International Women’s Day 2015

Women doing some of the mundane work of the movement:
"Souvenir booklet sales table at March on Washington, 1963."
Photo by Marion S.Trikosko [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

For International Women’s Day, I’m thinking about the women who go unnoticed by history but whose efforts were nonetheless essential for bringing about social change for the better. I’m thinking, for example, of the churchgoing women portrayed in the movie Selma who were packing bedrolls, medical supplies, and food for the marchers. 

Feminism doesn’t just mean lauding the women who have achieved renown (although I am certainly proud of them, too), but also appreciating the everyday labor that women do, the small actions they take to create a better world. It could be a personal conversation. It could be lessons imparted to a child. It could be letters written to people in power. It could be a work slowdown or stoppage. 

I think of women I saw in Dakar, standing up to men in the marketplace, or putting themselves in danger to stop fights, or talking with each other in courtyards about what was wrong in their country and how to fix it. They formed small collectives and pooled funds to lift each other up and improve their communities. Many women infuse the tasks they must do every day—make food, raise children, go to work, stitch together household funds—with social justice. 

To all of them, and all of you, thank you.

My Thoughts on Cops, Race, Ferguson, Justice, and Whose Side I'm On

A demonstration in New York City protesting
the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO.
(Photo via WikiMedia Commons)

When I was about 18, I got into an argument with my best friend* over an article about a man who committed suicide by cop. 

I said something like, “It’s disgusting that getting shot by the police is so predictable that someone can actually plan to commit suicide this way.”

My friend countered, “You know who I feel sorry for? The cop. Imagine having to live the rest of your life knowing that you killed someone just doing your job, and that person used you to commit suicide.”

I don’t remember what I replied to him, but I remember still feeling angry and unconvinced. My friend is white. I am not. That day, I was unable to articulate to him that race had everything to do with where our sympathies lay.

Nevertheless, my friend’s words stuck with me.

I actually have family members who were cops—family members who are not on the brown side of my family—but I have never talked with them in depth about what it was like to be on the job. One of them said to me, “It’s pretty much like [the reality TV show] Cops.” Having seen snippets of the show, I was afraid to ask more. I was too much of a coward to confront the possibility that people I love might be doing things that would enrage me if I knew. (We already have plenty we disagree on.)

I have also met cops that I like (usually police of color), who have been personable, fair, and concerned, who have exactly embodied the ideal of law enforcement as it should be.

Sometimes, news of a policeman killed during duty has sent me into a reverie, trying to imagine what it would be like to have every work day present the possibility of death. I have read writings by and about cops, describing how seemingly innocuous situations can turn bad, or how someone who presents as non-threatening might be extremely dangerous. I can sympathize with the idea that confronting the worst side of human nature, day in and day out, can taint a person’s view of the world and transform every individual into an object of suspicion.

Since Monday, I have been reading with a kind of grim resignation everything I can about the killing of Mike Brown. I read Officer Darren Wilson’s testimony, which I don’t believe for a minute, and Dorian Johnson’s testimony, which includes details that comport exactly with my own experiences of cops’ attitudes and speech with me and with other people of color.

These two accounts encapsulate two world views. In the first, Mike Brown is the belligerent aggressor, who escalates nothing into something, who is huge and terrifying, and Wilson must defend himself. In the second, Darren Wilson is the demon, and Brown must fight for his life.

The two accounts are parallel, yet mirrored. But no matter which account the reader believes, the end is the same: Wilson has a gun, and Brown does not. Wilson gets a hearing, but Brown gets executed.

The gap between these two accounts seems like a chasm. After all, they can’t both be true.

But I wish cops could understand that what they feel—being on high alert, aware that people going about their business might be hiding a threat, knowing that any day they could die at the hands of someone irrational, stupid, or hot-headed—is exactly how African Americans, especially black men, feel around them.

Cops and black men are having parallel yet mirror experiences of each other.

On the face of it, this could provide some common ground, the beginning of understanding. In reality, we know that the construction of race, a construction hundreds of years old and woven inextricably into the fabric of Western culture, functions precisely to perpetuate the divide. An illusion with very material consequences.

I have lived in places where police are not upholders of the law, but agents of bribery and corruption. The kind of life most of us want, with stability and security, is only possible in our current society with a professional, trained, and funded police force. 

