International Women's Day: On Prom-Posals and A Time for Outrage

For my recent birthday, some dear friends gave me a t-shirt celebrating Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. As you can see, it is fire-engine red and amazing.

I wore it the morning after my birthday to clean up the minor wreckage of a good dinner party. This sartorial choice wasn’t a statement open to some post-umpteenth-wave of Feminism ironic interpretation along the lines of, "we’re now so evolved as society in terms of gender equality and identity, a lady such as myself can freely choose to do the duties of a repressed housewife, even while wearing the garb of revolutionary propaganda." That is silly bullshit that I hope you read in a funny snooty parody voice. 

I was thus garbed because I wanted to wear my new shirt, the kitchen was littered with dirty dishes and I don’t much like living in filth, and it was my mess to clean up.

I find even the ghost of an idea that we’re in a post-Feminist society absurd.

We aren’t.

As an example of how I fear we’re backsliding as Feminists in important and emotional ways, working at the high school, I keep overhearing clusters of boys worrying about how to pull off a good “prom-posal,” which is apparently now a thing. I hear girls giggling about how they hope they’ll be asked. One boy is making a daily series of riddles and clues for his date—presumably him actually asking her to prom is the treasure. Another is planning to buy red roses for everyone in his math class, have them one by one present the roses to his girlfriend—also in math class—and then he would come in last and give her a white rose and ask her to prom.

Prom is not my issue here—if teenagers want to get gussied up and dance and canoodle and have healthy consensual sex lives, more power to them. Similarly, I am 100% on board with Romance—although I’m guessing that these kids haven’t learned yet that Romance is not really rose petals and pink hearts and proms, but someone bringing you Gatorade in the middle of the night when you have a violent stomach flu, or waiting up for your bus until dawn, or putting tennis balls on your walker and salt on the icy steps, or any of the other millions of ways that people demonstrate their actual, practical, messy love for each other.

In fairness, I didn’t go to my high school prom and so have no frame of reference on this allegedly all-important aspect of high school life in America. Aside from being painfully—almost snobbishly—shy, I had a track meet the next day and, while I was a lackadaisical athlete, that was a simple excuse to avoid what I at seventeen suspected would be a lot of fuss over nothing. The school dances that I had attended always ended up with me in the bathroom with one upset friend or another, dealing with some mismatch of expectations and reality. No matter how many teen-age rom-coms I watched, I suspected that real prom wouldn’t be much different than past dances, and having my mum make me a beautiful dress just to hang out in a fancier bathroom somehow didn’t appeal.

So, really, I’m not one to talk about proms per se. But, my issue with the prom-posal situation is that is seems both horribly stressful and indicative of trends that cauterize teenage girls as passive Princesses in need of asking, with the expectation that they will be asked and in a certain way, or they are not correct. Flipping that, this script for life requires that teenage boys are the actors, the one who gets to make the choice of what lady to ask, who pick the cast and create the lines. Ladies should just sit around and wait with absurd culturally engrained expectations to be asked to the dance, to life. Dudes should steel up against any fears of rejection, but remain emotionally open and Romantic, and pick a lady by doing something traditional but unique, memorable but not super weird. To culturally pressurize these traditional gender roles at young and emotionally fragile ages seems cruel and, therefore, against the Feminist agenda I believe in.

At the same time, I am mentoring a trio of high school students in a Feminism seminar this spring. We are compiling a list of readings and videos and music to study and explore. We’ve got Emmaline Pankhurst and Ida B. Wells and bell hooks and Betty Friedan and Wonder Woman and videos of 100 years of beauty in Black-American, White-American, and Iranian culture and more all set up and ready to go.

These students already know so much more than I did at their age about Feminist history and literature. On the other hand, I grew up with red and yellow and blue Legos and no Disney princesses. They are at once reading Angela Davis, and expecting rose petaled prom-posals.

