SISTER OUTSIDER

"Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, 

and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying."

MICHAEL BROWN   ERIC GARNER   TAMIR RICE   TRAYVON MARTIN

Audre Lorde wrote those words in 1980. It is heartbreaking to realize that in over 30 years not much has changed.

That quote is so powerful. It is full of truths and fears. It calls out a distinct difference between women. Audre taught me we have to acknowlege our differences. We can not move forward without doing so.

"Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women."

"Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged."  

A few years ago both of my grandmothers died a month apart. They were in their nineties. It is so easy to believe that we can't affect change when we "descend into the chaos of knowledge". We are too small. The world is too big. But then I think of my grandmothers. Over the course of their long lives society drastically changed. Do I really believe that progress can't be made? We have a wealth of feminist teachers. Some are still with us. Others are not, but their words are still here. Audre spoke truth 30 years ago, and it is still truth today. Listen.     

AUDRE LORDE

 "Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying."

SISTER OUTSIDER

THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

I don't know what I expected when I decided to start this journey by reading, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Honestly, I picked it because it played such a huge role in sparking the second feminist movement. Little did I know I would relate so much to a book written 51 years earlier. 

There is no way I could cover the entire book in one post. In fact, I might need to open a can of worms at some point down the road and speak to the role advertisers play in American women's lives. The only thing that has changed decades later is the mode to which the advertisers reach women today via mommy blogs and lifestyle blogs. But for now I'll close that can and keep things a little more personal.

And let me start out by saying I completely believe that there are women out there who are truly fulfilled in their role as a full-time stay at home mom. And that is a beautiful thing. In fact, I wish I fell into that camp. It sure would make life a lot easier. I, on the other hand, suffer from the problem that has no name.

"Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say 'I feel empty somehow...incomplete.' Or she would say, 'I feel as if I don't exist.'"

I get embarrassed sometimes when people ask me, "How are you doing?" I get embarrassed because I don't have much to say.  In reality I'm fine. My days look the same. I try to get out of the house everyday and do something fun with the kids. I do laundry and clean a little. I change a lot of diapers and make some food. I do this every day. Days and weeks run into each other because they are all the same. I don't have any real goals. I might try to make my days have more meaning by finding new recipes, doing a craft with my oldest, or going on a hike thru the redwoods with the boys. And those are all really good things, but at the end of the day there is still something deeply missing. 

"If women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become, 

they will forfeit their own humanity."

I almost didn't use the above quote for my illustration for Betty. Let's be honest, it sounds a little harsh. But why shy away from such a harsh reality? I love my family. I love my husband. I love being a mother to my boys. But I will lose myself and them if I don't try to be something more. And although I didn't arrive in this place entirely in the same way women in the late 40's, 50's, and early 60's did, I am here nonetheless. And I must take these words by Betty Friedan to heart:

"The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself as a person, is by creative work of her own." 

BETTY FRIEDAN

 "If women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become,

they will forfeit their own humanity."
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE