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Non-Conforming Women

4/14/2019

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Two famous women are on my mind, recently. Diana Athill (1917-2019), a British literary editor, died in January (2019) at age 101. And Nuala O’Faolain (1940-2008), an Irish journalist.

Both of their lives overlapped with mine. After reading their memoirs, I was struck by their unconventional romantic lives. You could say “wild,” “immoral,” “creative,” and “reckless.” I’ll use the neutral word “non-conforming.”

I told a friend: “I wish I’d known a woman could have a life like that. It would have lifted a lot of guilt, confusion, and tortured decisions. I wanted to be Bohemian, and secretly was, but didn’t realize it was allowed.” My friend said: “Most of that behavior was secret at the time. That’s why you didn’t know. And it wasn’t allowed.”

In retrospect, I did know about wild women during my college days, the impressionable years. In reading about existentialism, I encountered Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), a French intellectual and the author of a feminist classic, The Second Sex. She and her partner Jean Paul Sartre were together for more than fifty years, but lived separately and had an open relationship.

Anais Nin (1903-1977), a French-Cuban writer and student of psychoanalysis, wrote more than fifteen volumes between 1914 through 1955, and is known for her frankness about sex. One of her lovers was Henry Miller. A few volumes of her diaries were part of my erotic education.

They were both Bohemians in Paris. Bohemians are by definition unconventional, artistic, adventurous, and even intentionally poor. They were into free love.

Diana Athill became engaged very young and waited for her fiancé through World War II, but he chose not to come back to her. She became lovers with someone with whom she founded a publishing house, and worked with him for 50 years. She had a love affair with an Egyptian writer. She had a long relationship with an African American writer. She spent four decades living with a Jamaican playwriter, during which a younger woman moved in and shared him. She had a miscarriage at 43 that nearly killed her, otherwise no children.

When Nuala O’Faolain arrived in Ireland in the 1940s, she says “It was a tomb for women.”  Her mother fell in love with a peer in journalism school, and then went on to have nine children, while her husband worked far away and took lovers after the first three children. Catholic Ireland discouraged education for women, suppressed all sex education, and outlawed and punished abortion and illegitimacy. Nuala grew up as a “nobody.” Her mother and siblings became “ferocious” alcoholics.

She escaped the “wasteland” of her childhood with the support of an older male mentor who paid her way to a boarding school. She never married but had long relationships, some with married men. She was “in trouble” all her life, promiscuous and drunk. Life was rough as she came out of naivete and poverty to enter upper class and cosmopolitan social circles. She smoked and drank too much all her life; she was known to be angry and sarcastic. Nevertheless, she became a renowned journalist for the BBC, an academic, and a successful author.

One woman was born to privilege, and after feeling abandoned and foiled in her “proper path,” gave up on a traditional romantic life. The other was born in extreme poverty, and feeling her life was hopeless, broke all the rules of “decency” that had never served her and went out and made the best of it.

In my generation, women with unconventional relationships were in forbidden territory, morally.

Times have changed, though. The hook-up culture, single parenthood and other trends have taken some of the stigma out of being non-conforming. Single parenthood is at about 35% of households. The overall percentage of women who have no children has doubled in a generation from nine percent to eighteen percent (data from 2017). The percentage of childless goes up for professional women—from 45% to even 80% (a statistic I remember for my generation, for whom delegated childcare was controversial).
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Non-conforming life styles, it turns out, have always been around, even outside Paris, and now they’re decent enough.

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Shut up, you bitch

4/15/2018

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​Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge is a well-known expert and author of a history of ancient Rome. She is also present on social media, including a blog and a Twitter feed.

Just this past December she published two talks as Women & Power: a Manifesto. https://www.amazon.com/Women-Power-Manifesto-Mary-Beard/dp/1631494759/

She traces the origins of misogyny to ancient Greek and Roman roots. Women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life since then, and public speech has historically been defined as inherently male.

She draws on classic and contemporary examples, including the battering of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren.

p. 36. “It doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves. They include a fairly predictable menu of rape, bombing, murder and so forth. … A significant subsection is directed at silencing the woman. ‘Shut up you bitch.’ … In its crude, aggressive way, this is about keeping, or getting, women out of man’s talk.”

If you look at her Twitter feed, you’ll see that she is very familiar with the most vicious of Internet trolls, and even jokes with them in her Tweets.

In fact, if you are a student of “how bad does the trolling get,” this is one place to look. Also, take a look at responses to #MeToo messages. And “gamergate” messaging, when females in the gaming industry complained about their treatment by male peers and got death threats.