Their emotional dichotomy seems different and somewhat more dire, to me, than cleaning the kitchen while wearing my Betty Friedan t-shirt. Or the common challenge of hating the Patriarchy and loving men.

If we read and know these things, but do not articulate them through our lives, does it matter?

Stéphane Hessel was part of the French Resistance in WWII and spent his long life working to resist various threats to human life and dignity. In his small and effective book, Indignez-Vous!: A Time for Outrage, he wrote about how, when he was young and resisting Nazis, it was almost easy because the enemy was so clear cut. Now, with globalization, instant communications, climate change, mass-marketing, and all the rest, the outrage is still easy, but knowing where to direct one’s indignation and action is more nebulous.

Last summer, someone asked me if I could give some examples of sexism and gender inequality still happening in this world. Similar to and as a part of Hessel’s nebulous enemies to be resisted, I feel that sexism is so subliminally and systemically omnipresent that it took me a minute to catch my breath and form words.

Sexism is everywhere and Feminism needs everyone—women, men, and those who have yet to make up their minds, as Lola says in Kinky Boots.

How we respond to this need depends on how we each get up every morning, what we put on and how we are in the world, what we ask for and what we expect from each other every day. Never mind International Women’s Day, it’s always Human Day.

Lessons from Terrorists

(Annie Leibovitz's photo of Pete Seeger 
and his banjo/hate crushing machine, from hilobrow.com)

Recently, friend and I were talking about the news. She had found herself absorbed by in-depth coverage of various horror spots of the world in the past few weeks. 

And, like most people who do so, her rapt attention slowly ceded to questions of if knowing all the available facts about violently-faith-based guerilla executions in France, about the deep harm racism causes in this country, about global temperature records being newly broken every year, if knowing all this news makes a difference.

I don’t know. Listening to the news doesn’t seem like much of a way to work for change. Listening, reading, being informed, even worrying in the night, seems so passive, and this news—this terrifying constant news—makes us want to rise up out of our seats, storm the castle and end the madness.

I don’t like the word “terrorist,” but as I can’t come up with some better term for these agents of sporadic, focused, devastating violence, it’s the word I’ll use.

We would do well to learn from these terrorists. Not in the sense of vengeance and violence, but in their manner of shaking up the world by of being small independent cells of individuals who are devoted to, but loosely affiliated with, a set of unifying ideals. Part of what makes the world seem scarier—other than overlistening to the news—is the idea that the terror and violence could come from anywhere. “Enemies” are no longer swathed in flags or behind iron curtains and cement walls.

And so, I believe that heroes are no longer to be found covered stoically in brass buttons or wearing capes or riding high white horses and protecting people like shepherds or inhuman angels. As the threats become more nuanced and personal, so too must the heroes, the solutions, the progress evolve into something growing and curling with shoots and branches and tendrils.

If terrorists can be home-grown lone-wolves, so can those of us who would have the world be better than it is. I have to trust that there are more people out there who want and believe in peace than who want and believe in violence. To think otherwise is fodder for those who would use fear as a weapon.

Guerilla acts of peace, carried out by passionate individuals loosely affiliated with ideals of human rights and world salvage, will not make headlines. But I believe that this is exactly what we must do, all of us, everywhere, every every minute.

And that is as pat and impractical piece of advice as possible. Being kind won’t stop a bullet or shut down a power plant, for example. But, we’re no longer in a world of one-to-one exchanges, of eye for an eye and vengeance Or if we are, I want to make a new one out of different materials. The opposing sides don’t march out to battle on a field. It is, entirely, regime and ethos change that we’re after. And, in that, being kind and doing all those small and daily acts that bring joy and love into the world, that affirm that all lives matter, that align the personal with the political…it does all add up to make a difference.

