So...
A Feminine Mystique All Her Own
What do we think about this?
Where do the mermaids stand?
The essence of this spirit was captured in a moving speech about tolerance given last year by the student body president of one of your sister colleges. She related the story by Robert Fulghum about a young pastor who, finding himself in charge of some very energetic children, hits upon a game called "Giants, Wizards and Dwarfs." "You have to decide now," the pastor instructed the children, "which you are ... a giant, a wizard or a dwarf?"
At that, a small girl tugging at his pants leg, asked, "But where do the mermaids stand?"
The pastor told her there are no mermaids, and she says, "Oh yes there are," she said. "I am a mermaid."
Now this little girl knew what she was and she was not about to give up on either her identity or the game. She intended to take her place wherever mermaids fit into the scheme of things. Where do the mermaids stand ... All those who are different, those who do not fit the boxes and pigeonholes? "Answer that question," wrote Fulghum, "and you can build a school, a nation, or a whole world."
~~Barbara Bush
Wellesley College Commencement Address, 1990
About Me
- Monica
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6 comments:
I haven't read the article yet, but I can say that I don't like the pattern on her sunroom furniture.
Haha. Yeah, the sunroom isn't my taste.
I feel like I need a bit more history to really get a feel for the characters in this play. I'm with her on not being a real fan of Betty Friedan, but I'm not exactly sure what she does think. It sounds to me from the article that she's all about women being strong, free thinkers, and valued; she just doesn't think they should whine about it. I'm all there.
Um, yeah, my first impression is that the furniture is just ugly beyond belief.
My second impression is that I've never been a big fan of what she wrote...but that her being a woman had nothing to do with that (I just generally disagreed with her political philosophy and Rush Limbaugh-ish attitude). In a sense, I suppose you can call that a success for feminism. She can be judged on her merits, not her gender.
If you haven't read Betty Friedan's book, you need to. It's a classic, and it's not the crazy piece that Fundy circles like to think it is. It's well-reasoned and well-researched, and you need that kind of background to realize what someone like Schlafly was saying and what else her audience was hearing at the same time. You should also read something about the ERA. I've got a great book on it at home that I read about two months ago. I'll try to remember to post it up here. It's a fascinating period of time, and the number of opposing messages that were going on at the same time in the media is just astounding.
Different messages may have been going out in the media about the ERA, but what matters is the legal impact of that admendemnt. Notwithstanding her poor taste in furniture and occasionaly overly-combative attiude, she did our nation an inestimatable service by shooting down the ERA.
We have the equal protection clause to deal with discrimination. ERA would have been superfluous where it was needed, but would have opened entirely new legal cans of worms. It could, for example, be used against churches which refuse to make women pastors. It was contemplated as being used to require a kind of affirmative action in fields where male characteristics create male dominance--like physical contruction, where a women whose performance was inferior as a block layer would have to have been hired. It raised problems with the military.
I could go on, but time forbids, although I can gather more evidence as I suspect Monica will contest my legal conclusions.
I've done quite a bit of reading about the ERA, and while I wouldn't vote for it at this point, I think I would have voted for it when it was first pushed. Most of my reading was out of a third-party kind of book that tried through interviews and primary source research to fairly represent both sides of the issue, and it was my feeling that the ERA would have served excellently for what it was intended to do. It's also my feeling that many of the people who would have voted for the ERA then would never have believed what it could be used for today.
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