Feminism

What Has Happened to Me?


I have never had the housewife instinct that so many of my female friends seem to have. I wasn’t much of a cook which my bare cupboards and barely stocked fridge more that attested to. I didn’t sew or crochet or knit or do needlepoint. I am not crafty (I think a special gene is needed for that). I can’t decorate. (Colors? They coordinate?) I don’t have collections of anything (and I am sure that notebooks, pens and pencils don’t count – very sure). And grocery shopping was just another chore. But I have noticed things about myself lately that have gotten me to think I may have been hasty in my original, and long-standing, assessment of myself. The house is clean. And getting cleaner and more organized all the time. Laundry is not only done but folded and in drawers and closets. Supper is on the table when Rob gets home every night. And I have a routine that is suspiciously suburbanish. Breakfast. Writing. Gym. Taking Katy to school. Errands. Writing. After-school snack. Supper preparation. Family supper. Bathing, bedding and story-telling. Couple time. You see? I see. I am a housewife. I even have a uniform. Lululemon. (And I look really great in it too, if it is possible to be a housewife and attractive at the same time).

It all came together for me the other afternoon when I was grocery shopping at the Safeway, skinny chai in hand. As I strolled up and down the aisles, making this and that selection, I was actually planning the menu’s for the next two weeks. I was planning! About cooking!! Weeks in advance!!! And the worst thing is how effortless it was and how much I enjoyed being able to do this, as though it were some hard won skill or something and not just a “wife” thing. Just a wife thing? Just a mom thing? Just a woman thing? If I believed in feminism I could count myself a traitor to the movement for sure.

This is not a place I ever pictured myself. Staying at home and really liking it and even being kind of good at it. I was raised in a quasi-feminist way. Sure, women got the heavy lifting of household and family maintenance, but my parents never assumed that any of we girls would have the stay at home life that my mom enjoyed (okay, didn’t enjoy at all) when we kids were small. It was fast becoming a double income world when I was growing up back in the seventies and early eighties and we were raised to expect to share the income load. So, to find myself 26 years later playing Carol Brady – no, Carol had Alice – inhabiting the mother knows best role is a bit afield of where I expected to be.

When I came to Canada, I was hoping to be able to teach eventually to help out while I worked on my writing. In the beginning. But immigration enforced retirement shifted my thoughts to just working on the writing – for which I am told that I have a talent. Now the prospect of going back to live in the States for a time has me thinking about going back to the original plan and not with relish. I like writing. I even like the thought of doing what I am doing now – but in Texas (and having more time to really explore writing as a career because Katy will be in school full-time).

But, there is that tiny Gloria in the back of my head insisting (in a very condescending and irritating way) that I need to pull my own weight and that I am not making a worthwhile contribution if I am not bringing home a bit of bacon to spend, and that even if I am published – somewhere – by the time we leave Canada – it will never be a living like teaching was. What if something were to happen to Rob? That nasty helmet haired harpy shrieks. It’s happened before and look at all those women who blithely ignored the reality of male mortality. Have you taken note of where they are? Except that I was working and supposedly safe before, I think back at her. What about self-fulfillment? Because isn’t that what it supposedly comes down to according to the ERA party line? But I wasn’t really anymore. Even writing this blog fills me with more pride in myself and accomplishments as a writer than teaching did on my best days those last few years.

I decided to discuss this with Rob again as we drove into the city for the hospice grief group. I wanted to hear myself say out loud that I don’t want to teach. I want to just write. And I wanted to hear what he thought because he is the one who goes to a “real” job everyday and brings home “real bacon”. I can teach once we are back in the states and feel that I should from the fairness point of view. Rob pointed out, rightly, that the things I do are things that need to be done by someone. It’s not an empty contribution. He also feels that I haven’t been at writing long enough to know if I can make something out of it and that we won’t go wanting without a second paycheck. But I feel a bit guilty that I am being given this gift of pursuit of a dream and I have nothing like that to give him in return. I worry that if I don’t make a good career of writing I will disappoint Rob and worse, not be able to turn the table around and give him the same freedom to pursue what he loves in terms of work. I guess I am too impatient.

Interesting what the gift of just the pursuit of your dreams can do.

Sexism: The NY Times thinks Girls are too dumb to run a Newspaper


The New York Times ran a piece on the Des Moines Register stating that the paper’s endorsement is seen as a great prize among candidates running for president. The article also pointed out that for the first time, the top three editorial spots at the Register are occupied by women and wondered if this wouldn’t give Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage because as we all know, women mindlessly vote for their own kind regardless of qualifications and the issues.

What an infuriating piece of crap! Nothing raises my blood pressure more than sexist thinking like this. The fact that most men wouldn’t vote for a woman unless she was in a wet t-shirt contest rarely gets talked about, but when a woman actually runs for public office and manages to overcome the mean girl backlash and draws other female supporters, this is seen as some kind of herd mentality response. Men never seem to think that anything they think, do or say is influenced by their gender though there is a mount everest worth of reasons to believe that they are even more hormonally driven than their sisters, but anything under the sun a woman does is probably a result of PMS if she isn’t currently on the rag.

Although I don’t believe the Des Moines Register is a great newspaper (because it’s rather light on news beyond central Iowa and it allows the city’s elite to use it as though it were a high school publication), I am going to go out on a limb and guess that a person doesn’t get to be one of the top three there unless they have proven themselves in their field. Interestingly, though women are often accused of being tokens when they achieve positions like these, the truth is that women are usually held to much higher standards than the men who wind up in similar positions.

