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Gender Mystique

What do I do with these thoughts?

6/3/2019

5 Comments

 
Why, oh why did I think this book would be easy, much less fun? It was going to be a history of clothing for older women, Age Appropriate, that would trace the evolution of sensible shoes, Lane Bryant, and mother of the bride dressing. Instead it has turned until a story I want to tell yet don’t see clearly even as I burrow more and deeply into the primary source literature. I call it a generational sartorial autobiography: a life story told through the changing fashions of the last seventy years.

And today, sitting in the library, I found tears running down my face. I had written a bit, revised a bit, done a quick online search for a promising source, and studied the images I have already collected for the chapter on childhood. It wasn’t frustration that brought on the tears, it was the question I had been pushing away for the last several weeks. Was my mother happy being a woman? According to the advice literature I have been researching, she was bombarded with the message that it was her duty to raise me to love my sex and to embrace femininity. Failure meant a masculinized daughter destined for confusion and unhappiness.

She died twenty-two years ago this month, so I can’t ask her. Instead, I look at my childhood self and ask, “Was I happy to be a girl? Did I look forward to becoming a woman, a wife, a mother?” The honest answer is “not really”, but I want to reassure my mother that it was not her fault. ​.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with being female. But fitting into the cultural idea of “girl” never suited me as a child, and as an adult, I rarely think of myself as a “woman”, except when ordering clothes or choosing a public restroom. Mostly I just go through my days and weeks being me; I am more aware of being white than female, and that’s not saying much. Deep inside, I truly believe that the “problem”, to the extent that there is one, is not me, or the way my mother raised me, but illfitting cultural and societal expectations.

​I am in in the midst of reading “Modern Woman: The Lost Sex” (1947), an anti-feminist bestseller that lays out the solution for “the woman problem” (which was considered by the authors to be at the root of every societal ill since the Industrial Revolution). Women must embrace their roles as mothers and homemakers, and society and government must support them in these roles. To say that it is infuriating is an understatement, but it is also sad. It is a tragedy that my mother’s generation was told that they should find complete fulfillment in being a wife and mother, and that to do otherwise was neurotic. And it shakes me to the core that my mother tried her best to instill those lessons in me, all the while not truly believing it was right. Because I don’t think she was happy being a “woman”, either.

So that’s where I am. And in the meantime there is the book I am trying to write. Not to be confused with the book that is trying to be written.
5 Comments
Ziad Shihab link
6/3/2019 07:30:04 pm

The following is now in my top quotes in literature — and I’m not kidding you, Jo:

“Deep inside, I truly believe that the ‘problem’, to the extent that there is one, is not me, or the way my mother raised me, but illfitting cultural and societal expectations.”

Because that sentence nearly captures my own experiences with being ‘Othered’ my whole life. (Gendered/Masculinized , discouraged to dissent by the threat of ostracism). Worse, many of us who resort to writing have for the most part given up on being well understood, much less respected, in conversation.

Self-awareness is perhaps the loneliest journey we take — and that we must take.

Bravissimo!

Reply
Jo
6/5/2019 09:54:42 am

Thanks, Z. This was a hard entry to write and I hesitated to post it here, much less on social media. But this book really is trying to write itself, so I relented. I am not sure that people who have never examined their own identity will understand. But your comment reassures me that there those who do.

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Patsy
7/8/2019 01:19:27 pm

Jo,

You have validated my thoughts about societal and governmental expectations of females. As a fourth grader, my teacher admonished me to walk lady-like. I just shrugged my shoulders and kept my usual gait.
Like you I never gave much thought to being a woman - I'm just me. I have been criticized for my choice of tailored, masculine-looking clothes.
Thanks for the talking about the book, "Modern Woman" Another one I might read is "The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston.
Thank you for your blog.
Patsy

Reply
Jo
7/8/2019 10:28:21 pm

Thank you so much, Patsy! "The Woman Warrior" is fabulous; one of my favorites! Can't say the same about "Modern Woman"; it sure is a useful period piece.

Reply
Esther McBride
4/8/2020 10:13:05 pm

I just found your blog! I'm hooked! It makes me want to cry just to think about the few paragraphs I just read. Now it's late and memories of the things I was taught are flooding my mind, so I'll read more tomorrow.

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    Jo Paoletti

    Professor Emerita
    ​American Studies
    University of Maryland

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