| 
katherine arnoldi,
from the
amazing true story of a teenage single mom
"What's
this about fair," my mother would say, pulling my
brother and I out of a life threatening brawl. "The world is
not fair." My mother should know. She was a single mom with
three kids to raise in the 60s. She was about as angry as a person
could be about unfairness. She was a perpetual time bomb of high
blood pressure and bitterness.
I was never able to accept
an unfair world, either. First, of course, my mother was unfair,
but before I knew it I was a teen mom and about to see just how
unfair the rest of the world could be, too. Working in a factory
gave me even more fodder for my arsenal of injustice, and I held
on tight to my belief that the world should be fair and I wanted
to do everything I could to make it that way. After all, I had my
daughter to consider.
First I had to learn
to fight for equal access to education. For that story see the graphic
novel, The
Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom (Hyperion, 1998),
the story of how I found Jackie, another single mom with two kids
who said the two words that changed my life forever: financial
aid.
Jackie made me see that
single moms did not have equal rights in four ways: to fairness
in the courts, to employment, to housing and to education. I wanted
the world to be fair and I wanted to do my part. But how could a
single mom who had a long way to go to work up to subsistence living
help anyone else? Who would ever listen to me? I had a sneaking
suspicion that if I ever mentioned these things people labeled me
as crazy, which I realized everyone had done towards my mother.
Once marginalized, it feels like you are yelling out on an empty
plain.
In 1976 I wrote my first
article for single moms about buying property with owner financing
for a magazine called Hard Labor. I had this idea I had
garnered from structural materialist anthropologists that those
in power had the money and if single moms could own property, the
basis of wealth I thought, then we would have more power. I also
realized that I was one of only two single moms on campus at the
University of Arkansas and that something was wrong with that, which
made me mad and furious that I, for example, had waited two years
on the waiting list for "married student" housing which
was a dark concrete hell with not a tree or blade of grass in sight
in the shadow of the gargantuan, luxurious football stadium where
thousands of red-clad Razorbacks yelling "Pig Souie" disturbed
my few minutes of precious study time. I knew there were plenty
of single moms in the town and plenty in the state, the second poorest
state in the country. I also surmised that when a sorority girl
became pregnant she had to disappear, her education over, or else
would return a year later with a new baby sister in the family.
Jackie, meanwhile, was
in North Carolina visiting teen moms in her poor rural county bringing
them the hope of going back for their GED and eventually college.
As I pursued a Masters in literature in North Carolina and then
Creative Writing in New York City (where I moved because I wanted
to publish a book about teen moms), I, too, took financial aid forms
and college applications to GED programs, realizing that if teen
moms were coerced to leave high schools, as they are, then go and
valiantly get their GED, they miss out on guidance counseling and
information about financial aid and college.
What threw me over the
edge of anger was seeing a photo in the New York Times in 1987 of
a teen mom with a baby in one arm and a teddy bear in the other,
a trivialization of the immensity of that young girl's problem.
The article was about the epidemic of teen pregnancy and I could
see it all coming then, how teen moms would be blamed for the economic
crises caused by the Savings & Loan bailout and Desert Storm,
all the way up to the End Welfare as We Know It frenzy. It's not
FAIR, I yelled, just I had at my mother about my brother.
I wrote up a lengthy
tome, the Single Mother's Bill of Rights, which Pat Gowans published
in the Welfare Mother's Voice, along with my other articles
about unfairness and justice (Thanks to Pat Gowans who has thirty
years of activism for poor mothers). I had been publishing my rants
on the subject in The Quarterly (thank you Gordon Lish!),
Room of One's Own and Blue Collar Review but I
also started, inspired by the East Village cartoonists in my neighborhood
(David Sandlin, Eric Drooker, Seth Tobacman, Sabrina Jones) to make
my own cartoon book. I thought that if I gave out the story of my
life to the teen moms I was seeing in the GED programs, then they
would understand that I, too, had many of the problems they had.
I xeroxed it myself, adding to it each time before I would spend
all night at the 24 hour copy center, along with all the other anarchists
of the East Village, self publishing our manifestos.
I wanted a home for my
"operations" and I approached Armando Perez and Chino
Garcia at the Charas Community Center two blocks from where I was
living -- on 9th Street between B and C -- and eventually I started
the Single Mom College Program there in the early 90s. Every Saturday
I sat outside at a table and handed out financial aid forms and
gave out college advice, most especially trying to entice moms by
the amount of Pell Grant available a year, $4,000, SEOG, $4,000,
TAP state tuition assistance, $3,000 and advising on how to avoid
loans. I went with the revolutionary Charas folks as we set up booths
at street fairs and festivals in Tompkins Square Park.
I went to the Blue Mountain
Center, a socially conscious art center and there, Harriet Barlow,
Ben Shrader and Jonathan Rowe of Redefining Progress inspired me
that my little zine should be published. The next year it won a
New York Foundation of the Arts Award in Drawing and that inspired
me to give it to my agent, Jennifer Hangen, and so, The Amazing
True Story of a Teenage Single Mom was published and I was
suddenly on the Today Show, Tom Brokow and the Nightly News, CNN
Entertainment and NPR getting to say that teen mothers do not have
equal access to education, and if they are raising almost half of
our country's children could not this lack of equal rights contribute
to the feminization of poverty? I also was able to say that there
appears to be a societal shift from nuclear family to single parenting
and, just like the shift from extended family to nuclear family,
it is women and children who are suffering. We need to lift the
institutions up to our level of responsibility, I said.
And just in case the
institutions did not want to do so on their own, I started a class
action lawsuit against the New York City Board of Education with
the New York Civil Liberties Union for coercing teen moms to leave
high school. Enid Mastrianni, formerly of the Upstate Welfare Warriors,
and I started looking at the top 300 colleges for accessibility
for moms. The results were dismal. The idea is to use Title IX,
which guarantees gender equity in education (nothing in it about
sports, by the way) to get the colleges to provide equal accommodations
for mothers, since having children is a gender characteristic. A
long shot, but, as I am still fueled by anger, I think it's worth
a try. For results go to www.katherinearnoldi.com
and click on the Guide
to Colleges for Mothers.
My anger has not subsided,
especially as I now find that the incidence of single parenting
is going up the world over, now 30 percent in Mexico, and up to
17 percent in Malaysia, and growing. Thanks to the World Bank and
the WTO and their neoliberal agenda, countries are doing what our
country had done over the past twenty years: sign welfare bills,
cut spending on education, health and social welfare, provide a
military for global riot control and to protect the interests of
the World Bank, and women who have been living a subsistence living
are seeing their fields being taken over to grow exportable crops
such as coffee and other unedibles and are forced to migrate to
the cities, where, voila!, they are needed for the factories to
make more exports out of plastic and other distressingly meaningless
compounds. That's why my next graphic novel is about how women have
been affected the world over by the neoliberal agenda. The fight
for justice is just beginning and I am grateful to have been and
to be a part!!
The Amazing True
Story of a Teenage Single Mom is being made in to a movie by
the Kennedy Marshall Company (Seabiscuit, Poltergeist) due out the
Fall of 2006. Hopefully, that will raise the level of interest in
helping teen moms have equal access to education.
mmo
: december 2005 |
