In my family, it's a tradition for middle-age women to take up gardening with a vengeance. For a long time I thought I might have escaped that particular quirk, but this year it hit. Me being me, I wasn't satisfied to plant a few pansies in a window box and call it a day. No, the kind of gardening I had in mind requires a pick and shovel.
I'd mapped out an area in our yard to plant a small vegetable garden. The problem was, a couple of years ago I'd planted the whole bed -- which was looking rather neglected then, because it was -- with an extremely invasive species of sunflowers. (Given the inclement climate of New Hampshire, most flowering plants considered "hardy" in this region have a shadow life as vexatious weeds.) These particular sunflowers, Helianthus tuberosus, have fleshy, edible tubers that grow six to eight inches beneath the ground and overwinter, so even if you uproot the dead stalks and leaves in the fall, a new plant will sprout up in the spring. This species also tends to multiply profusely -- plant one, and the following year you'll have ten. My original folly was to plant about two dozen, which rapidly multiplied and grew into an impenetrable thicket of six-foot high plants -- and now I hope to obliterate them from the face of the earth.
Since the flowering plants of H. tuberosus sprout from the buried tubers -- and depending on how long they've been in the ground, the tubers range from the size of a marble to the size of a small sweet potato -- the only way to get rid of them once and for all is to completely dig up and dispose of all the tubers, and I mean every single one. If a tuber is cut or broken in the process, even if only a tiny sliver of it remains in the soil, it will send up a new plant. If you snap off the stalk above the ground, the tuber will send up three more plants, and each of those plants begins to form a new root.
So -- I started digging. I dug for five straight days, sifting through every shovel-load of soil with my fingers to catch any tuber fragments I'd lopped off with my spade. I even pulled out the stone pavers surrounding the planting bed, one by one, when I discovered the infernal tubers were growing between and underneath them (and as I found out when I moved an old rosebush, they also twine around the roots of other plants). In the end, I unearthed about 90 pound of sunflower tubers. I figure I moved at least a ton of dirt in the process as well.
So I planted my lettuce and carrots, and green beans, and tomatoes and summer squash, and spread soft mulch all around them with tender loving care. And do you know what? I still have those fucking sunflowers sprouting up in my vegetable garden.
But here's the thing: while I was doing all this digging and sifting and cursing at the sunflowers, I was also thinking about this issue on sexism. I chose this topic because I've noticed we've stopped talking about sexism and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways it plays out in women's lives, and I'm not so sure that's a good thing. These days, we mostly hear about the choices women have and why they make them -- not the choices women don't have, and why. And I started thinking, the way my sunflowers grow is a pretty good analogy for how sexism (and racism, and classism, and homophobia, and all the other ideological detritus that limits our lives) works in a society. The tall, green part of the plant is a problem, because once it spreads, it blocks out all the light and nothing else can grow. Some folks might look at the sunflowers and think: Well, they do have nice yellow flowers -- I like flowers, flowers are pretty, it would be crazy to dig them up. And those roots are edible! -- isn't that worth something? In fact, it might make your life worse, not better, if you dig them up.
I suppose that's one way to look at it. Unless you stop to consider that 99.9 percent of every Helianthus tuberosus plant consists of a spiny, brittle stalk and scratchy, dark-green leaves that cast such a deep shadow nothing else can take root where they grow. But the real trouble is what's happening underground, where we can't see it. And even if we methodically rip out everything we can find, something -- some tiny remnant with the power to grow -- is always left behind.
In the 150 years between 1830 and 1980, we rid ourselves of a lot of the leaves and stalks of sexism -- the parts that are easiest to see. It happened through a gradual social process involving an intersection of new economic opportunities for men and women, changing attitudes about the morality of human oppression (such as slavery, for example), the modernization of religious values, men's and women's changing roles in civil society, increased literacy, the long historic trend toward decreased childbearing, medical and technological advances, the opening of secondary and post-secondary education to women, political pressures from women's rights groups, legislative reforms expanding women's legal rights, plus a few other developments and at least three major overhauls in the way American families work and live. We even yanked out some of the really thick, ugly roots that were growing right under the surface. But most of them survived, and sometimes we don't even notice we're surrounded by sexism until it sends up a fresh, green shoot.
In the mid-twentieth century, a lot of the stalks, leaves, and flowers of sexism -- the part women could see and feel and smell -- were still thriving. All you had to do was open the daily newspaper and see the separate columns for "Help Wanted: Men" and "Help Wanted: Women" in the classified section. Until 1964, it was legal for employers to discriminate against women -- and they did. And it was legal to fire women workers when they became pregnant until 1978. Until 1973, the federal government maintained it had an interest in controlling women's bodies -- but only imposed restrictions on men's actions (unless they happened to be gay, in which case the state determined it had a moral interest in controlling men's bodies, too). Needless to say we're not quite done with that battle, but for the most part sexism was pretty easy to spot wherever it happened to be sucking up the sunlight.
