When a woman wants to be equal, she's antagonistic. When a man wants to equal, he's fighting for his rights. How much of the following do you agree with? I hope we women are "creating a climate where gay marriages are seen as acceptable".
Updated: 04:09 PM EDT
Vatican Says Modern Feminism Threatens Families
By Shasta Darlington, Reuters
VATICAN CITY (July 31) - Modern feminism's fight for power and gender equality is undermining the traditional concept of family and creating a climate where gay marriages are seen as acceptable, the Vatican said Saturday.
In a 37-page document "On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World," the Vatican said women should be respected and have equal rights in the workplace, but differences between the sexes must be recognized and exalted.
"Recent years have seen new approaches to women's issues" including a tendency "to emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism," it said.
Getty Images
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger heads the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The document, which re-stated Catholic Church positions, including the ban on female priests, said that many women felt they had to be "adversaries of men" in order to be themselves.
"Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women ... which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family."
The document is a booklet-letter to bishops by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department in charge of safeguarding and interpreting doctrine.
It criticizes feminism's attempt to erase gender differences.
This has "inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality," it says.
NO TO GAY MARRIAGE
Pope John Paul has repeatedly defended traditional marriage from the trend toward legalizing same-sex unions in the United States and Europe.
After Massachusetts became in May the first state in America to permit gay marriages, the issue has been hotly debated ahead of U.S. presidential elections.
"The reservation of priestly ordination solely to men does not hamper in any way women's access to the heart of Christian life."
-Vatican document
The document called for greater recognition of a woman's role as a mother and urged society to value it as real work.
But it also said women's access to the workplace and to positions of authority should not be limited.
"Although motherhood is a key element of women's identity, this does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation," it said.
The Vatican said women who choose to be full-time mothers should not be stigmatized, but at the same time, it appealed to governments to make it easier for mothers to hold outside jobs without "relinquishing their family life."
In the introduction, Ratzinger says the letter is meant "as a starting point for further examination in the Church, as well as an impetus for dialogue."
Among other issues, the document addresses the recurring question of whether the priesthood should be opened to women -- a possibility repeatedly denied by the pope.
The document says woman's role within the Church as a witness and "bride," as exemplified by the Virgin Mary, is key but different from man's.
"The reservation of priestly ordination solely to men does not hamper in any way women's access to the heart of Christian life," it said.
The Church teaches that it cannot change the rules banning women from the priesthood because Christ chose only men as his apostles.
Groups that favor female ordination say Christ was only acting according to the social norms of his times.
07/31/04 08:01 ET
Vatican Says Modern Feminism Threatens Families
Moderator: Super Moderators
Vatican Says Modern Feminism Threatens Families
Last edited by Bellisima on 07-31-2004 06:09 PM, edited 1 time in total.
While I clearly support Gay Marriage... and I believe in equal rights for women, including equal pay... I do not support feminism...because feminsim in my experience has become something not concerned with equal rights for women.. but instead has beocme - as it says in this letter, a social agenda dedicated to undermining the family as the basic social structure of our society...
Further, for many Feminists, feminsim has become an excuse to discriminate against men, to deny men equal rights before the law, and wage psychological warfare on little boys...all on the basis of their sex....
In this regard I would recommend Tammy Bruce's book Who Stole Feminism - Tammy Bruce is a Conservative ..and another by an author I cannot name called... The War on Boys...
Further, for many Feminists, feminsim has become an excuse to discriminate against men, to deny men equal rights before the law, and wage psychological warfare on little boys...all on the basis of their sex....
In this regard I would recommend Tammy Bruce's book Who Stole Feminism - Tammy Bruce is a Conservative ..and another by an author I cannot name called... The War on Boys...
Bellisima, to answer your question, I do not agree with the church's historic repression of women whatsoever. Our situation has improved in this country (women earned 63.9% of men's earnings in 1951, and 76% in 2002), but there is still room for improvement (of everyone's situation, really). I also think we need to keep in mind that our freedoms and our equality are by no means guaranteed. There are a number of trends going on in today's world, and in the Bush administration specifically, that make me fear for the freedom of not only women, but of men as well.
The whole world needs to move to having more respect and more loving care of everyone. Anything working in an opposite direction from that is, IMHO, a mistake.
The whole world needs to move to having more respect and more loving care of everyone. Anything working in an opposite direction from that is, IMHO, a mistake.
We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. B. Franklin
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Devastated
- Moderator - Hammock Expert
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- Joined: 12-29-2002 03:00 AM
I for one am glad that American women aren't all trapped in the laundry room and kitchen all day any more, taking care of ten kids to boot. That was nothing short of slavery.
If what I just said undermines the basic family system of American social structure so be it.
If what I just said undermines the basic family system of American social structure so be it.
