles each way!), and a mom. She was driving to campus for a meeting. But she had only barely realized she had the meeting. Or, rather, she had made plans for the meeting -- arranging childcare, booking other meetings for the time before and after it -- but all on the wrong day. And on the true day of her meeting, she had plans to do lots of work at home. What a mess.

At first, I felt relieved and a little smug that it was her and not me who had messed up. But it must be catching. My own scatterbrain dementia returned. Just today, I found out that I booked a dinner party for the night of my kids' school open house. Oh well. I think it is a disease common to many working moms. We try to be everything to everyone and don't want to be called out as not meeting our responsibilities in any sphere, so we over commit. Maybe getting scatterbrained is nature's way of telling us that we can't.

DIY

Frequently, when I see my mother, she tells me that she doesn't know where I came from. It isn't my feminism she questions, or my interest in gender, or film, and it isn't my being a wife and mother. When my mom questions my origin, it usually has to do with my knitting and cooking.

For my mom, when I took up knitting it marked me as not hers partly because she is terrible at crafts. When I was a kid, she had an old fashioned Singer sewing machine -- one of those with iron wheels, built into a table that ran by foot power, not electricity. It was old then, and clearly outmoded. On it, she would occasionally sew a hem here and there, or maybe a dress, but they were awful. She managed to make slipcovers (something of an obsessive specialty of hers) because she could hide the flaws more easily than on clothing.

I have, in fact, proved myself her daughter when it comes to sewing. A few years back, I bought a cheap portable sewing machine so that I could hem my own pants, a modest ambition motivated by the fact that I am 5' 2" (and shrinking) and have to take a minimum of 4" off every pair of pants I buy. But I am terrible with a sewing machine. Every single time I use it, I have to use the handbook to remember how to thread the thing. My hems are uneven, and sloppy. I rarely assay anything more complicated than a hem, and when I do, like when I made my son's Halloween costume last year, the results are poor (let's just say that his monster costume was not quite what we had imagined.) I would probably be better off paying the $10 to have my pants professionally hemmed.

Knitting, for me, differs from sewing. There is no practical reason for me to knit. It costs way more to knit a sweater or baby blanket than to buy one. And it takes a long time. I started knitting to pass the time when my kids were little and I found myself in a room with them when they were watching Elmo or playing but could not be left alone. Now, it supplements my own TV watching, provides an activity on planes, and otherwise fills the void. I like the process, like learning new techniques, and admire the artistry of watching knots become patterns.

Where my mom would sew out of practical necessity, like me, she could never imagine knitting for pleasure. More than just a skill question, my mother's surprise at my knitting registers as a kind of alienation. She simply can't fathom it. To her, it smacks of something too homespun, too old fashioned. For her, feminism meant never having to take the long road again. Betty Friedan diagnosed the feminine mystique as, in part, being about creating unnecessary work. For Friedan, the housewife's move to suburbia represented an expansion of domestic duties, as a way to fill the void (if you have to drive your kids everywhere, and you have to volunteer at school, then it justifies your not working and helps fend off the boredom of inactivity). So, Friedan recommended moving back to the city, getting a smaller place, and, in effect, what could be called good-enough housekeeping. For my mom, who worked most of her life and worked full-time from the time I was ten, with four kids and a husband to care for, domestic duties were full enough, thank you! So she, like many women, treasured convenience. She wanted ready made clothes, store bought knits, and convenience foods. She wanted to make her life easier. She never settled for good enough housekeeping -- though lord knows none of us cared or merited her high standards, though I now appreciate them -- but she took what shortcuts she could.

While Friedan's model could be seen as proto-sustainability (less is more), current feminist practice diverges from hers. Now, as part of sustainability movements and green politics, we tend to seek ways to make life hard again. Rather than shop at a supermarket, we choose to visit the farmer's market, Whole Foods, specialty butchers, and organic bakeries, making multiple trips and stops. Rather than processed foods, we try to cook from scratch, to make healthier and more natural foods. We have live chickens in our yards! We poo poo the convenience my mother treasured. Where she tells a story about discovering the miracle of McDonald's on a cross country road trip with four kids and very little money, we view fast food as a poison, if not a crime. My mother is shocked that anyone would make tomato soup rather than buy canned. To her, it is like hunting for meat when you could just go to the store. We, a la Michael Pollan, tend to think that hunting would be more honest, natural, better.

Third wave feminists initiated the DIY movement as a means of reclaiming craft and the pleasure of domesticity from what they considered an overly rigid feminism. But let's not forget the reasons women walked away from much of what we now fetishize as DIY: for them DIY wasn't a choice, but a necessity. Now, when I choose to make the soup or knit the blanket, I know I can also choose not to, and that the pleasures of post feminist domesticity should not lead us down a path where we imagine that being organic means that those activities are "natural" or "organic" to our role as women.

