The Feminist

My mother used to tell me she wished I had a sister.

I’m not sure what effect a sister would have had on me, but I doubt it’s the one she intended. Had the sister been older, no doubt she would have bullied me and bossed me around as big sisters of my acquaintance seemed to do. Had she been younger, I would have resented her, because my mother would have constantly tried to impress on me the importance of being a good role model.

My life should stand more as a warning than as an example.

My parents had so much difficulty having babies, though, if I’d had an older sister, they probably would have given up before I was born, which is probably why I never had a younger sister.
For myself, I never had much use for a sister, other than the belief that it would have allowed me to get bunk beds. I would gladly have forgone the whole idea of a sister if I could just have had a loft bed.

For a brief period of time, I did have the role of “big sister” thrust on me when a much younger cousin came to live with us for about a year. While I loved my cousin, I hated the fact that he had, albeit briefly, usurped my role as the baby of the family. Worse, it came just at the time I discovered that female puberty was about to ruin my life.

Being the youngest, I had the benefit of having my brothers as an example, both of how to be and what not to do in this world. I learned from many of their mistakes. Of course, many of mine were far dumber.

I think my mother believed that a sister would have had a feminizing effect on me. I doubt it. Despite her best efforts at trying to teach me how to mother my dolls, I still carried them around by the neck or the leg. They often sat in chairs in groups, my audience while I sang or read to them or gave some sort of performance. They were the friends I didn’t have – or the captive audience friends were never interested in being.

My mindset was never being a mother. Babies were kind of noisy and demanding, and as an introvert, I definitely need down time. I never saw my mother get any of that. My dolls, after all, only cried when you squeezed their heads.

From my earliest memory, I had it in mind to have a career. Of course, my chosen career – actor/writer/rock star – never came to fruition. But it never occurred to me that marriage and motherhood were all that important, despite being told by most relatives that those were the best I could hope for and all that I should aspire to.

Yes, I was born in the ’50s.

Obviously, I did not accept their sage advice.

I knew what I wanted, even if I had no idea how to get it. And I was very definite in what I didn’t want – besides motherhood. I did not want to be a nun, a secretary, a nurse or a teacher. While all are fine careers – for someone else – they were not for me. They were also nearly the only careers open to middle class women.

I always found it very strange that people who thought they knew me would suggest that I was going to become a nun. Up until about a year before I married, one of our parish priests would refer to me – me, not the super religious girls – as “our nun.” And every time he did, I said in my head, “Ain’t gonna happen, Father. Not now, not ever.”

But I digress.

I came of age a few years after it became fashionable to burn one’s bra. Hippies were the dominant force during my late elementary school days and most of my high school years. While I may have worn bell bottoms because it was nearly impossible to get any other kind of trousers for women, I did not embrace hippiedom.

I did not march to the beat of Sgt. Pepper. In fact that album made me leave my precious Beatles for Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees. I didn’t like shoulder length hair and beards on men.  (Well, until Queen.) The most psychedelic song I liked was the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” I wasn’t interested in the drug culture. I was interested in things staying where they were when I was nine.

But one thing I did insist on was equality. I spent my childhood railing against the family double standard. Any time I wasn’t allowed to do something my brothers did, it wasn’t because they were older; it was because they were boys.

“That’s not my fault!” I’d reply. Later, my response was, “Blame my father for failing to give me a Y chromosome, but don’t hold it against me!”

Ah, you’re a feminist, people would say.

No, I just believe that people should be treated equally, regardless of a gender that is out of their control.

In high school my “guidance counselors” would take a group of us for college counseling. When they would ask what we wanted to be when we grew up, two of the five of us would say teachers, two would say nurses and I would say, “I want to be an actor.”

That was immediately met with, “I don’t know anything about that. But my sister is a nurse.”
So, we would spend a half hour talking about universities that had good teaching programs and those with good nursing programs, and I was relegated to fending for myself. The best I could say of those sessions were that they got me out of class, where I would have preferred to be. Obviously, my “counselors” had no idea how to deal with someone who wasn’t going into good girl (feel free to pat them on the head) professions.

When I would complain, I was told I needed to be realistic. I didn’t want to be realistic, I wanted a career! I wanted fairness.

Ah, a feminist. That was really looked down upon by the nuns in the Catholic schools I attended.

No, I just want fairness.

A few years later, while attending the wrong university – where I didn’t get the training I was looking for – I ended up graduating with two rather useless bachelor’s degrees. The highlight of my college career, the only reason for choosing my second major, was getting to spend a semester in the UK.

And still I tried to insist on fairness.

Oh, you’re a feminist.

To quote Charlie Brown, “Good grief!”

While I never achieved my career goal, after another stint in a university, I did end up in a job that allowed me to afford to travel, at least.

During a recent conversation about feminism, I suddenly realized that what most women call feminism is all about girl power, and putting men down as “less than” them. It’s about women who were so insecure in their being that the only way they could feel empowered was to put down those who weren’t them.