It’s hard to hold both ideas in my head, that I want to have cops patrolling my streets at the same time that I also fear them, not just for myself, but for my some of my friends, and some of my kids’ friends who are brown and black boys and will grow up to be brown and black men. I can feel sympathy for an individual cop in a tight situation having to make a tough call (and let me be clear that Darren Wilson is NOT that cop). But such sympathy cannot erase the continuing rage I feel at an institution that regularly mows down men of color and  incarcerates them at a staggering rate.

I don’t have a solution. Rational discussions and state-sponsored “conversations about race” serve mostly to create the appearance of progress and building bridges without shifting the institutional bedrock that supports the structure of the status-quo. Violence usually hurts communities already suffering the most, but sometimes it is the only language that state power understands and responds to. (I am not calling for violence. I am simply looking at history.)

I do know that if cops have any kind of sincere desire to change this dynamic, it is incumbent upon them to listen and learn. Cops have power and resources; impoverished communities do not, which is why the equation of armed white cop + unarmed black man ends with the same tragic result again and again (while armed white men roam freely).

Ultimately, what police are supposed to stand for and what people in the streets are calling for is the same thing: justice. But the scales are weighted, and Americans need to take clear-eyed look at the ways race creates that imbalance. The scales have never hung equal, but until they do, we will have no peace.

* Read about my run-in with a cop and a vigilante with this same best friend here, as part of my reflection on the injustice of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. 

LINKS:

A petition to President Obama and the US Attorney General to press federal charges against Darren Wilson

A wishlist of books for the Ferguson Library

The NAACP march, Journey for Justice, beginning on Saturday, November 29
 

Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 3

Cousin Mary teaching my dad and me
her mother's secret kata recipe
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Continued from Part 1, where I explore the connections between cooking, work, and leisure, and Part 2, where I unpack the dynamics between cooking and gender in my own family history.

In Part 3, I want to break down the argument presented in the study, “The Joy of Cooking?”, step by step. First, the authors assert that working mothers feel duty-bound to cook because of pressure from a traditional ideal of motherhood coupled with pressure from various “food gurus” who are advocating for Americans to cook more often at home. In the course of interviewing women to support this theory, they also uncover several barriers that make cooking difficult for their interviewees: poverty, work pressures, transportation, housing, child care. Finally, they propose a number of possible “creative solutions” to feed families without forcing mothers into the kitchen. 

The authors of the study seem to contend that no working mother wants to cook, but does so due to external obligations. They write, “Mothers felt responsible for preparing healthy meals for their children and keenly experienced the gap between the romanticized version of cooking and the realities of their lives.” Women are feeling even more pressure, they argue, because “modern-day food gurus” such as Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Rachel Ray, as well as political figures like Michelle Obama, “advocate a return to the kitchen.” (I’m just going to note here that Pollan’s book, Cooked, includes a gender analysis that demonstrates he is aware of these issues.) 

Of course, the ideal of motherhood exists; of course, mothers constantly feel guilty for not living up to it. But to say that mothers are manipulated to this extent simply by unrealistic standards is to ignore the ways that we defy these standards on a daily basis. A search for “good enough mother” turns up the words of many mothers who are rejecting the ideal. Periodically, studies come out that “prove” that stay-at-home mothers are best for their children, or that day cares will damage children irreparably. Do working mothers feel horribly guilty when these studies come out? Yes. And then they go back to work, either by choice or by necessity, knowing that their work is helping their children by providing the financial support they need and by modeling working womanhood. (And those studies get refuted.)

So while I don’t deny that ideology is a factor in mothers feeling oppressed by cooking, I would add that to pin the blame solely on idealized motherhood and foodies is to miss the point. 

If the ideal—and the sexism contained within it—is truly at issue, then how do partnerships that are less traditionally gendered look? I asked several mothers and fathers about how they divide cooking and other domestic work, and I received a range of responses. (Because this post will be long, I’ll include direct most quotes in a coda to this series.) I heard from stay-at-home and work-at-home dads who actively enjoy and take pride in cooking. I heard from opposite-gender couples who split cooking 50/50. I heard from same-gender couples where one partner did most of the domestic tasks. I heard from single mothers who are struggling to do it all. From a small sample, I received a breadth of possible family configurations, each negotiating cooking and domestic tasks in their own way. 

