The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read online

  The more I talked, the angrier I got. People were starting to stare, so we left and I got angry in the taxi. I railed about what had been done to women. He got defensive. He railed back. At some point I realized he’d become a target for my anger, an anger I had kept tightly bottled. It wasn’t fair to him, and yet I needed him to hear me. I wanted so badly for him to understand, and I couldn’t make it happen.

  During awakening, volatility often lies just beneath the surface of a woman’s relationship with her partner. In our case it was created by hurt and blaming on my part, fear and resistance on his. Men’s resistance often grows out of their fear—fear that everything is going to change, that women’s gain is their loss, that women will “turn the tables on them.” Men need to become aware, but blaming them doesn’t help. It only polarizes. Eventually I came to see that what’s needed is to invite men into our struggle, to make them part of our quest.

  If Sandy and I had been more sensitive to what lay behind the other’s reaction, if we’d picked our time wisely and listened, really listened to the other, we may have avoided such scenes. But frankly, it may not be possible to completely avoid the clash of feelings that accompanies powerful transitions. Sometimes the exchange may be calm and fruitful, but often it’s a wild taxi ride.

  Sandy and I made our peace, but it would be a while before I mentioned my journey again.

  Flying home from New York, I thought about the painting. I thought about it over and over. In that curious and exotic way that an “unteacher” appears only when the student is ready, the Magritte painting appeared and opened several revelations to me. First, our lives as women are not always as self-created as we might assume. And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father—the man holding the brush—and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We’re rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don’t.

  Back home, I read these words by Jungian analyst Sylvia Perera:

  What has been valued in the West in women has too often been defined only in relation to the masculine: the good, nurturant mother and wife; the sweet, docile agreeable daughter; the gently supportive or bright achieving partner. This collective model is inadequate for life; we mutilate, depotentiate, silence and enrage ourselves trying to compress our souls into it just as surely as our grandmothers deformed their fully breathing bodies with corsets for the sake of an ideal.32

  Over the next few months I began to probe the feminine scripts that had been imprinted on my life.

  Gracious Lady

  During a visit to my childhood home in Georgia, I bumped into a school friend, and we relived the time during our adolescence when we’d gone to charm school. It was taught by a dramatic woman we called Miss Belle. It was her task to teach us the art of the female life. This involved learning how to set a formal dinner table, use crystal salt bowls instead of shakers, sit in a chair with ankles crossed, walk and pivot in high heels—the beauty pageant walk, we called it. We learned to pour tea, we learned the proper way to take off a summer glove, and we learned a lot of things a lady would never say and do. We discovered how to win boys by letting them open the pickle jar, whether it was too hard for us or not, and by asking boys questions we already knew the answers to.

  My friend and I recalled these things with a laugh. “I was at a luncheon once where the host actually used those crystal salt bowls,” I told her. “I got confused, thought they were sugar bowls, and spooned salt into my iced tea. When I saw what I’d done, you know the first thing that came to my mind? Miss Belle.”

  “I know,” my friend replied. “She’s been looking over our shoulders our whole lives.”

  Later I came upon Gloria Steinem’s oft-quoted line, “We are all trained to be female impersonators,” and I thought again about those hours in charm school.33

  Learning to play the Gracious Lady had started way back there with Miss Belle and probably even before her.

  In the film Fried Green Tomatoes, Evelyn Couch lives out the Gracious Lady, though she’s a little too dowdy to pull it off in the manner of crystal salt dishes and beauty pageant walks. Evelyn is a proper and passive woman who is forever accommodating and being sweet, trying to do the right thing and meticulously playing by the rules of culture.

  In her perky curls and lace collars, she uses her girlish charm and laughter to glide past life’s unpleasantness. She visits her husband’s aunt at the nursing home, bringing candy, and her smile hardly wavers when the old woman throws it and her out of the room. At the grocery store, a young man runs into her, almost knocking her over, and she apologizes. When a driver usurps a parking space she has been waiting for, she courteously swallows back her anger and continues to circle the lot. When she makes a perfect meal for her husband, setting the table with flowers, she sighs but acquiesces when he takes his plate to the chair before the television.

  In one of the film’s more hilarious moments, Evelyn attends a women’s consciousness-raising group at the insistence of a friend who hopes it will instill some power into Evelyn. The leader gives each woman a mirror and tells them they are going to explore their femaleness, the source of their strength and separateness—their vaginas. Falling back in her chair, shocked and flustered, Evelyn makes a nonoffending exit, offering her girdle as an excuse. (Indeed, wearing a girdle is an interesting metaphor of a woman tightly controlled by conventional expectations.)

  It is not until she meets old Mrs. Threadgoode that she begins to question the stereotype she’s living. No Gracious Lady herself, Mrs. Threadgoode dyes her hair lavender and tells Evelyn stories about a firebrand girl named Tawanda (actually Mrs. Threadgoode herself), who never put on airs and who broke every social rule that confined her true female self.