When it feels like your little actions—unplugging the dryer, smiling at strangers, telling people you love them, joining a CSA, lobbying for legislation, marching in the streets, whatever it is that you can do to put love into the world—are teensy drops in the bucket, think of this: you are part of something bigger than yourself. It helps, I find, to feel like I am part of a secret revolution, full of sleeper agents and unmet friends. Doing good is the password. Whenever I see solar panels, I either tear up or grin my face off, reminded that others are in this as well. We give each other strength and ballast with all our actions.

I believe—because I want to believe—that love is stronger than fear. It is slower, it does not make the headlines or trend on social media, but it is eternal. Our revolution doesn’t need to be secret, of course, but neither does it need to be televised to be effective.  Let’s have a revolution waged—daily—by peaceable guerillas who are loosely affiliated with and united by our faith in the world and each other.

That is the best news I can think of.

Emma Goldman and Dinosaurs

Emma Goldman, 1886?

In July of 1892, the Labor activist and Anarchist Alexander Berkman shot Henry Clay Frick three times. Frick, at the time, was the Chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company. The steel mill in Homestead was in the middle of a major and violent dispute between the fledgling labor unions and management. In Living My Life, Emma Goldman’s autobiography, she writes: “the philanthropic Andrew Carnegie conveniently retired to his castle in Scotland, and Frick took full charge of the situation.” (I am basing the following synopsis on Goldman's account in her autobiography, and am, undeniably biased in favor of the anarchists and labor activists over the industrialists.)

Frick refused to negotiate with the workers and the unions over labor contracts, fired the mill workers, evicted the workers and their families—including at least one very pregnant woman—and hired strike-breakers—who were probably in dire economic necessity themselves, even more newly arrived immigrants who were compelled to take the most immediate source of income that presented itself. These striker-breakers were protected on their route to the mills by the security forces Frick hired from the Pinkerton detective agency, a group which seems particularly prone to being well-paid by the powerful for unnecessary violence against unions and activists. In an altercation between the striking workers and the hired “security forces” several strikers—including a child—were killed.

Berkman, Goldman, and their circle of friends were outraged and, while they felt no real personal grievance against Frick as a man, they determined that he, as an active symbol for all of the inequity of power and dignity that the Labor and Anarchy movements sought to alleviate. They were young and passionate and utilitarian, and so their solution was that Berkman would kill Frick, and that Berkman’s own likely death as an outcome of this would be forfeit for their ideals.

A week of nightly experiments with bomb making in a cheap and crowded tenement—thankfully—yielded nothing but lost time and money when the dynamite turned out to be damp. The back-up solution was that Berkman would go to Pittsburgh, work with the local Labor-Anarchist groups, buy a gun, and assassinate Frick. The major trouble with this plan was that guns were expensive, especially for impoverished Anarchists who were working 18-hour days at menial paying work and trying to start a thousand revolutions with their spare hours. Emma Goldman, who was remarkably well-read, decided that the only course of action was to take a page from Crime and Punishment, and prostitute herself for as long as it took to earn the money for Berkman’s gun. As she wrote, “Sasha [Berkman] is giving his life, and you shrink from giving your body, miserable coward!”

So, Goldman spruces herself—cheaply—up, and trudges out to the street, and hates every minute of it. The man who approaches her buys her a beer, senses that this is not a job that Goldman will ever be any good at—although he doesn’t agree with Goldman that most women who become prostitutes are driven to the profession out of dire economic necessity, rather than “mere looseness or love of excitement,” as the man terms things—and pays her ten dollars to go home and wash her face. 

That money, plus the fifteen dollars Goldman borrows from her sister—after lying that she needed the money because of illness, which seems like the worst crime in this whole twist of mixed morals—buys the gun that Berkman shoots Frick with a few weeks later.

In the ensuing struggle, Berkman also stabs Frick in the leg, before Frick’s people knock Berkman out.

Berkman went to prison for fourteen years. Frick, with the 1890s version of top-notch medical care, survived. The Homestead Strike fizzled out amid public outcry at the violence—on both sides, now—with few gains for workers.

