letter to a daughter and letter to a mother from Alternet
You say words such as "cheesy," "hooker boots," and "like" too often. You own polyester tops and plaid skirts exactly like the ones I rejected in the late '50s as totally uncool. You drink "40's," email obsessively and love your writers' group. You roll your eyes at me a lot, a whole lot, especially when I nod to the beat of the latest rap song on the radio but don't realize that the words are misogynistic or violent.
Similarly, I love the beat of your feminism, your generation's spunk and confidence, but I don't always understand the message. It seems vague and undefined. It trickles out in bits and pieces instead of bursting out in decisive shouts like ours did. Sometimes I wonder if you get the bigger picture of how the power structure in this country (mostly older, white and male) is still gridlocked, letting only the few token women actually come to the table no matter what their education or experience.
But I do believe that we need more women leaders, and I think they'll make different decisions that I expect might serve us better. They'll change the conversation, maybe not in the beginning, but definitely once there's a critical mass of a variety of women of different colors, ages, experiences and beliefs. Men and women are different in ways crucial to the way that businesses are run and social infrastructure is put into place. I think women will govern in a more collaborative way and take the effects of their decisions on women and children more into account than men do presently. Perhaps when men have had years of experience with hands-on parenting, more permission to experience their own feelings and a chance to expand their focus beyond the quickest way to get up the corporate ladder, then I'll revise my assessment, and these differences won't exist in quite the same way if they exist at all.
My generation of feminists loves thinking big picture, because we were forced to focus on minutia for so much of our lives. We wanted the next generation to expect vast equality and opportunity. I appreciate your Mother's Day thank you, but honestly, it was my pleasure watching you play basketball and observing that you demanded to be heard and paid fairly (well, as fairly as writers and teachers can expect in 2006). In some ways, it actually gives me joy that you take the right to choose for granted. It is the water you have swum in. Notwithstanding the epidemic of eating disorders and egregious focus on looks, I think your generation is more in control over your own bodies than any before it. I just hope you can mobilize one another to protect that power.
I have always wanted you to have choices. I wanted you to be able to be yourself in the world without dumbing down, settling for less or being afraid speak your mind. I tried to be a model, but I have to admit that sometimes I talked a good game without playing it particularly well. I did most of the management of the household and relationships with extended family, and cut down on my paid work to handle the majority of parenting, despite the promises my husband and I made each other when we got engaged at 19. Although I was pretty good about speaking my truth, I often quietly gave in so no one would suffer my "selfishness."
Some things take time. I was born in the Midwest to traditional, Episcopalian parents, so being "nice" and a "good wife and mother" are part of the blood that runs through my veins. Let's appreciate each other's gains and struggles. I am proud of my continuing work to resist the "nice and good" lessons of my upbringing. I love that these requirements seem to have been bred out of you. I love it that you're sassy, empowered and outspoken. I love that you do a better job of addressing class and race in the mix than we did, and the way you've taken networking to a whole new level with blogs and organizing online.
I don't want you to be superhuman. No wise second-waver does. Instead, our dream is that you each have the opportunity to be happy in the fullest expression of your true nature. There's still a lot of work to be done in order to support you, to support women less privileged than you to realize that dream.
I'm just not sure I understand how you are organized as a group to fight on the issues still before you, and I do think you're going to have to fight and fight harder. No one is going to just hand you anything just because it's fair. That's not the way power operates.
But we can all lighten up and have more fun along the way. It feels like the older I get the less serious I feel I have to be. I'm having a lot of fun in my 50s as the mother of a grown-up daughter and as my own grown-up, independent, feminist self. I can't wait to see how much fun I'll have as a grandmother.
Jere E. Martin is an artist, film consultant and activist living in Santa Fe, N.M.
You use words like "patriarchy" and "crone." You have a dream group, two book clubs, a medical psychic. On your bathroom wall, you have a photograph of a middle-aged naked woman stretched out in the curve of a leaning tree. I love you, but sometimes your ideas of feminism seem sappy, sentimental, unproductive.
