(no subject)
Today is Mother’s Day.
I’ve never been a big fan of Mother’s Day. Firstly, I am not a mother. That puts a damper on the whole thing right there. No home-made presents or burnt breakfasts in bed for me. Well, I did try to talk the cat into doing it for me, but he was pretty sure cats don’t celebrate. Secondly, and really most importantly, my mother and I didn’t get on. It wasn’t that we didn’t love one another. We did. We were just two completely different people and that made it hard for us to connect in any way but the purely familial. The one thing we really had in common is we were both loud and short-tempered. We hurt each other often with words that could never be taken back and that made any kind of holiday tense as we each waited for the other to burst apart.
But that was then and this is now. Now my mother is gone, having passed away last year. With her passing Mother’s Day takes on a new dimension for me. It’s no longer a day to give my present and run before things go terribly wrong; it’s a day of reflection on what it means to be a mother, and, by extension, a woman in our society.
When I was in high school, Alex Haley’s Roots was very popular, both the book and the mini-series. Since History and English were taught in a block, our teachers decided that it would be good education for us to discover our own roots. We were told to interview as many relatives, look through as many sources and to dig as deeply into our own memories as we could. We were then asked to write down what we had found. In interviewing my own parents I found out lots of things about the men in my family. I had a great uncle who was at the golden spike ceremony. There were cattle rustlers on one side of the family and that the name I knew was really fake. I learned about my Dad’s family’s brick business and how it went down in the Depression. I learned how my Mom’s family actually did well during the Depression because they had apple orchards. What I didn’t learn was what the women in my family were doing all this time. Interestingly, as each student in my class gave information about their families, some of whom could trace their roots through six or seven generations, I realized that none of them knew much about the women in their lives either.
I look back on that now and I think how sad that is. Women are the bringers of life and they are the keepers of memories, yet in our society they are all but forgotten except as background noise. History is full of women who were someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s something or other, but very few that are heralded for their own contributions, for their own thoughts, for their own lives lived well and fully. Quick now, name three and then make sure you don’t have to qualify it with how they helped a male-driven achievement. My first thoughts were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and okay, I leaped to Sacagawea. I had to scrub her because although they would have never made it without her, she is famous for “guiding” Louis and Clark. I then went to Margaret Sanger, but I bet many people don’t have a clue who she is. (I’ll leave you to look it up.) Most people remember Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and helped bring the anti-slavery movement to popularity and Harriet (Moses) Tubman, who was instrumental in the Underground Railroad and was a spy for the North in the Civil War, but do they know that women were not allowed to even speak at most anti-slavery rallies? Read Sojourner Truth’s “And Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. It will tear your heart out.
How many girls these days grow up hearing the names of Elizabeth Beecher, Emma Goldman, The Bronte Sisters, George Sand, Indira Ghandi, Mary Pickford (who co-founded United Artists as well as being an actress), Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothy Fuldheim, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Hopper (Rear Admiral), Maria Mitchell, or Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell. The women are there, many with impressive back grounds and achievements made all the more amazing that they did it in a world where they had to fight just to try. Yet most people do not remember them.
There’s more though. I find it especially telling that when a whole class of teenagers was asked to discover their roots, they looked to their fathers and grandfathers. Don’t get me wrong, I did it too. We are taught, I think, from very early on, through tradition, media and observation of the world around us, that women, no matter what else they do, are essentially loving, nurturing creatures whose job it is, over and beyond anything else is to care for the family and for our greater society. Women are, we’re told, more suited to it. Women are the gatherers, the family makers, the cooks, the cleaners, the mothers. Our society has become so bound up in this that women who work outside this heavily constructed box are nearly invisible and those who operate inside it are devalued.
My grandmothers lived on opposite sides of the walls of that box. My maternal Grandmother started her adult life as a reporter, a sob sister. She palled around with controversial politicians and wrote stories that made people worry about the state of American youth in the Jazz Age. She wore thigh flasks of prohibited hooch, wore bobbed hair and flapped with the best of them. One of my earliest memories is of her teaching me the Charleston, which I can still do to this day. My paternal Grandmother on the other hand started her adult life getting married right out of High School. She told me how she could remember reading newspaper accounts of Alice Roosevelt (Theodore’s daughter) smoking in the White House when she was a child and wanting to grow up to be just like her. She may have grown to the career of wife and mother but that firm, independent streak stayed with her. She raised seven children through the Depression, supporting them when her husband’s business failed. When her sons went off to war, she led local drives for metals, bacon grease and tires. My dad told me that all the kids on the block came to her for advice. Later, when her husband suffered a major stroke he never did come back from, she cared for him and kept his brain as active as she could with little math quizzes she reprinted by hand from her teaching days. She stayed in her own home until she was well over ninety and continued to be a community supporter until the day she died.