But things changed -- partly because women and what they wanted changed, but also because our families and economy have grown increasingly dependent on women's paid labor. In any case, the light started shining through. In the United States today, more women than men graduate from high school. Women have slightly overtaken men in earning four-year college degrees, and men and women are entering elite professions like law and medicine in roughly equal numbers. But more women than men are living in poverty and low-income households, and women at all levels of the income scale are paid less than male workers with the same qualifications for exactly the same work. Women spend more time doing unpaid caregiving and family work than men do -- regardless of their employment status -- and are significantly more likely to be victims of domestic assault and sexual violence. And women -- who do, in fact, make up one-half of the world -- are vastly underrepresented in positions of influence, from Congress to corporate board rooms. And when men and women marry and have children, or don't marry and have children, in many cases their lives, work opportunities, and economic realities look very different.
Since we've done away with the most obvious manifestations of sexism in the last century, some people think women must be the problem. Others think our laws and culture have changed so dramatically over the last forty years that sexism and racism persist only as personal character flaws, and all we need to do is police bad actors like Don Imus and his ilk. Few people are willing to entertain the idea that sexism is invisibly rooted in the foundations of our society and the dark places inside our heads, and that we all -- every one of us -- carry around its seed. That doesn't mean we're all bad men, or bad women. It means we need to pay more attention to our assumptions and surroundings, especially to what lies beneath power relations in our society.
And of course we've got to keep digging and sifting through the dirt to make sure we've gotten rid of all the squishy little pieces of sexism that are scattered through our social structures and dominant values. It's a long term project -- trust me on this. And if you run into anyone who believes sexism and racism (and all the other -isms that drag us down) no longer exert an influence on men's and women's experiences or social outcomes, please send them my way. I could sure use some help in the yard.
I hope this month's edition will raise a few questions that get readers thinking and talking about sexism again. In this months Features section, I am thrilled to offer an in-depth interview with Canadian sociologist Andrea Doucet on the findings of her study of primary caregiving fathers. "Just as young boys don't want to be called 'sissies'," Doucet explains, the fathers she interviewed "do not want to equate their care work as 'women's work.' And this comes to bear on how men define themselves, not only as fathers but as fathers in relation to a society that still largely assumes that care work is women's work." It's impossible to overemphasize how important Doucet's analysis is to expanding feminist thinking on men and mothering, and I encourage anyone who cares about the future of fatherhood -- and motherhood -- to learn more about her work by reading the full interview.
Also in this month's Features: For awhile now, I've been mulling over the relationship between the popular children's album "Free To Be…You and Me" (1972) and this generation of mothers' sense of being blindsided by reality when they hit the maternal wall. I finally managed to write something about it: Mommies Are People: Revisiting Free To Be…You and Me. And thanks to author Deborah Siegel and her publishers, you'll also find an excerpt from Deborah's important new book, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, on the ideological conflicts of second and third wave feminism and what to do about it (a full review of Sisterhood, Interrupted appears in this month's Books section).
Last year, many readers wrote to say how much they liked Kyndra Wilson's personal essay, Love: How Do You Know? (November 2006). I'm happy to say Kyndra is back this month with an equally thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, Women Raising Girls: It's Complicated. Also in this month's Essays, returning contributor Karen Oakes writes about the gendered meaning of the language of "home" and "work," and suggests it's time to think up something new.
In Noteworthy you'll find the usual assortment of interesting news and views on women, work, family, and other social issues from various sources on the web, plus a short report on a few promising things that have been happening in Washington, DC, including a summary of recently-introduced legislation to help working families. There's also a description and links to a valuable new resource on low-income children and families in the states, and a summary of a new report on the characteristics and earnings of the direct care and child care workforce in the United States.
I hope this hunk o' fascinating reading will keep friends of MMO amused until our July/August edition on Activism 101: Strategies and Resources for Grass Roots Organizing goes online in mid-August (deadline for submissions is August 1). In September, our topic will be The "Choice" Mystique: The Remaking of Feminism as Freedom of Choice (submissions are due September 1). And in October, we'll be covering Raising Consciousness: Self-expression, Communication and Social Movements (contributing writers have plenty of time to plan for that one -- submissions for the issue are due October 1). For more information about issue topics and submission deadlines, please download the 2007 Editorial Calendar or email editor@mothersmovement.org.
I'll be attending two conferences over the summer: the 2007 National NOW Conference in Detroit, Michigan from July 13 - 15, and the one-day Carework Conference in NYC on August 10. I hope any MMO readers will swing by and say hello if they happen to attend either event. Meanwhile, I have some sunflowers to wrangle with.
Thanks to all this month's contributors, and to all our past contributors, for making the MMO what it is -- and making it possible to keep this unique project going strong.
In solidarity,
Judith Stadtman Tucker
Editor, The Mothers Movement Online
editor@mothersmovement.org
June 2007 |