I am not one of those Sophie Kinsella fans who likes my heels high and my man Cro-Magnon. In fact, despite my teasing, you are the most powerful person I have ever known. You founded the longest running women's film festival If you like a book, 10,000 of your closest friends immediately buy it. You can sense that I am sad from thousands of miles away. You gave me feminism, and when I was old enough to comprehend the profundity of that gift -- 18 years old and watching all of my friends fall apart from eating and anxiety disorders -- I embraced it with a vengeance.
On Mother's Day, I first and foremost want to say thank you. It is clearly not said enough by the women of my generation, the inheritors of Title IX and day-care centers and gender studies programs. Thank you for getting us these things, and thank you for doing away with others -- girdles and sanitary belts immediately come to mind. Thank you for teaching us to speak truth to power. Here I speak, not just to my all-powerful mother, but all second-wavers.
Your version of feminism sometimes feels like what Bitch Magazine founder Lisa Jervis called "femmenism", an idea that "female leadership is inherently different from male, that having more women in positions of power, authority, or visibility will automatically lead to, or can be equated with, feminist social change."
We have witnessed Abu Ghraib and Condoleeza Rice and Paris Hilton. This to me is evidence enough that women aren't inherently better or more just. We don't believe in goddess worship or that getting just any old lady into office will make the world a better place.
What we do believe in is education and choice. We believe in pleasure. We believe in humor. God knows, OK, Goddess knows, we believe in ambition; too many of us are unhealthy, perfect girls -- faithful, if unconscious, imitators of our supermoms.
Sometimes your legacy feels like a ten-ton weight, like we can never accomplish enough. Sometimes your adoring gaze feels like a critical stare -- as if our moments of frivolousness movement is dead. Sometimes your well-intentioned advice feels like a dooming prophecy. One feminist writer told me that she could not bear to connect me with her agent because the publishing world was inhumane. I was 24 with a mountain of ideas and hope that wouldn't pay the rent. Let us earn our own bitterness. Stop shaking your heads at NOW conferences because "the youth" don't show up. We are trying to maneuver a new path towards social change, and it has less to do with "everyone say aye" and more to do with blogs, networking sites, the hostile takeover of pop culture. Watch Pink's new video "Stupid Girls" (http://popsugar.com/5256) or read Feministing (www.feministing.com) if you want a sense of where we are fighting the 21st-century battle.
We want to fight the good fight, but we want to make sweet love too. We want our partners -- girl, boy or something radically in between -- beside us. We want boys to be less buttoned-up and more down for parenting and dancing to stupid '80s music in public; if they pay for dinner, unlike Maureen Dowd's hyperbolic claims, it doesn't mean we are riddled with '50s-era nostalgia. We just don't take some things as seriously as you do.
I can hear a chorus of Eileen Fisher-wearing women now -- wait until you have kids. I surrender. I have no clue about how I am going to realize my equal parenting dreams; I watched my own idealistic parents fail. My mom and I joke that she has grandmother Tourette's these days -- she shouts, "Babies would solve that," and then looks over both shoulders and asks, "Who said that?"
But for all our laughing, we know that the still-unsolved problem of work-family-gender balance is grave. I am scared of compromising my cherished independence, deathly afraid that I will wake up at 40 with an indistinguishable fire of bitterness in my guts. Sometimes I find myself standing over the sink washing my boyfriend's dishes even though I made dinner, and it scares the shit out of me.
When I recently came across second waver Cynthia Horney's rare message, it made me breathe a deep sigh of relief: "We got nowhere close to Having It All. But here's what I think … we had an awful lot of it. My point is simply that this turned out to be the very life I wanted: not my mother's life, not my husband's life, but a patched-up-some-of-both model that I worry is in danger of being cast aside as unworkable by people who have listened to too many women like me despair over what we are missing. We didn't make enough noise celebrating the great parts, did we?"
