I have already written about feminism when I wrote about the death of Betty Friedan. And there are a great many women (and men) out there writing about sexism today, their own personal experiences of it, political analysis, etc. Because of the South Dakota Legislature, a number of those people are discussing abortion.
I need to talk about paradigms, and hope, and self-definition.
In 1854, Coventry Patmore, a respected Victorian poet, published "Angel in the House," a book-length sentimental ode to his wife Emily that would provide the standard for respectable Victorian middle class women -- and would remain influential into the early 20th century. Patmore's "Angel" was a woman who lived solely for her husband:
Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress'd,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers;
Or any eye to see her charms,
At any time, she's still his wife,
Dearly devoted to his arms;
She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass grows taller round a stone.
Virginia Woolf, in 1931, said that "killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer."
Echoes of the Angel still exist. I heard her in the voice of my eighth-grade best friend warning me that boys didn't like me because I was "too smart." She was whispering in the ear of Kansas state senator Kay O'Connor when she opined that the 19th Amendment happened because "men weren't doing their jobs, and I think that's sad. I believe the man should be the head of the family. The woman should be the heart of the family." She had her fingerprints all over Maureen Dowd's 2005 book Are Men Necessary?, in which Dowd argued that men were put off by powerful, intelligent women. (To which I say, no man worth having is put off by powerful, intelligent women.)
Fortunately there are other, opposing paradigms, even for people who have the strange (and inaccurate) view of feminists as a bunch of man-hating, Birkenstock wearing separatists -- and some of them from the most unlikely places. You might never have thought that a movie about a country and western singer would provide us with a portrait of a strong and independent-minded woman, yet there she was. Velvet and steel. June Carter Cash was a remarkable woman.
Reese Witherspoon, who won an Oscar for portraying June Carter Cash, herself presented no mean role model in her grandmother: "She taught me how to be a real woman, to have strength and self-respect, and to never give those things away." What a world away from Coventry Patmore's ideal! And what a ways away even from the picture of womanhood presented by Kay O'Connor.
It's a long road, and a hard road. And people like Maureen Dowd don't help. But maybe, within my lifetime, the only Angel in the House will be the one we stick on top of the tree at Christmas.
OK, first of all, now we're not being fair to real angels. That's probably a parallel "-ism". Biblically, real angels are more likely to get an "Oh, shit!" reaction than an "Aren't you beautiful!" reaction.
ReplyDeleteSimilar comparisons probably apply to humanity and gender.
Now, anyone who knows me -- and you do -- knows that I'm closer to being an "Oh, shit!" angel than an "Aren't you beautiful!" angel. It took me years of therapy and twelve-step time to get here. But I would say that the way I love my partner now is in SOME ways closer to what Coventry Patmore describes. The limited paradigm and marital dysfunction in that poem says as much about Patmore's limited vision and self-centeredness as it does about Angel-Wife's codependency.
In my paradigm, angels are empowered agents of a higher power, NOT of their short-sighted human fellow beings. Don't kill the angels. Let them fly and try to figure out what they're really up to.
Discussions of sexism and feminism so often steer in a direction that advocates reapportioning emptiness and anger, rather than finding wholeness and relationship and mutual esteem. We deny each other's humanity in more ways than just denying legal rights. Isn't it wonderful that Reese Witherspoon played velvet and steel June Carter Cash -- but didn't she also make a couple of movies sending up an image-conscious, pretty-first, smart-second feminine use-my-beauty-as-a-tool stereotype, and really well at that?
Women who keep other women down, well, what can you say? I have two daughters -- plenty assertive -- who go to great lengths to seek control over each other. We're working on it. I don't consider it a sign of health or maturity. Same goes for overdominant women I've worked with, and myself when I display that behavior.
Anyway, my other life calls. I've gone on long enough.
Jen, if you were an angel, you would definitely be of the "oh shit!" variety. You would also not fit in well with the prevailing behavioral mores for women in Victorian England or the eastern U.S. (The American West was a slightly different story -- women in the west were expected to be stronger and more independent minded. BTW, have you read Charlotte Gilman Perkins "The Yellow Wallpaper"?)
ReplyDeleteI think there is a difference between viewing yourself and your husband as partners in life, and love them "forsaking all others", which is what I see you as doing, than the "living for thee alone" sort of devotion Patmore describes. It should be noted that men in the Victorian era were under no societal expectation to reciprocate such slavish devotion, althbough they were expected to provide support for their wives, and hopefully love them.
(Views such as those expressed by Patmore also had very concrete practical effects, such as laws regarding married women owning property or child custody going to fathers automatically.)
When I use Angel, capitalized, I am definitely referring to Patmore's creation, not the heavenly beings who visited the sheperds, and who made them sore afraid.
About the Legally Blonde movies, about the only time I saw Reese Witherspoon even approach being snippy on Oscar night was when a reporter asked "Is there going to be a Legally Blonde 4?" Witherspoon smiled stiffly, took a couple of deep breaths and said "There isn't even a 3 to be released. Lucky you."
I am with you on the finding ways to establish mutual esteem and relationship. I don't think legal rights are the end, but to some extent they have to be a beginning. But the crap Maureen Dowd is peddling is not about legal rights, it's about women denying their true selves. And I know a lot of feminists who detest what she writes for that reason.
Personally, I think sexism exists in a whole framework of dysfunctional power dynamics based around gender, race, sexual orientation and class, of which gender is only one axis. The ultimate goal is to destroy the frame, not merely one part, to allow all people to establish healthier, mutual relationship and community with each other.
As far as what women can do to each other... heh. The day I wrote this, I was at the receiving end of a stream of abuse at the hands of a self-styled "radical feminist" because I dared politely contradict her assertion that men were never the subject of sexual violence, or that if they were, their suffering was unimportant compared to what women went through. It was really unpleasant. The will to exert power over other people is certainly not an exclusively male trait.
One of the things that has helped me thinking through the sexism stuff has been Cristopher's post about dancing -- the last section about the dance of creation we are all called into. Eliminating sexism, it seems to me, is in a sense undoing chains that trip us up and prevent us from participating fully in that dance.