  Inspired, Evelyn discards the lace collars and the Gracious Lady constraints. We witness her ram a car that has stolen her parking place, shouting, “Tawanda!”

  While I don’t recommend ramming cars, in lots of ways the energy of Tawanda is the cure for Gracious Ladies, those children of Miss Belle, whose real selves are suffocating inside strictures of properness, charm, sweetness, and social convention.

  Church Handmaid

  One afternoon during the same visit to my hometown, I drove by my childhood church, speculating on a certain question: What would happen if I brought feminism into my spiritual life?

  On impulse, I parked the car beside the church and found a side door open. Maybe I was trying to understand why the question I’d asked turned my hands into warm puddles. Maybe I was trying to recapture an attachment to an old pattern of faith I could feel slipping away. To shore it up. To pat it like a child pats a sand castle at the first hint of tide.

  I entered the sanctuary, hoping it would purify my doubts, but all I could seem to remember in there were sermons about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and especially that devastating sermon about Eve and the chalkboard with the downward-pointing arrows.

  I wandered into the educational building, found a child’s classroom, and sat in one of those miniature chairs. My knees pushed up toward my chin. I felt like Goldilocks in the chair that was too small.

  I thought how I’d started out in a nursery down the hall. My grandfather and father were both Baptist deacons. My mother taught children Sunday school and headed the social committee, making sure there were platters of food for all our fellowships. My grandmother had given devotionals at the Women’s Missionary Union. Growing up, I’d attended this church three times a week for services.

  I think sometimes a childhood place can lean so heavily on your growing up that later, when you are grown, you find it has become part of your internal geography. This church was such a place. But it came to me suddenly and without question that I must leave the Baptist world. I sat still on the little chair and breathed in and out very slowly, taking this in.

  A goldfish bo
wl sat on a piano across the room. It was empty of fish and water, but I saw almost immediately the metaphor it represented. For so long the Baptist world had been both my goldfish bowl and the water I swam in. I’d come to think of it as the whole realm. I’d grown used to seeing everything through that water. It had never occurred to me that it was possible to leave. At a deep level, I’d not known I could make such a large choice.

  It sounds silly, but at the time leaving this realm seemed as daunting to me as leaving the goldfish tank might have seemed to a goldfish. I wondered if I could survive outside the safe perimeters I knew so well. And I was not even thinking at that point about taking my leave from the entire church. I wasn’t yet thinking about learning how to breathe in brand new spiritual environs, in a feminine realm where the old breathing mechanisms don’t work at all.

  Despite the growing disenchantment women experience in the early stages of awakening, the idea of existing beyond the patriarchal institution of faith, of withdrawing our external projection of God onto the church, is almost always unfathomable. It’s that old the-world-is-flat conviction, where we believe that if we sail out on the spiritual ocean beyond a certain point we will fall off the edge of the known world into a void. We think there’s nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth and meaning. That if we keep going, we might even come full circle, but with a whole new consciousness.

  Operating with the world-is-flat mentality, I was only thinking at that moment of going over to the Episcopal Church, which seemed to me to be a much larger fish tank.

  I tried to picture myself explaining to my husband, my family, my friends that I was exiting the Baptist Church. It was way too much for the imagination. Not remotely possible. I got up from the too-small chair and left.

  The following Sunday, home again, I returned to my own church. The deacons sat together on the front pews. All of them, I noticed, were men. The ministers—three more men—sat in huge chairs up front. I looked from one stained glass window to another. Most of the figures were men.

  As the service began, I became acutely aware that every hymn and biblical passage used only masculine pronouns, as if that was all there was. Until then I had accepted that when it said men and brotherhood, that somehow meant me, too. But now, in a place much deeper than my head, I didn’t feel included at all.

  I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

  Until that moment I’d had no idea just how important language is in forming our lives. What happens to a female when all her life she hears sacred language indirectly, filtered through male terms? What goes on deep inside her when decade after decade she must translate from male experience into female experience and then apply the message to herself? What does the experience imprint inside her? Does it keep exclusive maleness functioning inside her, at least at the level of experience and symbol?

  Sitting there, I thought of all the times I’d listened to ministers and Sunday school teachers extol the virtues of women who were subject to men, extensions of men, helpmates to men—women who lived as pale shadows of their true selves.

  “Women have not only been educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been excluded from theory formation,” Lerner writes in The Creation of Patriarchy.34 That is, we’ve been excluded from creating symbol and myth, from the meaning-making process that explains and interprets reality.

  This has been particularly true within the church. There women have reigned in the nurseries and the social halls but have been mostly absent from pulpits and places where theology, policy, and spiritual meaning are forged. Within the church, women have been more apt to polish the brass, arrange the flowers, put cookies on a plate, clean up, keep the nursery, be led, pass the credit, look pretty, and be supportive. In other words, women have frequently functioned more as church handmaids than religious meaning makers or symbol creators.

  The Church Handmaid is a woman who tries to be a Good Daughter to the Church, trying to be everything it wants and expects her to be. Throughout my life I’d done this without question.