You don't have to believe everything that you think...
Me too, Dev. We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to women who have come before us and have fought for our rights. Women gave their lives for our right to vote, and we haven't had it for that long.
It's interesting that the most war-torn areas of the world are the areas where they suppress their women the most, isn't it?
Bellisima, how do YOU feel about it, hon?
It's interesting that the most war-torn areas of the world are the areas where they suppress their women the most, isn't it?
Bellisima, how do YOU feel about it, hon?
We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. B. Franklin
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daboodaddy
- Pirate
- Posts: 3555
- Joined: 12-12-2000 03:00 AM
Frankly, I think it's the old barefoot and pregnant routine couched in clerical language.Originally posted by Iris
Bellisima, how do YOU feel about it, hon?
As, I said above, I am delighted if we are creating a climate where same sex marriages are seen as acceptable.
I would like to ask Aloha how Feminists are discriminating against men and to state that of all the Feminists I have known, not a single one would even dream of "waging psychological warfare on little boys".
Of course there were a few whackos in the feminist movement. Name a movement that didn't have a few whackos. That is no reason to discredit all the good that was done by many brave and outspoken women.
I'd like to see us all move toward more love and tolerance for one another, and yes, more equality and respect. That includes everybody.
I'd like to see us all move toward more love and tolerance for one another, and yes, more equality and respect. That includes everybody.
We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. B. Franklin
What I am posting below is an excerpt from the Preface (Never Follow a Dog Act) to Erica Jong’s excellent autobiography Fear of Fifty. I post this with the hope that perhaps Ms. Jong’s musing and amusing analysis will help we women here to put these issues into perspective. I also hope that perhaps in reading this excerpt you might be persuaded to buy a copy of this book and read it for yourself in its entirety. 
~*~*~*~*~*~
Excerpt from Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir by Erica Jong, published by Harper-Collins in 1994, pages xxv-xxx:
Note: I have edited this passage for brevity, but only in cases where I felt Ms. Jong’s still-excellent commentary strayed too far afield from the issues being discussed here on this thread, and those places are indicated by ellipses … oh, and one place in the first paragraph where I knew that the word she used wouldn’t make it through intact )
I look around me at fifty and see the women of my generation coping with getting older. They are perplexed, and the answer to their perplexity is not another book on hormones. The problem goes deeper than menopause, facelifts, or whether to f*ck younger men. It has to do with the whole image of self in a culture in love with youth and out of love with women as human beings. We are terrified at fifty because we do not know what on earth we can become when we are no longer young and cute. As at every stage of our lives, there are no role models for us. Twenty-five years of feminism (and backlash), then feminism again—and we still stand at the edge of an abyss. What to become now that our hormones have let us go?
It may seem that, in the last few years, there has been a spate of empowering books for midlife women, but how much have things really changed? Can we so easily undo fifty years of training for midlife self-annihilation?
***
I figure that if I’m confused, you are, too. After all, we are the whiplash generation (patent pending): raised to be Doris Day, yearning in our twenties to be Gloria Steinem, then doomed to raise our midlife daughters in the age of Nancy Reagan and Princess Di. ... But sexism (like athlete’s foot) still flourishes in dark, moist places.
What a roller-coaster ride it’s been! Our gender went in and out of style as hems went up and down and up and down and up again, as feminism rose and fell and rose and fell and rose again, as motherhood was blessed then damned then blessed then damned then blessed again.
…[W]e grew up in the era of the Sexual Revolution—an essentially fake media event that was promptly replaced by good old-fashioned American Puritanism when the AIDS epidemic hit. The tragedy of losing a whole generation of some of the most talented among us was predictably turned into an excuse to bash the life-force and her messenger, Eros. Sex was out, was in, was out, was in, was out—a new twist on what Anthony Burgess called “the old in-out” in A Clockwork Orange.
***
The point was: We whiplashers could depend on nothing in our erotic or social lives.
Think of the advice we got growing up. Then think of the world we grew up into!
“Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve!”
“Don’t let men know how smart you are!”
“If he has milk, why should he buy the cow?”
“It’s as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.”
“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”
“A man chases a girl until she catches him.”
“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
If we’d been stupid enough to live the lives our mothers and grandmothers proverbs spoke of, we’d all be bag ladies, scavenging in garbage pails. If we’d been stupid enough to live the lives the magazines and movies of the sixties and seventies recommended, we’d all be dead of AIDS.
Raised to believe that men would protect and support us, we often found that we had to protect and support them. Raised to believe we could care for our children full time (at least when they were little), we often found Donna Reed motherhood a luxury few of us could afford. Raised to believe that femininity consisted of softness and conciliation, we often found that our very survival—in divorce, in work, even in our homes—depended upon our revising those ideas of femininity and sticking up for our needs.