I am proud of the achievements of both my Grandmothers.
My mother totally bought into the idea that a woman was by default a homemaker/mother/Jill or all trades homely. Coming to age in the 1950’s, she was taught there was no other choice. The problem was that homemaking isn’t a genetic trait it’s a skill, and she had no flair or real love for it. My mother was trapped into a life she was unsuited for and did not enjoy, yet, somehow she did what women for millennia have always done; she kept on keeping on. She raised me, not an easy thing to do, and, much more importantly, she raised my sister. My sister is Developmentally Challenged and in the early 1960’s there was very little support for someone with as many emotional, cognitive or physical challenges as my sister displayed. The underlying cause for the symptoms wasn't even discovered until my sister was twelve. Schools were under no obligation to provide education for her, therapists gave her little hope of her going beyond being able to maybe talk, and friends and family found it hard to speak about the little angel my mother loved. Amazingly, my mother fought like a bull dog to get my sister everything she needed. My sister got braces for her deformities, got a public education, and was made an integral part of our family with a social network of friends, all through my mother’s hard work. We didn’t have a clean house. I cooked almost all our meals. I grew up without some of the nurturing I probably needed. Yet, I cannot help but wonder at all that my mom did achieve and how she never really knew she had achieved a thing.
On this Mother’s Day, and on the days that follow, look to see how far women have come. Really look. Rejoice in it and be proud. When you have finished celebrating, however, roll up your sleeves because just when women are finally coming into the light for all the things they do, they are being pushed back by politicians, mostly, but sadly not all, male, who are slowly taking all the things our mother’s and grandmother’s for generations back have fought to achieve. Don’t let that happen. We should never settle for the invisibility of times past.
I’ve never been a big fan of Mother’s Day. Firstly, I am not a mother. That puts a damper on the whole thing right there. No home-made presents or burnt breakfasts in bed for me. Well, I did try to talk the cat into doing it for me, but he was pretty sure cats don’t celebrate. Secondly, and really most importantly, my mother and I didn’t get on. It wasn’t that we didn’t love one another. We did. We were just two completely different people and that made it hard for us to connect in any way but the purely familial. The one thing we really had in common is we were both loud and short-tempered. We hurt each other often with words that could never be taken back and that made any kind of holiday tense as we each waited for the other to burst apart.
But that was then and this is now. Now my mother is gone, having passed away last year. With her passing Mother’s Day takes on a new dimension for me. It’s no longer a day to give my present and run before things go terribly wrong; it’s a day of reflection on what it means to be a mother, and, by extension, a woman in our society.
When I was in high school, Alex Haley’s Roots was very popular, both the book and the mini-series. Since History and English were taught in a block, our teachers decided that it would be good education for us to discover our own roots. We were told to interview as many relatives, look through as many sources and to dig as deeply into our own memories as we could. We were then asked to write down what we had found. In interviewing my own parents I found out lots of things about the men in my family. I had a great uncle who was at the golden spike ceremony. There were cattle rustlers on one side of the family and that the name I knew was really fake. I learned about my Dad’s family’s brick business and how it went down in the Depression. I learned how my Mom’s family actually did well during the Depression because they had apple orchards. What I didn’t learn was what the women in my family were doing all this time. Interestingly, as each student in my class gave information about their families, some of whom could trace their roots through six or seven generations, I realized that none of them knew much about the women in their lives either.