I don’t know what those women are, but I don’t believe they are real feminists. Listening to modern women who call themselves feminists, I think the real deal is someone who knows what she wants and goes after it. It is the woman who doesn’t need to “find a man” to have an identity, but who also doesn’t need to put men down to feel good about herself. She doesn’t accept the idea that “Women don’t do that.” Being a woman has nothing to do with what you want as a career – unless, perhaps, you’re trying to break into the oldest profession.

I still have a problem with being called a feminist. I guess it’s just the fact that, since I’m not a jar, I don’t like being labeled.

Empowerment

I did not grow up in the age of “girl power.” While I was encouraged to do my best in school and found most subjects fairly easy, girls were encouraged to be polite (I excelled), pretty (I failed) and fit in (I failed miserably).

I started high school to the strains of “I am Woman, hear me roar,” but somehow, I didn’t get the memo.

It started in elementary school. I was sent to school in the belief that 1) I would learn to read, and 2) I would make friends.

For the first half of my first year, I waited to learn to read. We recited the alphabet daily, were drilled on phonics and sight words and learned to write them in cursive, but as far as I was concerned, we weren’t reading. Until Christmas, we had no readers. When we finally received them, the stories fell into the category of stupid. I made up better stories, and I was six.

As for friends, I was clueless. I decided to play with the girl who sat in front of me in class, mainly because I knew her name (Debbie). That didn’t last. She had a pushy friend who said Debbie was her friend, and I couldn’t play with them. I learned about crossed games (“You can’t play; the game is crossed.”), playing tag with girls who could run faster than I could, and being told I thought I was a big shot because I usually knew the answers in class. I was told this by those who didn’t.

When I came home in tears because I had no friends, my mother would tell me I didn’t need friends like that. If I mentioned some mean retort I’d thought of saying back to the girls, she would tell me not to stoop to their level.

“Just think how you would feel if someone said that to you.”

But… someone did.

Years of being told that taught me to choke on standing up for myself. I learned enough empathy to spirit away others who were being bullied. I couldn’t stand up to the bullies, but I was friends with their victims until they got tired of me.

People often thought I was a push-over. They were wrong. I simply learned to be passive-aggressive, and wander off. Unfortunately, my lack of ability to stand up to people, and the ingrained admonishment to “be nice” caused me to date several people I didn’t want to date because I didn’t know how to turn them down without hurting their feelings. Fortunately, I knew how to be boring enough to help them decide they didn’t want to date me. They had no worries about hurting feelings.

I remember a nun in seventh grade telling us that people were meant to either get married or go into the religious life. The only reason to remain single was to care for aging parents. Anyone who stayed single for any other reason was selfish. At that, I raised my hand.

“Sister, what if no one ever asks you to marry them?”

My question was met with chuckles by my classmates. I took that to mean that they also understood that it was highly unlikely that anyone would ever ask me. And there was no way I was ever going to be a nun, no matter what.

“Sit down,” she said, as if it were inconceiveable that any woman anywhere could fail to be asked.

The women I see today are so much more confident than I ever was. I see that in teenagers as well.

I’ve attended several bat mitzvahs in my husband’s family, and I’m always amazed at the poise and style of the girl in question and her friends. Of course, they have the advantage of public school, where they are allowed to fraternize with boys, as we were not in my Catholic schools, so they have male friends as well as female ones, and are at ease with all of them.

When I think of myself at 13, I remember a pudgy tomboy who was awkward in every situation that didn’t involve having a guitar in my hands and singing. At 13 I was still very much a child, unlike my nieces and my husband’s cousins. I wouldn’t have fit into the kinds of dresses they wore, much less been able to walk in the heels or dance in said clothes.

Teens and college women are very nonchalant compared to who I was at those ages. I recall several times having people approach me when I was in my first year at Penn State and asking if I’d gone to Catholic school. When I said I had, the response was, “I thought so,” and the stranger with the strange question would walk away.

I don’t to this day understand what that question was about. I thought I was fairly cool in my layered hair, earth shoes, corduroy trousers and blazer over an Oxford shirt. I’d still dress that way, but they don’t make earth shoes like that anymore.

My colleagues at work seem to take all sorts of social situations in stride that I still struggle with. When I listen to them talk about dating, if they’re single, I think I never would have gotten away with talking to guys the way they do. If I’d even looked like I was going to give an ultimatum or make a demand, the guys who dated me would have taken me home, leaving me with no expectation of a call. Ever.

I wonder how people get that way. I was always made to feel that I didn’t have the right to be like other people; I was the outsider.

While I’ve improved with age, I still hate confrontations. I can usually avoid unpleasant situations. And there is something empowering about being happy keeping one’s own company. As the saying goes, “I live in my own little world, but it’s all right: they know me here.”