We found ourselves always torn between the mothers in our heads and the women we needed to become simply to stay alive. With one foot in the past and another in the future, we hobbled through first love, motherhood, marriage, divorce, careers, menopause, widowhood—never knowing what or who we were supposed to be, staking out new emotional territory at every turn—like pioneers.
We have been pioneers in our own lives, and the price of the pioneers is eternal discomfort. The reward is the stunning sense of pride in our painfully achieved selfhood.
…
The women of my generation are reaching fifty in a state of perplexity and rage. None of the things we counted on has come to pass. The ground keeps shifting under our feet. Any psychologist or psychoanalyst will tell you that the hardest thing to deal with is inconsistency. And we have known a degree of inconsistency in our personal lives that would make anyone schizophrenic. Perhaps our grandmothers were better able to cope with the expectation of oppression than we have been able to adjust to our much-vaunted freedom. And our freedom anyway is moot. Our “freedom” is still a word we can put in inverted commas to get a laugh.
For decades, we couldn’t expect to take a maternity leave and get our jobs back, let alone find affordable day care. No day care, no Americans who wanted to be nannies …
With ascending expectations and a declining standard of living, we asked ourselves what on earth went wrong. Nothing went wrong. We were merely brought up in one culture and came of age in another. And now we are hitting fifty in a world that is grandstanding about feminism once again. But this time we have good reason to be skeptical. This time we have a good reason to anticipate the next backlash.
The whiplash generation is, in its own way, a lost generation. Like spectators at a tennis game, we keep snapping our heads from side to side.
No wonder our necks hurt!
Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right. Perhaps there were flappers of the twenties who longed for the security of their grandmothers’ lives. But the first wave of feminism at least carried its members along on a current of hope. And the second wave (of the late sixties and early seventies) made us dream that women’s equality would soon be universal. So my classmates and I have seen women’s expectations raised and dashed and raised and dashed and raised again in our not very long lives. The brevity of the cycles has been dizzying—and enraging.
The media still try to comfort us with bromides. Fifty is fabulous, we hear. We should wear hemorrhoid cream on our wrinkles and march off into the sunset popping Premarin. We should forget centuries of oppression in exchange for a new hat with “Fabulous Fifty” embroidered on the brim.
***
What about our need—women and men both—to prepare for death in a culture that mocks all spirituality as “new age” pretension? What about our need to see ourselves as part of the flow of creation? What about the deep loneliness our individualistic culture breeds? What about the dismissal of community and communal values? What about society’s mockery of all activities other than getting and spending? What about our own despair in seeing liars and manipulators become rich and powerful while truth tellers are chronically outmaneuvered and fall through that porous “safety net” the liars have woven with loopholes for themselves and their children?
But most of all, what about meaning and what about spirit? These are not empty words. These are the nutrients we hunger for increasingly as we age.
“More things move,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote in one of her last poems, “than blood in the heart.” As human beings, we long for some ritual that tells us we are part of a tribe, part of a species, part of a generation. Instead we are offered hormone replacement therapy or pep talks about how hip it is to be fabulously fifty.
Let’s be clear: These pep talks insult our intelligence. We cannot so easily forget that we were raised in a world that mocked female maturity. We cannot easily forget generations of jokes about old bags, cows, yentas, witches, crones. “Menopause-lady painters” my artist-grandfather used to say about the women who shared a studio with him at the Art Students League. And I didn’t even realize that this remark was sexist and agist. I just dismissed the old bags—as he did—hardly knowing I was dismissing my own future.
Just because new shibboleths are broadcast over the airwaves, or printed on glossy pages, we cannot expect our images of self to be instantly healed. We are more than just consumers of magazines, television shows, makeup, face-lifts, clothes. We have inner scars, inner wounds, inner needs. We cannot be treated like chattel for fifty years and then suddenly be flattered into political compliance because it has been discovered (quite belatedly) that we vote.
The new hype trumpets that fifty is fab because the baby boom generation has reached that formerly dangerous age and we now run things—or rather our husbands and brothers do.
…
In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have been turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
In our primes, we looked around the world and saw an epidemic of rape frequently not even reported in mainstream newspapers. In our childbearing years, we frequently met our deadlines only by losing sleep. We began to get angry, really angry, angry for the second time in our adult lives. But now we knew that the time was short.
We are finally learning to harness our anger and use it to change the world. But we have not stopped turning against each other. Until we do, sisterhood will continue to be a comforting theory rather than an everyday reality.
That is the next great taboo subject: When will women learn not to divide but to unite? And how can we learn to be allies when society still pits us against each other as tokens?
***
At fifty, the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won’t be imprisoned anymore. The second wave of anger is purer than the first. Suddenly the divisions between women don’t matter. Old or young, brown or white, gay or straight, married or un-, poor or rich—we are all discriminated against just because we are women. And we won’t go back to the old world of injustice. We can’t. It’s too late.
