A repost
2015
Last year or the year before that someone on the news announced that Rhoda, a character on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was might die of brain cancer.
I hadn't thought of Rhoda, played by Valerie Harper, in years, possibly decades. I couldn't believe it when they said she was over 70 years old. That brought me back to thinking about my own age.
Couldn't believe that either.
All this inability to believe started me thinking about how MANY things that I now consider "normal" simply weren't when I was born. No internet, GPS, or microwaves. As the list of things we didn't have as a kid got longer, longer, and longer still, I re-realized that I was born a decade BEFORE women could easily get credit in their own name!!!
When I was a girl, I heard about this new law that made women able to get credit on their own. I can just barely remember thinking, "Well yeeeaah....of course!" I was shocked that an actual law had to be written to ensure this. I also remember being desperately glad that I hadn't been born a few decades earlier.
It's not so surprising that I thought this way, I suppose.
I grew up watching and listening to feminism in what I considered "common sense" slogans as well as slices of speeches from Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem etc. I thought all this "common sense" already existed. I guess I knew but I didn't REALLY know this "common sense" was...
In the 1970s, when black women were almost entirely absent from television, I didn't know my "normal" was being created and then reinforced by the white women of television, such as Mary Tyler Moore and Sally Struthers, who played Gloria in "All In The Family". I simply didn't know that they were representative of a new way of life for women, a new option.
And even thought I know all this heavy feminism baggage exists, what I ALSO know is that all of us ought to be grateful for "The New Normal."
2015
I hadn't thought of Rhoda, played by Valerie Harper, in years, possibly decades. I couldn't believe it when they said she was over 70 years old. That brought me back to thinking about my own age.
Couldn't believe that either.
All this inability to believe started me thinking about how MANY things that I now consider "normal" simply weren't when I was born. No internet, GPS, or microwaves. As the list of things we didn't have as a kid got longer, longer, and longer still, I re-realized that I was born a decade BEFORE women could easily get credit in their own name!!!
When I was a girl, I heard about this new law that made women able to get credit on their own. I can just barely remember thinking, "Well yeeeaah....of course!" I was shocked that an actual law had to be written to ensure this. I also remember being desperately glad that I hadn't been born a few decades earlier.
It's not so surprising that I thought this way, I suppose.
--in the process of being born
--in the process of being fought for, of being protected
--and voted on.
In the 1970s, when black women were almost entirely absent from television, I didn't know my "normal" was being created and then reinforced by the white women of television, such as Mary Tyler Moore and Sally Struthers, who played Gloria in "All In The Family". I simply didn't know that they were representative of a new way of life for women, a new option.
I didn't know women making their own money, working at a career, and making decisions that a WHOLE person with equal rights tends to make, sometimes looking for another WHOLE person (a man) to walk through life with - was new.
After all, my Mom did this for a few years before she married. A lot of black women did, maybe most black women did.
But Mary Tyler Moore's job was not a pit stop before marriage, like my mother's was supposed to be. Mary Tyler Moore's job was important to her and contributed to society like a man's does. She wanted to be good at her career, succeed at it. She wanted a relationship, maybe a husband, but all of her energy and focus was not on getting a husband.
That was a very different choice to have, one that wasn't there for women of my mother's generation. Or if it was, it was seen as failure. A career was seen as consolation prize for many women and for the people who felt sorry for them.
More importantly, it was seen as a status symbol for a man if his wife didn't have to work -- what the wife did or didn't want, be damned.
At 10 to 12 years of age, I hadn't grasped the fact that I wasn't considered as capable as or as equal to a male child either. (Well...most of the time I didn't) But somehow, I DID know that I was considered less-than as a person because of my black skin...by the majority of people in the country.
Racism, somehow, I knew this practically from birth.
As sheltered as I was in some ways, I had eyes. Newspaper headlines shouted white supremacy at me daily, no matter what my parents tried to keep from seeing. And I couldn't walk past a television, without seeing a white cop sic a big dog with huge teeth on black people or take a fire hose to them.
As a girl-child born in the land of the free and the equal, I thought Mary Tyler Moore and the rest of these characters were representing "normal" people with "normal" desires. Eventually, a lot of people came to see them that way...having laughed a little by the end of each episode.
Maybe the writing was special, like some like to believe it was. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" made the new, more feminist(?) world seem mundane. I don't know for sure. I simply cannot remember what I was thinking at the time then rehash something I really didn't notice to begin with.
But when I heard that Rhoda was sick? Maybe dying? That was when I remembered that women didn't always have..
After all, my Mom did this for a few years before she married. A lot of black women did, maybe most black women did.
But Mary Tyler Moore's job was not a pit stop before marriage, like my mother's was supposed to be. Mary Tyler Moore's job was important to her and contributed to society like a man's does. She wanted to be good at her career, succeed at it. She wanted a relationship, maybe a husband, but all of her energy and focus was not on getting a husband.
That was a very different choice to have, one that wasn't there for women of my mother's generation. Or if it was, it was seen as failure. A career was seen as consolation prize for many women and for the people who felt sorry for them.
More importantly, it was seen as a status symbol for a man if his wife didn't have to work -- what the wife did or didn't want, be damned.
At 10 to 12 years of age, I hadn't grasped the fact that I wasn't considered as capable as or as equal to a male child either. (Well...most of the time I didn't) But somehow, I DID know that I was considered less-than as a person because of my black skin...by the majority of people in the country.