Eventually, Frick’s New York City mansion, home at one time to the three-member Frick family and their twenty-seven member staff, became the Frick Collection to showcase Frick’s personal art collection.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892

Elsewhere in 1892, the painter John Singer Sargent made a portrait of Gertrude Vernon Agnew, the wife of a Scottish Baron. The painting helped to launch Sargent’s career of painting glamorous portraits of beautiful rich women, and also advanced Lady Agnew’s career as a society lady.

For the last month or so, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw has been hanging in the Frick Collection, on loan from the Scottish National Gallery.

Personally, I find Lady Agnew of Lochnaw as visually resonant as I find Emma Goldman’s writing politically resonant.

They make an odd pair of icons, and would have probably classistly hated each other. That their respective hey-days were the same era is stranger still. While industrialists built libraries, collected art, made fortunes off destroying the natural world with ignorance and greed, and hired security forces to beat up workers, crusaders for social reform were holding meetings, working long hours for little money, reading, writing, rabblerousing, opening ice cream parlors, plotting assassinations, getting beat up by police and paid security forces, going to jail, and always fighting for a fairer world.

Do Carnegie’s many libraries, does the art displayed at the Frick, does that absolve them of the inhumanity of how they made their money? Does the intent of a violent action—like an assassination attempt or the touch and go of building a bomb in a crowded apartment building—out weigh the violence itself?

And it is easy, very easy, to say of Frick and Carnegie and Rockefeller and Morgan and all the rest of the major industrialists of that early era that the times were different, that isn’t it—in the end—good for the public that they made all that money and had it to build public edifices? There is a sense that this sort of industrially financed public offering is a PR absolution for really dirty and inhumane treatment of workers and ecosystems alike. And that such acts were of the past.

After visiting the Frick to see Lady Agnew in person—in a place that wouldn’t have been if history had gone differently—I went to the American Museum of Natural History. This included a long and wonderful saunter through the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.

Koch, as in the Koch brothers.

As in the family that seems to use their—mostly fossil fuel derived—fortune on political causes that run completely opposite to my own beliefs. Never mind that their profits, as a fossil fuel company, come from our blind obedience to the climate-change causing status quo.

Just a few weeks ago, the long struggled over Cape Wind project in Massachusetts was felled by power companies pulling out, nearly eliminating the market for wind-generated electricity from a wind farm in Nantucket Sound. Bill Koch, David “Dinosaur Wing” Koch’s brother, has donated over a million dollars to fight against Cape Wind—possibly because the view from his summer home would now include clean power sources—threatening his lifestyle—as well as the oceanscape. When one side of a political fight is better funded—corporate and political leaders versus environmentalists and scientists, say—it becomes easy to see that people and common sense are worth less than dollars and influence.

Now, I’m not advocating for assassinations of corporate leaders. Or anyone else. Everyone's parents and children and friends love them, I suppose. Our challenges in the climate change and human justice fields are, these globally-connected days, more systemic than the elimination of any one person could solve, anyway. Violence helps no one and only scares people away from joining a revolution.

Something, though, does need to change and be shaken up and rearranged. Starting, I think, with what we question and what we blindly accept. When push comes to shove, I’d rather have the dinosaurs stay in the ground than become either a museum exhibit or climate-change and fortune causing fuels. I’d rather all people have good useful work they feel confident in and be paid a living wage than have one man open a museum filled with artwork that his workers could never afford to have seen.

Push, though, will never come to shove. Powerful people will continue to buy off and silence opposition to their profits with pretty things. No one is going to ask me to decide if I like dinosaur bones in a museum donated by rich men who make a fortune but destroy ecosystems more than I like Tuvalu or alpine flowers or the clear lungs of Appalachian toddlers, and then re-arrange the world order according to my whims while I sit back and wish things were different. No one is going to start this revolution except us. We must, ourselves, use every day as an act for the world we want.