The anger of midlife is a ferocious anger. In our twenties, with success and motherhood still before us, we could imagine that something would save us from second-classness—either achievement or marriage or motherhood. Now we know that nothing can save us. We have to save ourselves.
~End of Excerpt~
Edited for typos...
~*~*~*~*~*~
Excerpt from Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir by Erica Jong, published by Harper-Collins in 1994, pages xxv-xxx:
Note: I have edited this passage for brevity, but only in cases where I felt Ms. Jong’s still-excellent commentary strayed too far afield from the issues being discussed here on this thread, and those places are indicated by ellipses … oh, and one place in the first paragraph where I knew that the word she used wouldn’t make it through intact
) I look around me at fifty and see the women of my generation coping with getting older. They are perplexed, and the answer to their perplexity is not another book on hormones. The problem goes deeper than menopause, facelifts, or whether to f*ck younger men. It has to do with the whole image of self in a culture in love with youth and out of love with women as human beings. We are terrified at fifty because we do not know what on earth we can become when we are no longer young and cute. As at every stage of our lives, there are no role models for us. Twenty-five years of feminism (and backlash), then feminism again—and we still stand at the edge of an abyss. What to become now that our hormones have let us go?
It may seem that, in the last few years, there has been a spate of empowering books for midlife women, but how much have things really changed? Can we so easily undo fifty years of training for midlife self-annihilation?
***
I figure that if I’m confused, you are, too. After all, we are the whiplash generation (patent pending): raised to be Doris Day, yearning in our twenties to be Gloria Steinem, then doomed to raise our midlife daughters in the age of Nancy Reagan and Princess Di. ... But sexism (like athlete’s foot) still flourishes in dark, moist places.
What a roller-coaster ride it’s been! Our gender went in and out of style as hems went up and down and up and down and up again, as feminism rose and fell and rose and fell and rose again, as motherhood was blessed then damned then blessed then damned then blessed again.
…[W]e grew up in the era of the Sexual Revolution—an essentially fake media event that was promptly replaced by good old-fashioned American Puritanism when the AIDS epidemic hit. The tragedy of losing a whole generation of some of the most talented among us was predictably turned into an excuse to bash the life-force and her messenger, Eros. Sex was out, was in, was out, was in, was out—a new twist on what Anthony Burgess called “the old in-out” in A Clockwork Orange.
***
The point was: We whiplashers could depend on nothing in our erotic or social lives.
Think of the advice we got growing up. Then think of the world we grew up into!
“Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve!”
“Don’t let men know how smart you are!”
“If he has milk, why should he buy the cow?”
“It’s as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.”
“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”
“A man chases a girl until she catches him.”
“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
If we’d been stupid enough to live the lives our mothers and grandmothers proverbs spoke of, we’d all be bag ladies, scavenging in garbage pails. If we’d been stupid enough to live the lives the magazines and movies of the sixties and seventies recommended, we’d all be dead of AIDS.
Raised to believe that men would protect and support us, we often found that we had to protect and support them. Raised to believe we could care for our children full time (at least when they were little), we often found Donna Reed motherhood a luxury few of us could afford. Raised to believe that femininity consisted of softness and conciliation, we often found that our very survival—in divorce, in work, even in our homes—depended upon our revising those ideas of femininity and sticking up for our needs.
We found ourselves always torn between the mothers in our heads and the women we needed to become simply to stay alive. With one foot in the past and another in the future, we hobbled through first love, motherhood, marriage, divorce, careers, menopause, widowhood—never knowing what or who we were supposed to be, staking out new emotional territory at every turn—like pioneers.
We have been pioneers in our own lives, and the price of the pioneers is eternal discomfort. The reward is the stunning sense of pride in our painfully achieved selfhood.
…
The women of my generation are reaching fifty in a state of perplexity and rage. None of the things we counted on has come to pass. The ground keeps shifting under our feet. Any psychologist or psychoanalyst will tell you that the hardest thing to deal with is inconsistency. And we have known a degree of inconsistency in our personal lives that would make anyone schizophrenic. Perhaps our grandmothers were better able to cope with the expectation of oppression than we have been able to adjust to our much-vaunted freedom. And our freedom anyway is moot. Our “freedom” is still a word we can put in inverted commas to get a laugh.
For decades, we couldn’t expect to take a maternity leave and get our jobs back, let alone find affordable day care. No day care, no Americans who wanted to be nannies …
With ascending expectations and a declining standard of living, we asked ourselves what on earth went wrong. Nothing went wrong. We were merely brought up in one culture and came of age in another. And now we are hitting fifty in a world that is grandstanding about feminism once again. But this time we have good reason to be skeptical. This time we have a good reason to anticipate the next backlash.
