Gratitude For The New Normal that Feminism Wrought

                                  

Last year or the year before that someone on the news announced that Rhoda was dying of brain cancer. I hadn't thought of Rhoda (played by Valerie Harper) in years, decades maybe. I couldn't believe it when they said she was over 70 years old, well over. 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. Forget the internet, GPS, and microwaves. Bump all that! I re-realized that I was born a decade BEFORE women could easily get credit in their own name!!! 

When I was a kid, 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 also remember being 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 process of being born,

in the process of being fought for, of being protected

...and voted on. 

I didn't know my "normal" was being created and then reinforced by Mary Tyler Moore and Sally Struthers,' Gloria,  of  'All In The Family' fame.  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 it for a few years before she married.

But Mary Tyler Moore's job was not a pit stop before marriage. Her job was important to her. She wanted to be good at it and succeed at it.  All her energy was not focused 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. Career as consolation prize? 


At 11 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. This, somehow, I knew this practically from birth.  Sheltered as my parents tried to make me, I had eyes. Newspaper headlines shouted white supremacy at me daily too. 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. 

And those are 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!!!')



Whatever. The racism-sexism knowledge gap (read: chasm) is another train wreck for another time.


But 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. And I think 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 can't remember and 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 as men to get
   
• 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.
  
  
• and before that - the same ability to get credit,  and before that - the same ability to own property
  
  
• and before that - the same right to vote.

So then I considered that these changes didn't just change by magic. It wasn't  the "something special in the writing" that created these changes in society. The show only reflected what was in the process of happening. But shows like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"  blew little more air on a fire already burning. That 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 earliest, feminist-by-definition organizations in the country, the National Organization for Women or N.O.W.,  were black?


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 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." 

-- 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, is just one example)

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. I know I am.


And I, for one, can't WAIT to see what feminism inspires next!  Can you?

~Deborah Lynn