Captive Women

I recently read Emma Donoghue's THE ROOM. Amazing book. The story of a women held captive in a soundproof backyard shed is narrated by the five year old son she bears while in captivity. The first part of the book details his routine, and expresses his attachment to the small space he lives in, which he calls Room, and the objects that fill it, a bed, a rug, a toy made of leftover egg shells. At first, the boy, Jack, does not know, because his mother, called Ma, chooses not to tell him, that there is a world outside the room. He thinks everything else -- except the man he calls Old Nick who visits his mom nightly -- is TV. Dogs are TV, cars are TV, stores, outdoors, all TV. The book eventually allows Ma and Jack to escape and details their adjustment to living in a bigger world. The trauma of this, of being let out of an enclosed space and from a very small and simple world to a much bigger, more complex and interactive one, is as compelling as imagining the enclosure. The book makes you aware of space, of what it means to be truly removed from the public sphere, from being able to circulate and speak. (It also reminds you how small and simple life can be, in almost a Walden way.) It intensifies the mother-child bond, as the child relies exclusively on his mother, still nurses at five years old, and has never spoken to another soul (he hides in a wardrobe when Old Nick visits).

THE ROOM led me to read Jaycee Lee Duggard's memoir, A STOLEN LIFE which details her 18 year captivity in a backyard enclosure. Duggard's story differs somewhat from the fictional THE ROOM. Where Ma, in the fiction, tries every day to contact the outside world by screaming at the soundproof skylight and flicking lights in the night, Duggard never tries to escape. Too young and scared, and eventually too dependent on her captors and afraid of angering them, she stays put, even when they begin to allow her small outings to thrift shops and other stores, and even as she begins working with the computers and the Internet. Even when her captor bizarrely brings her to the FBI, she initially does not reveal her identity.

While both these books present situations that are obviously extremely rare -- stranger abductions are only 1% of all abductions and rarely are successfully maintained this long -- they both have some resonance as tales of "marriage," or marriage as practiced in the 19th century. The women, taken quite young, are brought into sex by a man without really knowing what sex is. They leave their mothers when they are still children. They have babies with no knowledge, but somehow assume the role of mother. They are left home while the man goes into the world and they depend upon him utterly to bring food and other necessities. While this deep split between the private sphere of the wife and the public sphere of the man has broken down since the 19th century (and was always somewhat less strict than we have been taught), there are still residual assumptions about the male's role as breadwinner and still ways in which many women are relegated largely to the home. More than that, both stories remind us how difficult it is for women in any kind of abusive situation to break free. Duggard articulates this well, at one point saying that the verbal abuse was more crippling and disabling for her than the physical. They suggest how important it is to be aware -- not just of the creep lurking near schools or playgrounds, but also of the clues around us of women in crisis.

Sometimes I Slip

As the Juan Williams scandal made clear, even the most staunch liberals sometimes have bad thoughts. And, despite all my best intentions, sometimes I fall into pre or anti-feminist traps:

Sometimes, I wish my daughter would care more about her appearance.

Sometimes, I wish my son were more of a jock, or even vaguely interested in sports.

Sometimes, I want my daughter to have a crush on a boy, or Johnny Depp.

Sometimes, I wish I were a stay at home mom.

Sometimes, I want to tell my son that he is being a "pussy," or to "man up."

Sometimes, I hope my kids will be popular.

Sometimes, I wish my daughter would wear a dress.

Sometimes, I want to purge all my son's less masculine toys.

Sometimes, I want my daughter to like anime and superheroes less and read Little Women or Heidi.

Most of the time, I love them exactly as they are and hope the world loves them as much as they deserve.

Hello Princess

The Disney Princess phenomenon has been well-bashed, by Peggy Orenstein among others. Thankfully, I never had a Princess-loving daughter. She had a small moment. One time, when she was about five, she was invited to a birthday party at which girls had to dress up in princess costumes and have make-up put on them. Worse, they then had to humiliate the birthday girl's dad, who had to sit in a chair and have the girls all dress him up in princess garb, for reasons unclear to me then or now. I was appalled. We had been listening to Free to Be You and Me in the long car ride to the party. This was a key record for me when I was a kid -- my fourth grade teacher, Ms. Sullivan, a hippie with Ali McGraw hair, would play it every day and we'd run around the classroom and dance. I got the DVD years later and both my kids liked it a lot. So, after listening to "Parents Are People" and "William's Doll," and other songs aimed at breaking down gender stereotypes, there we were at a princess party, with my daughter, wearing eye make up and a gown and glitter on her face. She loved it. But she never got full-blown princess fever and she never went for dolls. And over time she became super cynical about both dolls and princesses. She and I shared a feminist disgust at the after-school Princess class organized at her K-8 school, which consisted of little girls and the grown teacher wearing tiaras and gowns, with parents PAYING for this. So, when we went on a Disney cruise recently, it was she, more than me, who was appalled. Because every time, and I mean every time, she entered a dining room, or a theater, or when she re-entered the boat after an excursion, or when she arrived at a hotel, or got on or off a shuttle bus, someone who worked on the cruise would greet her, saying "Welcome home, Princess." (When I was her age, my family went to London and my pixie haircut and brown velvet pantsuit led the entire staff of the hotel to greet me as The Little Master, so perhaps hotels are geared to humiliate ten year olds). For me, it was the "home" that galled -- as if Disney were some ur-home for all of us, our collective womb (and maybe it is). But she really hated being called Princess. It was both the offense of being assumed to want to be a princess, and the constant need to define kids by gender that irked her. And what about the boys? The Disney folks had no idea what to call them. Prince doesn't have the cache of Princess. Pirates seem to be now the gender equivalent but you can't really hail boys with "Welcome home, Pirate (murderer, rapist, thief)." Maybe they could just call them Mickey and Minnie? Or maybe they could just say "hello."