The whiplash generation is, in its own way, a lost generation. Like spectators at a tennis game, we keep snapping our heads from side to side.
No wonder our necks hurt!
Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right. Perhaps there were flappers of the twenties who longed for the security of their grandmothers’ lives. But the first wave of feminism at least carried its members along on a current of hope. And the second wave (of the late sixties and early seventies) made us dream that women’s equality would soon be universal. So my classmates and I have seen women’s expectations raised and dashed and raised and dashed and raised again in our not very long lives. The brevity of the cycles has been dizzying—and enraging.
The media still try to comfort us with bromides. Fifty is fabulous, we hear. We should wear hemorrhoid cream on our wrinkles and march off into the sunset popping Premarin. We should forget centuries of oppression in exchange for a new hat with “Fabulous Fifty” embroidered on the brim.
***
What about our need—women and men both—to prepare for death in a culture that mocks all spirituality as “new age” pretension? What about our need to see ourselves as part of the flow of creation? What about the deep loneliness our individualistic culture breeds? What about the dismissal of community and communal values? What about society’s mockery of all activities other than getting and spending? What about our own despair in seeing liars and manipulators become rich and powerful while truth tellers are chronically outmaneuvered and fall through that porous “safety net” the liars have woven with loopholes for themselves and their children?
But most of all, what about meaning and what about spirit? These are not empty words. These are the nutrients we hunger for increasingly as we age.
“More things move,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote in one of her last poems, “than blood in the heart.” As human beings, we long for some ritual that tells us we are part of a tribe, part of a species, part of a generation. Instead we are offered hormone replacement therapy or pep talks about how hip it is to be fabulously fifty.
Let’s be clear: These pep talks insult our intelligence. We cannot so easily forget that we were raised in a world that mocked female maturity. We cannot easily forget generations of jokes about old bags, cows, yentas, witches, crones. “Menopause-lady painters” my artist-grandfather used to say about the women who shared a studio with him at the Art Students League. And I didn’t even realize that this remark was sexist and agist. I just dismissed the old bags—as he did—hardly knowing I was dismissing my own future.
Just because new shibboleths are broadcast over the airwaves, or printed on glossy pages, we cannot expect our images of self to be instantly healed. We are more than just consumers of magazines, television shows, makeup, face-lifts, clothes. We have inner scars, inner wounds, inner needs. We cannot be treated like chattel for fifty years and then suddenly be flattered into political compliance because it has been discovered (quite belatedly) that we vote.
The new hype trumpets that fifty is fab because the baby boom generation has reached that formerly dangerous age and we now run things—or rather our husbands and brothers do.
…
In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have been turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
In our primes, we looked around the world and saw an epidemic of rape frequently not even reported in mainstream newspapers. In our childbearing years, we frequently met our deadlines only by losing sleep. We began to get angry, really angry, angry for the second time in our adult lives. But now we knew that the time was short.
We are finally learning to harness our anger and use it to change the world. But we have not stopped turning against each other. Until we do, sisterhood will continue to be a comforting theory rather than an everyday reality.
That is the next great taboo subject: When will women learn not to divide but to unite? And how can we learn to be allies when society still pits us against each other as tokens?
***
At fifty, the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won’t be imprisoned anymore. The second wave of anger is purer than the first. Suddenly the divisions between women don’t matter. Old or young, brown or white, gay or straight, married or un-, poor or rich—we are all discriminated against just because we are women. And we won’t go back to the old world of injustice. We can’t. It’s too late.
The anger of midlife is a ferocious anger. In our twenties, with success and motherhood still before us, we could imagine that something would save us from second-classness—either achievement or marriage or motherhood. Now we know that nothing can save us. We have to save ourselves.
~End of Excerpt~
Edited for typos...
Last edited by Joolz on 08-01-2004 09:38 PM, edited 1 time in total.
Anchors Aweigh!Below is another quote from Erica Jong’s book, this time an anecdote from personal experience, and one that I think outlines the current trend in feminist thought.
Excerpts from Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir by Erica Jong, published by Harper-Collins in 1994, pages 280-287:
Note: Again, I have edited this passage for brevity, and those places are indicated by ellipses … )
We call ourselves best friends. ...
Gerri and I met on a Sunday afternoon in the seventies. I was wearing an ivory crocheted string bathing suit with more holes than string and she was wearing a tank suit—probably Speedo. …
In a lot of ways we were opposites. She had three children and I then had none. She had always wanted to be a mother and was perplexed after motherhood stopped being a full-time job. I had never wanted to be a mother, but took her word for it that it was great. She was verbally quick and clever, but didn’t feel my need to get everything down on paper. She was an athlete and I was a desk person. …
Pretty soon we discovered that we were almost the same age … that we both loved Italy, ribald jokes, and vodka and orange juice on summer afternoons by the pool. We swam through pools of vodka like John Cheever’s swimmer. …
When I was pregnant with Molly the following summer, she helped to make the pregnancy into one long celebration. I remember days by her pool, with families mingled, and nights in my hot tub, when all four of us took sidelong glances at one another’s naked bodies and decided our friendship was more important.