In the diversity of responses, one consistency stood out for me. Many women in opposite-gender couples, who had generally egalitarian relationships, said they cook because their male partners simply lacked know-how. No one had taught their men to cook when they were young. As adults, the men had little time or motivation to learn, so if their female partners wanted to eat decently, then they cooked. 

If families abandon cooking entirely, then we lose one path to gender equity: men who cook. I am fortunate that my son loves to help me in the kitchen. I count teaching him to cook amongst my small, daily feminist acts. One day, after picking up my son from preschool, my daughter asked him, “Do you want to play ‘Frozen’?” “No,” my son replied. “I want to help Mama make dinner.” Heart cockles: warmed. 

If gender dynamics and motherhood ideals can’t fully explain the problem of working mothers and cooking, what else is at play? One clue is revealed in this quote from Elaine, a white, middle-class married mother interviewed for the study: “When we get home it’s such a rush. I just don’t know what happens to the time. I am so frustrated. That’s why I get so angry! I get frustrated ‘cause I’m like, I wanna make this good meal that’s really healthy and I like to cook ‘cause it’s kind of my way to show them that I love them, ‘This is my love for you guys!’ And then I wind up at the end just, you know, grrr! Mad at the food because it takes me so long. It’s like, how can it take an hour for me to do this when I’ve already cut up the carrots and the celery and all I’m doing is shoving it into a bowl?” (emphasis mine) 

Elaine says herself that she likes to cook, but she is frustrated that she doesn’t have the time to cook the way she wants to for her family. I hear her longing for a certain kind of connection that a home-cooked family meal can bring, but time pressures turn a leisure activity into a stressful obligation. 

The study authors themselves name many of the barriers to cooking: food costs, particularly for healthy foods; basic food insecurity; long work hours; unpredictable schedules; differing family schedules; inadequate transportation; and long commutes to work. Some mothers live in particularly dire situations: “During the month we spent with Flora, a poor black mother who was currently separated from her husband, she was living with her daughter and two grandchildren in a cockroach- and flea-infested hotel room with two double beds. They prepared all of their food in a small microwave, rinsing their utensils in the bathroom sink.” 

Is cooking really the problem here? 

Would Flora benefit more if she were released from a gendered obligation to cook? Or would she perhaps find more relief if her city had a program to house the homeless like Salt Lake City’s? 

Sign from the New York City strike
of McDonald's workers this summer.
(Photo by Annette Bernhardt,
from WikiMedia Commons)

At the same time I read this study, which features at least four parents who work in the fast food industry, I also read William Finnegan’s article in The New Yorker about the efforts of McDonald’s workers to unionize and raise the minimum wage. Most of the workers he interviews have jobs at two different locations, if not three, and yet their hours are held under forty hours a week to keep them part-time. One mother who has worked at McDonald’s for fourteen years makes $8.50/hour, a 50 cent increase over the base pay—which is minimum wage—in a city where a living wage for a single parent with a child is calculated to be $30.02/hour. Finnegan writes, “American fast-food workers receive almost seven billion dollars a year in public assistance,” which includes food stamps. 

Moreover, employees do not get regular shifts. Instead, every Saturday evening, hours are posted for the following week. Each worker receives a thin strip of paper with her or his schedule. Imagine what this unpredictability means for parents trying to arrange child care. 

As if this level of exploitation isn’t enough, some workers don’t even get paid for the hours they put in. Finnegan reports, “Two former McDonald’s managers recently went public with confessions of systematic wage theft, claiming that pressure from both franchisees and the corporation forces them to alter time sheets and compel employees to work off the clock.” 

This kind of treatment is inhumane, for parents and non-parents alike. And it isn’t just the fast food industry. American workers put in longer hours for less pay than their counterparts in other developed countries, and they also take fewer vacations. No legal limits exist to prevent American workers from answering e-mails and analyzing spreadsheets when ostensibly having family time at home. 