No, you didn't. But it is never too late.
Courtney E. Martin's book, "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters," will be published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in March 2007. Read more of her work at courtneyemartin.com.
Similarly, I love the beat of your feminism, your generation's spunk and confidence, but I don't always understand the message. It seems vague and undefined. It trickles out in bits and pieces instead of bursting out in decisive shouts like ours did. Sometimes I wonder if you get the bigger picture of how the power structure in this country (mostly older, white and male) is still gridlocked, letting only the few token women actually come to the table no matter what their education or experience.
But I do believe that we need more women leaders, and I think they'll make different decisions that I expect might serve us better. They'll change the conversation, maybe not in the beginning, but definitely once there's a critical mass of a variety of women of different colors, ages, experiences and beliefs. Men and women are different in ways crucial to the way that businesses are run and social infrastructure is put into place. I think women will govern in a more collaborative way and take the effects of their decisions on women and children more into account than men do presently. Perhaps when men have had years of experience with hands-on parenting, more permission to experience their own feelings and a chance to expand their focus beyond the quickest way to get up the corporate ladder, then I'll revise my assessment, and these differences won't exist in quite the same way if they exist at all.
My generation of feminists loves thinking big picture, because we were forced to focus on minutia for so much of our lives. We wanted the next generation to expect vast equality and opportunity. I appreciate your Mother's Day thank you, but honestly, it was my pleasure watching you play basketball and observing that you demanded to be heard and paid fairly (well, as fairly as writers and teachers can expect in 2006). In some ways, it actually gives me joy that you take the right to choose for granted. It is the water you have swum in. Notwithstanding the epidemic of eating disorders and egregious focus on looks, I think your generation is more in control over your own bodies than any before it. I just hope you can mobilize one another to protect that power.
I have always wanted you to have choices. I wanted you to be able to be yourself in the world without dumbing down, settling for less or being afraid speak your mind. I tried to be a model, but I have to admit that sometimes I talked a good game without playing it particularly well. I did most of the management of the household and relationships with extended family, and cut down on my paid work to handle the majority of parenting, despite the promises my husband and I made each other when we got engaged at 19. Although I was pretty good about speaking my truth, I often quietly gave in so no one would suffer my "selfishness."
Some things take time. I was born in the Midwest to traditional, Episcopalian parents, so being "nice" and a "good wife and mother" are part of the blood that runs through my veins. Let's appreciate each other's gains and struggles. I am proud of my continuing work to resist the "nice and good" lessons of my upbringing. I love that these requirements seem to have been bred out of you. I love it that you're sassy, empowered and outspoken. I love that you do a better job of addressing class and race in the mix than we did, and the way you've taken networking to a whole new level with blogs and organizing online.
I don't want you to be superhuman. No wise second-waver does. Instead, our dream is that you each have the opportunity to be happy in the fullest expression of your true nature. There's still a lot of work to be done in order to support you, to support women less privileged than you to realize that dream.
I'm just not sure I understand how you are organized as a group to fight on the issues still before you, and I do think you're going to have to fight and fight harder. No one is going to just hand you anything just because it's fair. That's not the way power operates.
But we can all lighten up and have more fun along the way. It feels like the older I get the less serious I feel I have to be. I'm having a lot of fun in my 50s as the mother of a grown-up daughter and as my own grown-up, independent, feminist self. I can't wait to see how much fun I'll have as a grandmother.
Jere E. Martin is an artist, film consultant and activist living in Santa Fe, N.M.
You use words like "patriarchy" and "crone." You have a dream group, two book clubs, a medical psychic. On your bathroom wall, you have a photograph of a middle-aged naked woman stretched out in the curve of a leaning tree. I love you, but sometimes your ideas of feminism seem sappy, sentimental, unproductive.