When Molly was born, Gerri and I bonded more closely. I understood now how she had spent what she considered the best days of her life. At that point, I was terrified of caring for an infant. I tried to imagine I was Gerri, but I was not. I could not always give that unbroken concentration children demand, but at least I had a model for it.
My own mind was chronically divided. When I was singing to my child, I heard the siren song of my book. When I was immersed in my book, I missed my child. Only occasionally did I fall into that rapt listening that is the principal gift of motherhood.
…
Gerri and I had similar mothers: another bond. Both were loving but unpredictable wild creatures. Both could go off into the ozone. And suddenly come back. Both of us had to learn to live with this. Since we are both middle children, looking for our place in the family constellation, each of us found it by being the family clown. And neither of us has ever abandoned the ”Ridi, Pagliaccio” role. We both laugh to hide our pain.
And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision. That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst, remind you of your strengths when you feel weal. And speak the truth—but without malice. Loving candor is the secret of friendship.
…
She never became my competitor, nor I hers. An amateur mother with only one child, I never took even a month off from writing. And it was already too late for me to have three kids. For me, then, she was a road not taken—an earth mother like my older sister. She was proof that plenty of funny, literate, intelligent women might choose to focus their lives on motherhood.
Her life was a balance wheel to mine. From her I learned that feminism had to include women like her. From her I learned that just because a woman chooses to be a homemaker, it doesn’t mean she wants an all-male Congress, or an all-male Supreme Court. My grandmother could have taught me that, but my grandmother had trained me not to listen to her.
In the mid-seventies, when Gerri and I became friends, the women’s movement was in the midst of this very crisis. The heady enthusiasms of the late sixties and early seventies had inevitably waned and it was time for the movement to embrace the average woman with children rather than alienate her. The failure of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to forge an alliance was symptomatic of the problem. Women who rejected family life despised women who had embraced family life. Perhaps the hatred was sour grapes. The urge to have children is so strong that you renounce it in yourself only at great cost.
My best friend understood all this long before I did.
“How can I identify with a movement that says I have to be childless or a lesbian in order to be a feminist?”
“You’re exaggerating the problem,” I told her. “You’re part of the constituency, too.”
But she felt excluded. And so did many women. I meet them everywhere—these passionate feminists who love men and children. Until we openly acknowledge the mistakes feminism made before the backlash decade, we cannot prevent backlash from happening again.
As women we still need practice in making alliances with other women. We still tend to see other women as competitors to be eliminated. We still act out All About Eve. Younger women plot to replace older women; older women find it harder to praise younger women. Men are led up the success ladder by male mentors, while we find ways to put down members of our own sex. We are not even allowed to admit this sabotage because it is officially nonexistent. But we have all experienced it. And the more we keep silent about it, the more we prolong its power over us.
~End of Excerpt~
~*~*~*~*~*~
Sorry those excerpts were so long, but I really wanted to share Erica’s words with all of you because I feel that they speak to the heart of the issue this thread seems to be evolving into, and also because I truly hope that after reading this you will feel persuaded to read the whole book!
Now… my own thoughts. As Ms. Jong outlines, yes, the feminist movement made a mistake. In speaking with young feminists today (remember, I am in college at 50), and in discussions with them—and young men as well—along with the professor (a wonderful woman who was my age) in a Women’s History class I took a few years ago, I’ve learned that the current movement is not the same one many of us here grew up with. Choices and equality for women means exactly that nowadays to most feminist women. That there are no right or wrong choices as far as career vs. motherhood—both are viable choices. It means that women who choose to concentrate their lives on motherhood should be honored among feminists as well as those who choose careers.
The problem here goes deeper than just the feminist movement, however. Feminism during the sixties and seventies and even into the eighties was only responding to a culture that devalues women at the basic level, a culture in which motherhood and children are not honored. If we want true and lasting change, we must work to change this view on a cultural level. Feminists of that day thought that we could achieve equality by doing what had previously been thought of as “men’s work.” But that only attacked the problem from one side and left another front totally bereft. Woman as mother is sacred, IMO. Cultures the world around have honored her so. And I do believe that the women’s movement of today sees this and they are working hard to rectify it. They are evolving again.