I look back on that now and I think how sad that is. Women are the bringers of life and they are the keepers of memories, yet in our society they are all but forgotten except as background noise. History is full of women who were someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s something or other, but very few that are heralded for their own contributions, for their own thoughts, for their own lives lived well and fully. Quick now, name three and then make sure you don’t have to qualify it with how they helped a male-driven achievement. My first thoughts were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and okay, I leaped to Sacagawea. I had to scrub her because although they would have never made it without her, she is famous for “guiding” Louis and Clark. I then went to Margaret Sanger, but I bet many people don’t have a clue who she is. (I’ll leave you to look it up.) Most people remember Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and helped bring the anti-slavery movement to popularity and Harriet (Moses) Tubman, who was instrumental in the Underground Railroad and was a spy for the North in the Civil War, but do they know that women were not allowed to even speak at most anti-slavery rallies? Read Sojourner Truth’s “And Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. It will tear your heart out.
How many girls these days grow up hearing the names of Elizabeth Beecher, Emma Goldman, The Bronte Sisters, George Sand, Indira Ghandi, Mary Pickford (who co-founded United Artists as well as being an actress), Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothy Fuldheim, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Hopper (Rear Admiral), Maria Mitchell, or Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell. The women are there, many with impressive back grounds and achievements made all the more amazing that they did it in a world where they had to fight just to try. Yet most people do not remember them.
There’s more though. I find it especially telling that when a whole class of teenagers was asked to discover their roots, they looked to their fathers and grandfathers. Don’t get me wrong, I did it too. We are taught, I think, from very early on, through tradition, media and observation of the world around us, that women, no matter what else they do, are essentially loving, nurturing creatures whose job it is, over and beyond anything else is to care for the family and for our greater society. Women are, we’re told, more suited to it. Women are the gatherers, the family makers, the cooks, the cleaners, the mothers. Our society has become so bound up in this that women who work outside this heavily constructed box are nearly invisible and those who operate inside it are devalued.
My grandmothers lived on opposite sides of the walls of that box. My maternal Grandmother started her adult life as a reporter, a sob sister. She palled around with controversial politicians and wrote stories that made people worry about the state of American youth in the Jazz Age. She wore thigh flasks of prohibited hooch, wore bobbed hair and flapped with the best of them. One of my earliest memories is of her teaching me the Charleston, which I can still do to this day. My paternal Grandmother on the other hand started her adult life getting married right out of High School. She told me how she could remember reading newspaper accounts of Alice Roosevelt (Theodore’s daughter) smoking in the White House when she was a child and wanting to grow up to be just like her. She may have grown to the career of wife and mother but that firm, independent streak stayed with her. She raised seven children through the Depression, supporting them when her husband’s business failed. When her sons went off to war, she led local drives for metals, bacon grease and tires. My dad told me that all the kids on the block came to her for advice. Later, when her husband suffered a major stroke he never did come back from, she cared for him and kept his brain as active as she could with little math quizzes she reprinted by hand from her teaching days. She stayed in her own home until she was well over ninety and continued to be a community supporter until the day she died.
I am proud of the achievements of both my Grandmothers.
My mother totally bought into the idea that a woman was by default a homemaker/mother/Jill or all trades homely. Coming to age in the 1950’s, she was taught there was no other choice. The problem was that homemaking isn’t a genetic trait it’s a skill, and she had no flair or real love for it. My mother was trapped into a life she was unsuited for and did not enjoy, yet, somehow she did what women for millennia have always done; she kept on keeping on. She raised me, not an easy thing to do, and, much more importantly, she raised my sister. My sister is Developmentally Challenged and in the early 1960’s there was very little support for someone with as many emotional, cognitive or physical challenges as my sister displayed. The underlying cause for the symptoms wasn't even discovered until my sister was twelve. Schools were under no obligation to provide education for her, therapists gave her little hope of her going beyond being able to maybe talk, and friends and family found it hard to speak about the little angel my mother loved. Amazingly, my mother fought like a bull dog to get my sister everything she needed. My sister got braces for her deformities, got a public education, and was made an integral part of our family with a social network of friends, all through my mother’s hard work. We didn’t have a clean house. I cooked almost all our meals. I grew up without some of the nurturing I probably needed. Yet, I cannot help but wonder at all that my mom did achieve and how she never really knew she had achieved a thing.
On this Mother’s Day, and on the days that follow, look to see how far women have come. Really look. Rejoice in it and be proud. When you have finished celebrating, however, roll up your sleeves because just when women are finally coming into the light for all the things they do, they are being pushed back by politicians, mostly, but sadly not all, male, who are slowly taking all the things our mother’s and grandmother’s for generations back have fought to achieve. Don’t let that happen. We should never settle for the invisibility of times past.