Week 3

What is Feminism?

I remember it being the first day that my Grandma told me she wrote poetry. She may have mentioned it before, actually, but the first time I really appreciated that this amazingly charming woman wrote poetry was the same day she got in an argument with my mother. It seems that somehow the status of women was brought up for discussion. My Mother was disgruntled that her Mother would dare compare the forced servitude of women to slavery. I found myself siding with my Grandmother, and I felt like my Mom was really ignoring a sobering truth. Suffice it to say; when I told my Mother about my proposed interview, she thought that I would have a lot more in common with my Grandma on the issue than I would have with her.

When I phoned her, and explained to her my questions, she requested another day to sort her thoughts out. She briefly mentioned two things that stood out to her: her college choices and reading Jane Austen. When I called her back, she didn’t mention any of the social issues cited as most concerning by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner’s survey of campus women (59). Her experience of gender didn’t include reproductive rights, self-identity, work-and-family balance, or, fortunately, violence against women. Two specific things highlighted her experience with gender.

When she went to college in 1953, she was only offered three choices: secretarial training, teaching, and nursing. She says she could have been brave and branched out, but it assuredly wasn’t encouraged. Much like my Mother’s history with feminism, my Grandmother was initially critical of feminism. Raised in a very gender-traditional Mormon household, they thought everything was okay with the world, that’s just the way things were. My Mother even described being disgusted by bra burners.

However, my Grandma was inspired by the likes of Gloria Steinam. Women pushing for ‘equal pay and things’. She eventually thought, “Why not?” and she gradually “kind of embraced it.” She loved Gloria Steinam so much; she shared with me a quote: “Two rules to live by: stay away from doctors, they make you sick. And always rinse the shampoo out of your hair.” While she assured me she’d never consulted a dictionary on the matter, she thought of feminism as the movement for equality. She even seemed relieved when I told her I had the same personal definition.

When I asked her for an experience that made her conscious of her gender, she brought up Jane Austen. Jane Austen, it seems, provided her with the first evidence that there wasn’t equality between the sexes. She recalls that she was furious that women couldn’t hold property, “And how badly women were treated. They had to call their husbands Mr. Lamb or Mr. Warren. That just upset me, but I love her books. So, that upset me.” She then told me a story that reminded me of Susan Faludi’s book Backlash. “My mother who is 93 went to a clinic to get a something for her blood, and when she came back she said:

“I can’t believe it, every doctor in that clinic was a woman. Every nurse”

I said, “Hooray”

“No, that’s not good, men are smarter. It’s just men who should be doctors.”

She was born in 1915, she still thinks men are smarter than women.”

I don’t think it’s the backlash Faludi was talking about, but it does demonstrate that equality isn’t wanted by all.

She then went on to discuss Sarah Palin, whom she views as a slap in the face after the promise of Hillary, and the discouraging notion that women can’t hold high office because they need to tend their kids. She didn’t articulate it into the desire that work-and-family balance become a priority of public policy, and she conceded that my Mother was probably right that children uniquely need their mothers around. I think that places my Grandmother at the beginning of the Second Wave: pushing for gender equality in the workplace. She concluded by telling me how glad she was that I was doing ‘this’. She wasn’t very clear on what ‘this’ was, but I appreciated her comment.