The Times should really be careful when it accuses others of bias. Aside from the ads, there isn’t a neutral thing printed in it ever, and I imagine that the East Coast ignorance about the Midwest played a role in the sexist conclusions that Mr. Zeleny, the piece’s author, came to write. Iowans are particularly plagued with Grant Wood images being superimposed over our lives and realities to the point where I don’t know if anyone out East even realizes that the majority of the state’s population lives in urban settings and that we have to organize field trips for our students to take them to farms so they know that milk comes from a cow and not from the AE plant on E. University. Shame on him still however, and shame on any who persist in the antiquated belief that when men vote for men it’s a result of thoughtful deliberation of the issues and facts whereas women only vote for the candidates based on their shared gender or because they have good personalities. Men are just as capable of casting their votes away as mindlessly as anyone and mindless voting is a result of just being stupid which is an equal gender opportunity judging from the NY Times piece.

Real Women


Caitlin Flanagan irritates me to my core. Last year she published a book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, which made her the darling of the nano-second with the Right Wing talking heads. Although it stops short of endorsing the shoeless, knocked up and slaving over a radiating microwave conservative mantra, it is a load of poser crap because as nearly as I can ascertain Ms. Flanagan is not, and never has been, a housewife. Her husband is filthy rich. She has a nanny and a housekeeper. She works. Okay, from home. But if the woman has a job that necessitates the need for a nanny and a housekeeper, them ain’t mother’s hours. 

This month she has a featured article in Oprah Magazine. I love O and I hate it. I love it because it provokes me and gives me good blog topics. I hate it because while it professes to be a tool for female empowerment, it completely buys into the same garbage about what being a woman is that all the other women’s magazines do. It is the deeper end of the self-help pool perhaps, but it isn’t helping because it makes the assumption that all the others do. If there is something wrong in your life from your relationship to your children to your job the root cause of this dysfunction is you, and though sometimes it is, a lot of the time it’s THEM. Anyway, the title of the article is You’re Middle-Aged. But Are You Done? Discuss. Oy! Where to begin with that! There are so many issues to be taken with the idea that 40 is some kind of huge mile-marker and that the decade that it kicks off is the precurser to Depends undergarments. Good lord, at 40 you still have a dozen or more years of tampons to buy. 40+ year old women are not near as wrinkly as the cosmetic industry would like us to believe (unless you smoke and were/are a tanning addict) and with a little bit of vigilance we can stave off the first bits of facial hair growth and graying. It’s not the wonder years of that the mid to late 30’s are but as Shrek says, “It’ll do.”

Flanagan yips a bit about not having the same drive or need to do and succeed that she did as a younger women and then wonders what her friends think about this decade of crisis. So, she fires up the old Rolodex and invites a few of her “average” friends over for party favors and wine and Q&A on the burning questions – marriage – money – sex and how this effects their ability to keeping dreaming about their lives and futures. Now, given who she is I didn’t expect her friends to be like mine. My best friends is a home health care nurse who is almost finished with her MSN despite having a full-time job, husband and two kids. Another very close friend is a middle school teacher whose husband is a farmer, her three girls are 22, 19, and 16 and has also just finished up her MA studies. Flanagan’s friends include a successful novelist, a performance artist, a television personality, a professional organizer , a temporarily retired entrepreneur, and she  throws in a SAHM as a bone for we merely ordinary women to relate with.

I truly went into the reading of this article with an open mind. I thought, “Hey, this is Oprah, right? She isn’t going to tolerate some vacuous shit. These women probably discuss some really important topics. The pressure on women to stay young looking and thin. The difficulties of juggling career and kids. Getting back into the workplace after taking time off. Being taken seriously in your profession.” Yeah, I was wrong, but I read on. And just made myself so crazy that I cornered my poor husband with a diatribe that lasted a good half-hour or so on how I would have answered this idiot woman’s questions. 

Although the entire article is not worth the paper it is printed on, there are a few topics that particularly galled me. One of them was sex. Not one of these women viewed sex with their husbands, or other significant mate, as important. It was an afterthought or worse, an inconvenience. One of them even quoted from a book entitled I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido whose author actually told her husband that she was unilaterally scaling back the number of sexual interactions in their relationship, and what’s more incredible really…..he agreed with her. Furthermore the group on the whole was intrigued with the notion that instead of women visiting their doctors to get help with increasing their low libidos (I am assuming that the 40’s are a low point hormonally for many women …. though I don’t personally know any such women) men should see their physicians to see about decreasing their sex drives instead. Sex with one’s love is a chore? Granted, I was married for a goodly while to a man too ill to be intimate with in any way, but even if that wasn’t the case, I would still want to make love as often as possible with my husband. Sickness, exhaustion, child, selling a house, packing, moving to another country. None of these present any sort of insurmountable obstacle to passionate interactions and this I know for sure.

Another topic was money. Money spent wisely and money thrown away. Most of the participants discussed some purchase of clothing as the best investment they ever made and were thankfully shamed into silence by the women who said that the money she spent on fertility treatments was easily the best investment she ever made. When the discussion turned to money they thrown away, it was predictably things that they regretted splurging on like outfits of clothing, furniture, interior decorators. The money  that I regret spending is on the grave site and headstone I purchased for my late husband. $1300 that I really couldn’t afford, but I did it because he wanted to be buried somewhere that his family, mainly Katy and I, and his friends could come and visit. Sadly, Katy and I were the only ones to really visit his grave and had I not interred him I could have brought his ashes along to Canada with us. Now he lies alone in a little cemetery that it is unlikely I or his daughter will get back to for long while. Who knows really? Maybe even never. I regret that money a lot now.

I thought about conversations I have had with my friends about the state of health care and education. About the night my women’s writers group discussed the realities and ins and outs of dating and how one’s relationship history influences our choices and views. I suppose that “depth” is one of those eye of the beholder things, but I am irked that such a completely shallow person was given an opportunity to have a frank discussion and blew it so definitively.