Bridging the Gap

I just returned from a hilarious and strange meeting.  An old guard feminist, one of the founders of one of the earliest local chapters, called all the county NOW members and commanded us to appear at her house to discuss the fate of the chapter.  She was a blast of energy on the phone -- saying "my goal is to choose a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer" (in social change organizing 101, one never tells people that if they show up they are going to be elected to formal position!) -- and she was basically an airhorn-in-a-library when I met her in person at the meeting.  It was fascinating to watch the other attendees (only a handful) maneuver around her as she pressed her own agenda and dismissed ideas/topics she didn't like.  In general, I found her amusing, but then her real agenda came through: sign people up for leadership roles but figure out how the inner circle can vett the new people first.  The message was, "young people need to step up and lead this organization -- but only if they do it precisely the way we want them to."  As a scholar who studies movements for social change, particularly women's leadership in such movements, I feel pretty confident in saying this is a sure-fire recipe for disaster!

This example will serve as a good representation of being in a meeting with this woman:  she read a quotation and asked people who it was from.  I happened to know, but she told people not to answer if they knew and instead made the others guess (ugh!).  When no one came up with it, I was then called upon.  I said, "Obama" (it was from his speech on the 50th anniversary of the MOW).  Her response? "Excuse me? That is President Barack Obama, the first half-black president of this country!"  Um, yep, that is the Obama to whom I was referring.  Yikes!

Anyway, of the 9 people at the meeting, we had an amazingly good representation of NOW's history -- all white, most in their 60s, small minority of working class women feeling somewhat out of place, all formally educated.  Even in this homogeneous group, though, we had many of the movement types -- the shy workhorse, the I-knew-Gloria-Steinem, the structure and policy person, the I'm-just-here-to-watch one, the action focused one, etc. etc.

My students and I have been doing a bunch of interviews with NOW members since April.  I went to this evening's 'entertainment' in part to gather more ideas for the research project and in part because I worry about a world where NOW can't manage to hold it together in a place like Ann Arbor.  I heard some important things:

1)The older generation (women in their 60s who have been doing active feminism for decades) are tired but they don't think there are any younger feminists who want to take on the work. (They are wrong, but we'll get to that another time.)

2)This group is pretty evenly split between those who trust young women to keep on fighting the good fight, but expect that they might want to do it through different tactics and organizations and those who think young women spend too much time on the computer to do any real organizing and dress like hookers.  (Yikes!)

3)The younger generations (and even my own sandwich generation) need to get it together and figure out a way to have real conversations with their elders -- despite the stuff I mentioned above -- or they/we will lose the opportunity to take over an organization that carries pretty substantial brand recognition.

4)There are many, many issues that reach easily across generations (reproductive justice -- don't doubt it for a minute, those post-menopausal women are FIERCE on this!, equal pay, sex trafficking, rape culture, political representation, etc.).  Once the formal meeting was ended by our host ("meetings must be exactly one hour!") and we could have real conversations about the issues and ideas that motivated us as individual activists, these connecting threads were so obvious.  It was heartening to see.

5)We need to listen to each other more and we need to assume that each group is going to say something stupid about the other.  We need to find a way to get past it and focus on the shared issues.

And that is the report from the "front lines" of feminism in Washtenaw county in the late summer of 2013!

Momentum

So, quite unintentionally, I've been reading two books back-to-back that both deal with the angst of women who married, had two kids, and found themselves in lives that were not what they thought they would be.

I started with Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, but put it aside for a while and read Stephanie Staal's Reading Women. Now I'm back to finishing up RR. They are very different books: one fiction, one a memoir; one published in 1961, one in 2011. The struggles of the women, however, are strikingly similar to each other and to feelings I recognize in myself. Most of it is a sense of loss of personal identity and one that the men connected to the women do not experience. One would hope that Reading Women, especially with the (overly) ambitious subtitle of "how the great books of feminism changed my life," would have some pithy solutions -- or even observations -- but it really doesn't. The message of both books seems to be "it is complicated, there is no right answer, and since you won't really figure it out, the best you can do is to muddle through and try not to be so hard on yourself" (especially in April's case) I suspect there is also supposed to be some message about the role of society in all this, but it is present but surprisingly not active in the stories.

I don't, of course, really need anyone to tell me that life as a 30-something mother is tough. What I have been thinking about is the role of momentum in shaping this experience. Motherhood interrupts the momentum one has developed as an adult and creates its own forces that, once rolling, are hard to check.

Last week, I was trying to explain to a friend that I was thinking it was time to get more engaged with my career. As someone who has recently left corporate world to seek greater validation in other parts of her life, she stared at me with a certain disbelief? surprise? disdain? I think what she heard me saying was that I was going to work more, which is most decidedly not my goal. I just want to use my time differently. I feel like I spend and enormous amount of energy trying to restart work that I have let grow cold, especially research. Deadlines and trips that provide research opportunities force me to frantically try to pull my shit together and while that frenzy results in a decent (though not outstanding) quality and quantity of 'deliverables' I have found myself thinking that if I could just keep plodding along and stay engaged, it would be so much easier and rewarding. To do this, I will have to counter the frantic-ness of academic life during crunch times at the beginning and end of every term and bring some more discipline into my summer work.

From there, it occurred to me that there are some other big and important areas of my life that need a similar treatment. They need better shape and structure. They need to be moving forward and that movement needs to be established well enough that the inevitable forces that crop up and get in the way can't derail the whole project.

The Unexpected.

Tonight I went to the banquet for an award that I did not win. I knew that I had been nominated and that someone else had won and that's fine, the individual who won is wonderful. It is an important night on my campus for many reasons and I was happy to go. I scored some earrings in the silent auction and had a pleasant dinner with some colleagues. I was also delighted to be there to honor a former student (and now a representative in the state House) who had won the other major award of the evening for her work in the community. This wonderful student, someone I have written about before, could not actually be there to accept as she is with a bipartisan commission of state legislators visiting Turkey at the moment. Instead, she taped her acceptance speech, which she opened by thanking the key professors, administrators, students, and fellow legislators who had helped her in all she has achieved. From there, she gracefully moved into discussing the guiding principles of her work as an advocate for women, for workers, etc., etc.... and then she thanked me. She thanked me big time -- singled me out from all the amazing people she had met as a student at our institution -- and credited me with challenging her, inspiring her, and introducing her to her role model for creating change: Ella Baker. I am so stinkin' proud of this woman and that she would share some of her accomplishments with me...in this setting...on this night. Well, I'm damn near overwhelmed. And yes, it kind of feels like I won the award after all.

Damn Proud

When I think too much about it, the concept of "feeling proud" of someone else's accomplishments is baffling to me (isn't it like taking credit for what they did?), but I have no other way to describe how I feel right now.

One of my students, a woman I had in my U.S. survey course the very first term I was in Michigan and then had in two other courses in years following, won a seat in the state house.

Like many of our students, she was not a traditional student. She was older. She was a nurse. She wanted so much from college. She was always one of my most enthusiastic students, intensely following every discussion and lecture, but also one of the most tentative, at least at first. I pushed her and pushed her in her writing and discussions to take a stand, defend her points, make an argument and it has been a joy to see her lose that tentativeness, a process that has resulted in her election to the house.

I wrote her a few lines of congratulations and she responded with the most generous e-mail. It made me cry. She told me not only how she felt inspired by my classes but played back through the various topics we had covered and how they had helped her stay motivated and talk to her now-constituents during the campaign. And then she closed with this:

You made a huge difference in my life and I hope to do the same for other women.

Today is a good day to be a professor. Lesia, you rock! Do good things!