The women’s movement has happened in stages. It is spoken of in women’s studies today as having happened in “waves.” The first wave of feminism was the one that won us the right to vote. The second wave of feminism was the one that brought us Roe v. Wade and better working conditions (not truly equal yet, tho), and a variety of other changes for the better—and I count even changes such as little girls being allowed to wear pants to school instead of dresses all the time as a change brought about because of the women’s movement. Right now, we are immersed in the third wave of feminism, and it is this wave that will finally bring those women who felt “left out,” those who embraced motherhood rather than career, into the fold. That is the goal. We can help work toward it, or we can keep carping about it. But I do believe it IS happening.
Do we then eschew feminism in its entirety because it failed to embrace these women in its second wave? I say no. As I see it, to reject feminism outright is to slap in the face women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who fought for our right to vote, it is to slap in the face women like Margaret Sanger, who fought for our right to control our own bodies using birth control, it is to slap in the face women like Alice Paul, who was jailed for demonstrating for women’s rights, and who helped to win the vote for us by going on a hunger strike while jailed… and so many, many more brave and courageous women who have fought for our rights. Our ability to come here to this place and voice our opinions is due to their diligence, their hard work, their vision. We stand on their shoulders. So, I claim the “F” word proudly, and am not afraid to say I AM a feminist. I am also a mother, and a wife three times over, have had the privilege in holding more jobs than I care to count, and have proudly cast my vote in every election that has been held since I came of an age to do so.
I do not post any of this to argue with anyone. And I won’t. These are my thoughts. This is my stance. Nothing I’ve said here is negotiable.
P.S. - Please check out the film Iron Jawed Angels to learn more about Alice Paul—Hillary Swank plays Ms. Paul and is absolutely awesome—I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in learning more about the early stages of the women’s movement. It is a powerful film.
Excerpts from Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir by Erica Jong, published by Harper-Collins in 1994, pages 280-287:
Note: Again, I have edited this passage for brevity, and those places are indicated by ellipses … )
We call ourselves best friends. ...
Gerri and I met on a Sunday afternoon in the seventies. I was wearing an ivory crocheted string bathing suit with more holes than string and she was wearing a tank suit—probably Speedo. …
In a lot of ways we were opposites. She had three children and I then had none. She had always wanted to be a mother and was perplexed after motherhood stopped being a full-time job. I had never wanted to be a mother, but took her word for it that it was great. She was verbally quick and clever, but didn’t feel my need to get everything down on paper. She was an athlete and I was a desk person. …
Pretty soon we discovered that we were almost the same age … that we both loved Italy, ribald jokes, and vodka and orange juice on summer afternoons by the pool. We swam through pools of vodka like John Cheever’s swimmer. …
When I was pregnant with Molly the following summer, she helped to make the pregnancy into one long celebration. I remember days by her pool, with families mingled, and nights in my hot tub, when all four of us took sidelong glances at one another’s naked bodies and decided our friendship was more important.
When Molly was born, Gerri and I bonded more closely. I understood now how she had spent what she considered the best days of her life. At that point, I was terrified of caring for an infant. I tried to imagine I was Gerri, but I was not. I could not always give that unbroken concentration children demand, but at least I had a model for it.
My own mind was chronically divided. When I was singing to my child, I heard the siren song of my book. When I was immersed in my book, I missed my child. Only occasionally did I fall into that rapt listening that is the principal gift of motherhood.
…
Gerri and I had similar mothers: another bond. Both were loving but unpredictable wild creatures. Both could go off into the ozone. And suddenly come back. Both of us had to learn to live with this. Since we are both middle children, looking for our place in the family constellation, each of us found it by being the family clown. And neither of us has ever abandoned the ”Ridi, Pagliaccio” role. We both laugh to hide our pain.
And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision. That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst, remind you of your strengths when you feel weal. And speak the truth—but without malice. Loving candor is the secret of friendship.
…
She never became my competitor, nor I hers. An amateur mother with only one child, I never took even a month off from writing. And it was already too late for me to have three kids. For me, then, she was a road not taken—an earth mother like my older sister. She was proof that plenty of funny, literate, intelligent women might choose to focus their lives on motherhood.
Her life was a balance wheel to mine. From her I learned that feminism had to include women like her. From her I learned that just because a woman chooses to be a homemaker, it doesn’t mean she wants an all-male Congress, or an all-male Supreme Court. My grandmother could have taught me that, but my grandmother had trained me not to listen to her.
In the mid-seventies, when Gerri and I became friends, the women’s movement was in the midst of this very crisis. The heady enthusiasms of the late sixties and early seventies had inevitably waned and it was time for the movement to embrace the average woman with children rather than alienate her. The failure of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to forge an alliance was symptomatic of the problem. Women who rejected family life despised women who had embraced family life. Perhaps the hatred was sour grapes. The urge to have children is so strong that you renounce it in yourself only at great cost.
My best friend understood all this long before I did.
“How can I identify with a movement that says I have to be childless or a lesbian in order to be a feminist?”
“You’re exaggerating the problem,” I told her. “You’re part of the constituency, too.”
But she felt excluded. And so did many women. I meet them everywhere—these passionate feminists who love men and children. Until we openly acknowledge the mistakes feminism made before the backlash decade, we cannot prevent backlash from happening again.
As women we still need practice in making alliances with other women. We still tend to see other women as competitors to be eliminated. We still act out All About Eve. Younger women plot to replace older women; older women find it harder to praise younger women. Men are led up the success ladder by male mentors, while we find ways to put down members of our own sex. We are not even allowed to admit this sabotage because it is officially nonexistent. But we have all experienced it. And the more we keep silent about it, the more we prolong its power over us.
~End of Excerpt~
~*~*~*~*~*~
Sorry those excerpts were so long, but I really wanted to share Erica’s words with all of you because I feel that they speak to the heart of the issue this thread seems to be evolving into, and also because I truly hope that after reading this you will feel persuaded to read the whole book!
Now… my own thoughts. As Ms. Jong outlines, yes, the feminist movement made a mistake. In speaking with young feminists today (remember, I am in college at 50), and in discussions with them—and young men as well—along with the professor (a wonderful woman who was my age) in a Women’s History class I took a few years ago, I’ve learned that the current movement is not the same one many of us here grew up with. Choices and equality for women means exactly that nowadays to most feminist women. That there are no right or wrong choices as far as career vs. motherhood—both are viable choices. It means that women who choose to concentrate their lives on motherhood should be honored among feminists as well as those who choose careers.
The problem here goes deeper than just the feminist movement, however. Feminism during the sixties and seventies and even into the eighties was only responding to a culture that devalues women at the basic level, a culture in which motherhood and children are not honored. If we want true and lasting change, we must work to change this view on a cultural level. Feminists of that day thought that we could achieve equality by doing what had previously been thought of as “men’s work.” But that only attacked the problem from one side and left another front totally bereft. Woman as mother is sacred, IMO. Cultures the world around have honored her so. And I do believe that the women’s movement of today sees this and they are working hard to rectify it. They are evolving again.
The women’s movement has happened in stages. It is spoken of in women’s studies today as having happened in “waves.” The first wave of feminism was the one that won us the right to vote. The second wave of feminism was the one that brought us Roe v. Wade and better working conditions (not truly equal yet, tho), and a variety of other changes for the better—and I count even changes such as little girls being allowed to wear pants to school instead of dresses all the time as a change brought about because of the women’s movement. Right now, we are immersed in the third wave of feminism, and it is this wave that will finally bring those women who felt “left out,” those who embraced motherhood rather than career, into the fold. That is the goal. We can help work toward it, or we can keep carping about it. But I do believe it IS happening.
Do we then eschew feminism in its entirety because it failed to embrace these women in its second wave? I say no. As I see it, to reject feminism outright is to slap in the face women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who fought for our right to vote, it is to slap in the face women like Margaret Sanger, who fought for our right to control our own bodies using birth control, it is to slap in the face women like Alice Paul, who was jailed for demonstrating for women’s rights, and who helped to win the vote for us by going on a hunger strike while jailed… and so many, many more brave and courageous women who have fought for our rights. Our ability to come here to this place and voice our opinions is due to their diligence, their hard work, their vision. We stand on their shoulders. So, I claim the “F” word proudly, and am not afraid to say I AM a feminist. I am also a mother, and a wife three times over, have had the privilege in holding more jobs than I care to count, and have proudly cast my vote in every election that has been held since I came of an age to do so.
I do not post any of this to argue with anyone. And I won’t. These are my thoughts. This is my stance. Nothing I’ve said here is negotiable.
P.S. - Please check out the film Iron Jawed Angels to learn more about Alice Paul—Hillary Swank plays Ms. Paul and is absolutely awesome—I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in learning more about the early stages of the women’s movement. It is a powerful film.
Last edited by Joolz on 08-01-2004 09:46 PM, edited 1 time in total.
Anchors Aweigh!Ah, Joolz, I knew this thread needed you! I was waiting for you to make it through your grand celebratory weekend and descend on this topic with all your wisdom, and you didn't disappoint.
Please don't apologize for your excerpts being long; they were thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking. In fact, as far as I'm concerned you're welcome to type the rest of the book here. lol! Thanks for taking the time to share this with us, as well as your own thoughts. You are far more "up" on the current trends than many of us.
Please don't apologize for your excerpts being long; they were thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking. In fact, as far as I'm concerned you're welcome to type the rest of the book here. lol! Thanks for taking the time to share this with us, as well as your own thoughts. You are far more "up" on the current trends than many of us.
We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. B. Franklin