I am not one of those Sophie Kinsella fans who likes my heels high and my man Cro-Magnon. In fact, despite my teasing, you are the most powerful person I have ever known. You founded the longest running women's film festival If you like a book, 10,000 of your closest friends immediately buy it. You can sense that I am sad from thousands of miles away. You gave me feminism, and when I was old enough to comprehend the profundity of that gift -- 18 years old and watching all of my friends fall apart from eating and anxiety disorders -- I embraced it with a vengeance.
On Mother's Day, I first and foremost want to say thank you. It is clearly not said enough by the women of my generation, the inheritors of Title IX and day-care centers and gender studies programs. Thank you for getting us these things, and thank you for doing away with others -- girdles and sanitary belts immediately come to mind. Thank you for teaching us to speak truth to power. Here I speak, not just to my all-powerful mother, but all second-wavers.
Your version of feminism sometimes feels like what Bitch Magazine founder Lisa Jervis called "femmenism", an idea that "female leadership is inherently different from male, that having more women in positions of power, authority, or visibility will automatically lead to, or can be equated with, feminist social change."
We have witnessed Abu Ghraib and Condoleeza Rice and Paris Hilton. This to me is evidence enough that women aren't inherently better or more just. We don't believe in goddess worship or that getting just any old lady into office will make the world a better place.
What we do believe in is education and choice. We believe in pleasure. We believe in humor. God knows, OK, Goddess knows, we believe in ambition; too many of us are unhealthy, perfect girls -- faithful, if unconscious, imitators of our supermoms.
Sometimes your legacy feels like a ten-ton weight, like we can never accomplish enough. Sometimes your adoring gaze feels like a critical stare -- as if our moments of frivolousness movement is dead. Sometimes your well-intentioned advice feels like a dooming prophecy. One feminist writer told me that she could not bear to connect me with her agent because the publishing world was inhumane. I was 24 with a mountain of ideas and hope that wouldn't pay the rent. Let us earn our own bitterness. Stop shaking your heads at NOW conferences because "the youth" don't show up. We are trying to maneuver a new path towards social change, and it has less to do with "everyone say aye" and more to do with blogs, networking sites, the hostile takeover of pop culture. Watch Pink's new video "Stupid Girls" (http://popsugar.com/5256) or read Feministing (www.feministing.com) if you want a sense of where we are fighting the 21st-century battle.
We want to fight the good fight, but we want to make sweet love too. We want our partners -- girl, boy or something radically in between -- beside us. We want boys to be less buttoned-up and more down for parenting and dancing to stupid '80s music in public; if they pay for dinner, unlike Maureen Dowd's hyperbolic claims, it doesn't mean we are riddled with '50s-era nostalgia. We just don't take some things as seriously as you do.
I can hear a chorus of Eileen Fisher-wearing women now -- wait until you have kids. I surrender. I have no clue about how I am going to realize my equal parenting dreams; I watched my own idealistic parents fail. My mom and I joke that she has grandmother Tourette's these days -- she shouts, "Babies would solve that," and then looks over both shoulders and asks, "Who said that?"
But for all our laughing, we know that the still-unsolved problem of work-family-gender balance is grave. I am scared of compromising my cherished independence, deathly afraid that I will wake up at 40 with an indistinguishable fire of bitterness in my guts. Sometimes I find myself standing over the sink washing my boyfriend's dishes even though I made dinner, and it scares the shit out of me.
When I recently came across second waver Cynthia Horney's rare message, it made me breathe a deep sigh of relief: "We got nowhere close to Having It All. But here's what I think … we had an awful lot of it. My point is simply that this turned out to be the very life I wanted: not my mother's life, not my husband's life, but a patched-up-some-of-both model that I worry is in danger of being cast aside as unworkable by people who have listened to too many women like me despair over what we are missing. We didn't make enough noise celebrating the great parts, did we?"
No, you didn't. But it is never too late.
Courtney E. Martin's book, "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters," will be published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in March 2007. Read more of her work at courtneyemartin.com.
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