Other quotes:

p. 53 “My basic premise is that our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male. … To put this the other way around, we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.”  [photo of Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton in the “female politician’s uniform” of trousers—a dark pant suit.]

p. 62 [regarding the myths about Amazon women] “The basic message was that the only good Amazon was a dead one, or one that had been mastered, in the bedroom. The underlying point was that it was the duty of men to save civilization from the rule of women.”

Her point about “our mental, cultural template” echoes another favorite expert: Virginia Valian, who wrote Why So Slow? about the low numbers of women in professions. She called it our “schema,” not a “template,” and noted that our schema for a professional person (especially a scientist) was incompatible with our schema for women.

Basically, we think the idea of a powerful woman, or a professional woman, is WRONG, and NOT NATURAL.

Watch this expressed nearly every day, as women are interrupted, insulted, and banned from speaking. (For example, a Congresswoman, IN CONGRESS).

If you have time to dip into feminist classics, this is one, I think.
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Mary Beard is taking unbelievable fire for speaking out. The backlash is proving her point.
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Marked for life

1/24/2016

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People who take care of other people’s teens are heroes.

When I was in high school, I was a first-generation immigrant. When my debate team wanted to go to the state competition in another city, as a group, my parents freaked out. They didn’t know anything about how these things go, even with teacher-chaperones. All they knew was that I was entering a dark and dangerous world and they were losing control.

After many sobbing negotiations and assurances, they let me go. We carpooled to a nearby city, stayed in a hotel, and entered dozens of competitions. I was partnered with an experienced girl as a debate team partner. There was a national topic, and we carried a little metal file box of 4 x 6 index cards, divided between “for” and “against” the topic. You had to swing both ways. Your notes were citations, talking points, arguments. Teams on opposite sides each had two 7-minute time slots in which to argue. The hardest part was to LISTEN to the other side, and counter their points precisely, not just pitch a standard speech every time.

For some reason, my partner and I were good. First research, then listening, fast retrieval, feeding each other cards or laying them on the table for each other as the other team spoke.

Thus hero #1 was the Debate Coach. He led this optional geeky club to occasional victory. Put up with the craziness of our varied personalities and dramas. Took us through the dark journey of Travel  Away From the Parents.

My parents were right. You can’t protect kids from stupid stuff. One boy, at our team dinner, slipped the key to his room to me. I pushed it back. We all SHARED our rooms with a same-sex teen. What was he thinking? He’d probably watched movies and thought, yeah, that’s how you make a move. I didn’t tell. Nothing happened. Except I remember the moment, the flush on my face, the bewildering thought, “WHAT?” “What do I say? What do I do?” I was frozen, and that was a good thing.

The Girl Scouts are really what grew me. Our leader organized our hike on the 100-mile Wonderland Trail around Mt. Rainier. We took about 15 days. We planned, shopped, packaged, and divided up all the food between us. Some of us didn’t even know how to cook, but the instructions were in the plastic bag with the powdered oatmeal mix or whatever. We had to carry 30-35 lb packs, etc etc.

There were girls who cried, especially the first and second day. There was no turning back. We learned that someone had to stay with the slower hiker. Several might have to split her pack. We weren’t all equal in attitude and strength. And some were real wusses. But we HAD to get along, and everyone made the trip.

Read about the trail at http://www.nps.gov/mora/planyourvisit/the-wonderland-trail.htm .

The real hero here is my Scout leader. She gave me an early adventure. The rest of my life, I could think, “I made it; it seemed impossible.” “Take care of the team.” “Don’t be afraid.” “Have fun and jump in the glacial water.” “Take care of things, and lead if a situation needs a leader.”
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I never thanked her enough because I was an insecure, confused, self-centered teenager. All I could think of was “Wow, look at us!” I had no sense for all the things she did, in the background, to make this happen, until MUCH later.  She took me out of my refugee-immigrant, fearful, controlling, insular home and brought me to the Wonderland Trail. Thanks, Mrs. Anderson. And the Girl Scouts.
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Inspiring Women, Closer to Home

8/14/2015

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For perspective, I have a wall display of Madame Blavatsky, Alexandra David-Neel, my great-great grandmother Alexandra Zubov, my great grandmother Sofija Zubov, my grandmother Aleksandra Zubov, and my mother Sophie Pempe. For what it looks like to get really old after a moxie life.

Who would you put on your wall?

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Inspiring women

6/25/2015

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Why only women, you might ask? Because Ginger Rogers danced every step as did Fred Astaire, but backwards and on high heels. And he's the famous dancer. It's harder to be a woman.

Who's on your list?


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    Ruta Sevo

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