Racism, somehow, I knew this practically from birth.
As sheltered as I was in some ways, I had eyes. Newspaper headlines shouted white supremacy at me daily, no matter what my parents tried to keep from seeing. And I couldn't walk past a television, without seeing a white cop sic a big dog with huge teeth on black people or take a fire hose to them.
As far back as kindergarten those were the images that flashed in my head the day Show-and-Tell featured a white police officer talking about how 'a policeman is your friend' ('Oooh no-No-NO! not MY friend!!!' I thought to myself.)The racism-sexism knowledge gap (read: chasm) is another train wreck for another time. The point I'm trying to make here is that I was taught nothing about the parallel issue of sexism.
As a girl-child born in the land of the free and the equal, I thought Mary Tyler Moore and the rest of these characters were representing "normal" people with "normal" desires. Eventually, a lot of people came to see them that way...having laughed a little by the end of each episode.
Maybe the writing was special, like some like to believe it was. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" made the new, more feminist(?) world seem mundane. I don't know for sure. I simply cannot remember what I was thinking at the time then rehash something I really didn't notice to begin with.
But when I heard that Rhoda was sick? Maybe dying? That was when I remembered that women didn't always have..
- the same ability to keep a job. A woman in her 20s could be fired because it was assumed she'd want to have a baby, soon or within a few years.
- the same ability to get credit, and before that - the same ability to own property
- the same right to vote.
It wasn't the "something special in the writing" of these television shows that created these changes in society. These shows only reflected what was already in the process of happening. But shows like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" blew little more air on a fire already burning, a fire that had been burning for more than a century
That air was important.
But more important are the women that sacrificed and died advocating 'for women's rights on the grounds of that women should have political, social, and economic equality to men'--which is THE definition of feminism.
Did you know that some of the women who started one of the most important feminist organizations in the country, the National Organization for Women or N.O.W., were black?
I didn't until a few years ago.
A number of black women had a meeting after the meeting that was known as "The March On Washington" Why? Because black female civil rights leaders like Dorothy Height and Diane Nash were not allowed on stage to speak, deliberately not allowed to speak
...by black men I was taught to worship as a child.
The story goes, having forgotten their be-seen-and-not-heard place, Gloria Richardson, Rosa Parks and other black female civil rights leaders were sent back to the local hotel in a cab. And they were in that cab while Martin Luther King was giving his "I Have A Dream" speech. They listened to it on the radio. (It was all Lena Horne's fault. Earlier in the day she had spent some time trying to introduce Rosa Parks to the foreign press.)
That air was important.
But more important are the women that sacrificed and died advocating 'for women's rights on the grounds of that women should have political, social, and economic equality to men'--which is THE definition of feminism.
Did you know that some of the women who started one of the most important feminist organizations in the country, the National Organization for Women or N.O.W., were black?
I didn't until a few years ago.
A number of black women had a meeting after the meeting that was known as "The March On Washington" Why? Because black female civil rights leaders like Dorothy Height and Diane Nash were not allowed on stage to speak, deliberately not allowed to speak
...by black men I was taught to worship as a child.
The story goes, having forgotten their be-seen-and-not-heard place, Gloria Richardson, Rosa Parks and other black female civil rights leaders were sent back to the local hotel in a cab. And they were in that cab while Martin Luther King was giving his "I Have A Dream" speech. They listened to it on the radio. (It was all Lena Horne's fault. Earlier in the day she had spent some time trying to introduce Rosa Parks to the foreign press.)
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/27/civil_rights_pioneer_gloria_richardson_91
So, while too many people have let this word "feminism" be redefined by the status-quo loving / cowering-in-the-face-of-change opposition (and pro-feminist extremists too for that matter) I refuse to let anyone else redefine "feminism" FOR ME. I refuse to let them define it as something as silly as who should open the door for who OR something as ass-i-nine as "man-hater."
So I deeply believe in feminism even though:
So, while too many people have let this word "feminism" be redefined by the status-quo loving / cowering-in-the-face-of-change opposition (and pro-feminist extremists too for that matter) I refuse to let anyone else redefine "feminism" FOR ME. I refuse to let them define it as something as silly as who should open the door for who OR something as ass-i-nine as "man-hater."
-- in much the same way as I refuse to let some white people redefine "African American" as someone who is more loyal to Africa than America simply because the word "Africa" comes first.
-- in much the same way as I refuse to let some blacks redefine "blackness" as being loyal to anything and anyone in black skin.
So I deeply believe in feminism even though:
1) I do not believe in ALL the positions that the official feminist organizations believe in (Abortion as a form of birth control method no matter how far along the pregnancy is, is just one example. Time limits are a discussion female lawmakers need to have with one another)
2) I do not believe the words "sexual objectification" are meaningless at the very same time that I do know women need more "sexual freedom."
3) I know that white feminists have put themselves first at the same rate of speed, or faster, that black anti-racists have put black men first. And in my patriarchy-soaked brain, women are supposed to be "better than that."
4) etc
And even thought I know all this heavy feminism baggage exists, what I ALSO know is that all of us ought to be grateful for "The New Normal."
And I mean ALL of us, men and women. I know I am.
And I, for one, can't WAIT to see what feminism inspires next!
Can you?
And I, for one, can't WAIT to see what feminism inspires next!
Can you?
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