  Now, sitting in church, I was full of questions. Why was God always the God of Abraham, never the God of Sarah? Why was it often impossible, rare, or difficult for a woman to hold real power in the church? Women had been the largest consumers of church, yet we’d held a vastly disproportionate amount of power compared to our numbers and commitment there. Why had my father always chaired the finance committee and my mother the social committee, even though my mother could manage household budgets and figures with the acumen of an accountant?

  The congregation stood to sing. Unbelievably, as if all the irony in the world were crashing down at once, the hymn was “Faith of Our Fathers.” I tried to sing, but I could not open my mouth. It was as if something had given way in my chest. I lowered the hymnbook and sat back down. I was fighting tears.

  Sandy bent down and nudged me. “Are you okay?” he whispered. I nodded, but inside I felt too heavy to move. Until that moment I hadn’t fully understood. I was in a religion that celebrated fatherhood and sonship. I was in an institution created by men and for men.

  By the time I got home I felt disbelief that I’d not seen all this before—that the church, my church, was not just a part of the male-dominant system I was waking up to, but a prime legitimizer of it.

  I was too dazed to be angry. Mostly I felt disillusioned, sad, betrayed. I stood in front of the closet in the bedroom hanging up my dress, thinking, But women have been so loyal to the church, so supportive. How could it negate and exclude us this way? How had this happened?

  That afternoon I opened a book I’d recently brought home, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I read all afternoon. I read how religion had given authority to men. As de Beauvoir put it, religion had given men a God like themselves—a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority has been vested in them by the Supreme Being.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I slipped out of bed and went to my study. I stood by the window, looking out at the night. The tears I’d suppressed that morning in church finally rolled down my face.

  The Secondary Partner

  I woke one morning and looked over at Sandy, still asleep on the pillow beside me. We had been married for nineteen years.

  I thought about those years when I was a young wife starting my family, how the newly launched women’s movement blew by me with hardly a rustle. Instead of meeting with a consciousness-raising group, I attended marriage and family programs at church. There I learned worthwhile things like communication skills, but I also learned a model of relating that unwittingly promoted women’s psychological dependence on men and male authority. Women’s personal journeys, goals, and quests were encouraged only to the extent that they didn’t interfere with those of husband or children. A woman’s surrender of herself on behalf of the rest of the family was (and often still is) extolled as the highest virtue.

  In the world where I’d grown up, marriage for women had meant revolving around men like planets around the sun. As everyone knows, planets don’t question their orbits; they just revolve. An enormous gravitational pull holds a woman in this orbit; it comes from finding approval and a sense of identity in her orbit, since finding these things within her feminine self is difficult in a culture where attitudes and conditioning are ranged against her.

  I leaned up on my elbow and studied the tilt of Sandy’s nose. In some way we did operate as if the husband’s life was the sun while the wife’s was the revolving planet. I began to wonder how a woman defies gravity and changes heavenly courses. What would happen if I actually brought feminism into my marriage?

  Not that Sandy was a dogmatically rigid or authoritarian perso
n. He’d never demanded that I should “submit” to him. On the contrary, he was kind and fun and loving and shared decision making with me. His resistance to my journey (which he didn’t verbalize so much as I intuited) came from his own fears about how that would change our relationship. I wasn’t sure, but I did know one thing—introducing feminism into the orbits of our life would make me about as popular with my husband as Galileo and Copernicus had been with the Catholic Church. Bringing feminism into my marriage would turn our little universe on its head.

  Gazing at him, I realized that the model of the revolving wife was an old model of marriage we’d both inherited—one in which the wife holds a key, though secondary, position. It was the model of the Secondary Partner.

  In the model of the Secondary Partner, the woman may run things at home and have her career, her pursuits, and her quests, but there is a gradation of power in the relationship. As Jungian analyst June Singer points out, when a girl is growing up, it is not taken for granted, as it is with boys, that her life and needs will be primary, that she will have access to places of authority and power like her brothers or father. What is taken for granted is that she will find her main source of fulfillment through her husband and family, that she will be secondary to them.35

  A man assumes certain entitlements simply because he’s male. For instance, Sandy was entitled to go and come in the world as he pleased. If he had a business trip, he simply went, no questions asked. And lots of times I packed the bag. But if I should have a writer’s conference or a speaking engagement, it was a big deal, something that needed to be discussed. How long would I be gone? Could he manage the children without me? What about meals? How many times a day is the dog fed?

  At times like those I felt a nebulous guilt for pursuing my own life.

  When a woman lives out the Secondary Partner, she tends to believe, not so much consciously but deep inside, that she is there to be of service to her partner. She might become his inspiration, investing herself in his creativity and work rather than her own. She may become the “woman behind the man,” the hostess who initiates dinner parties for his associates, the one who makes sure his clients get Christmas cards. In the extreme she may become completely deferential and adaptable where he’s concerned, shaping herself to his opinions, beliefs, and wishes or, as a friend of mine says, “being wax to his flame.”