Rather than an accusation against cooking for causing misery amongst working women, I would like to see an indictment of a brutal work culture engendered by skyrocketing inequality. I would like to see an examination of farm subsidies that make processed foods artificially cheap while making raw foods unattainably expensive. I would like to see a report on the economic conditions that create food deserts in certain neighborhoods when food is so abundant in others. I would like to see a denunciation of a political climate that makes raising the national minimum wage to a paltry $15/hour an impossibility. I would like to see rage against weak and ineffective initiatives to end poverty while the top 0.1 percent continue to attain new heights of wealth. 

The study authors suggest in their conclusion a variety of “creative solutions” to feed families healthy meals without continuing to overburden mothers. They suggest town suppers and healthy food trucks, to-go meals that parents pick up at their children’s schools to heat up at home. 

While I am interested in collectivist solutions, the logistics bring up more questions. Where would the food come from? Who would grow it? What food traditions would be represented? How would it all get funded? If families buy the meals, how could the meals be affordable yet made with good quality, fresh ingredients? 

The main question I have is, who would prepare these foods? How much would they get paid? What hours would they work? Because I can imagine, all too easily, that these programs would rely on part-time workers juggling two jobs, some of them parents. Parents who would work long hours to prepare food for parents, who are working too much to prepare food. Alternatively, I can imagine stay-at-home moms being asked to volunteer their labor, just as they are tasked with filling in labor gaps in their children’s schools. 

This isn’t a solution. It’s a displacement of the problem. 

The answer to the question, “Why do working mothers find it so hard to cook?” is not an easy one, but cooking itself is not the problem. The way most Americans, not just working mothers, find it difficult-to-impossible to engage in one of the most fundamental human activities is but one symptom of a cancer in American culture. 

So what can we do? We can insist on connection. We are all linked: the farmers who grow our food, the migrant workers who harvest it, the drivers who transport it, the grocers who stock it, the corner-store owners who sell it, the food workers who prep and cook it, the parents who bring it home, the children who either eat it or complain about it. 

Cooking can be feminist or anti-feminist. But insisting on a more just and equal world is feminist to the core.

Where Do We Go After #CancelColbert?

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

This post is available on Salon.com: “#CancelColbert accomplished nothing: why social change movements must be inclusive.”

Thanks to Mimi Khúc, who read an early draft of this post. Thanks also to the many friends on Facebook whose discussions helped develop my thoughts on these issues.  

#365Feminist Selfie 1: Hair (specifically, body hair)

The brows are lightly waxed.
Because I'm half Armenian.

First in my #365FeministSelfie series.

I haven’t shaved for 23 years. I know, I know. Shaggy underarms are at the top of the list of Feminist Stereotypes, probably right next to “burning your bra.” You’d think I attended college in the 1970s rather than been born during that decade. 

I tried shaving, but after six years of gashing my legs and getting red, itchy rashes under my arms, I threw in the towel. 

Actually, the reason I thought that not shaving could even be possible was due to Pia, the Swedish exchange student who attended my high school during my sophomore year. Pia wore miniskirts, showing her long, white-blonde leg hair to God and everybody. Of course, within two months she had begun to shave as part of her acculturation process. But she had already made her impression on me. 

I’m going to say right here, because I know the first riposte this post will provoke, that I have had my fair share of sexy times with men even though I don’t shave. (I say only “men” because I doubt anyone is going to chime in on the comments with “No self-respecting hot lesbian would want you with that disgusting pit hair.”) Yes, Virginia, there are hetero cis-men who hit skins with women with body hair and either don’t mind or actively enjoy it. After all, ahem, I do have two children with my handsome, hetero cis-man husband. 

I am not alone in my alarm at American culture’s intolerance for body hair. Not because I think that all women should let their body hair GROOOOW FREEEEEE! I am not opposed to women (and men) who trim, shave, wax, electrolyze, or thread off some or all of their body hair. Bodily autonomy is a feminist principle. 

But I do object to a culture that excludes, shames, or punishes women (or men) who do not wish to participate in depilation. 

I never thought about how early this enculturation starts, until one day when my daughter’s friend, five years old, came up to me and whispered, “Most women shave off the hair under their arms.” She said it in the exact tone of an old lady admonishing another that her slip was showing. “I know,” I whispered back, and smiled. She shot me a look of mingled incredulity and distain and walked away. 

I am fortunate that the kind of places I have worked—queer-oriented public health, publishing, teaching abroad, graduate school—did not require a conventional [American] cis-woman presentation. I didn’t have to shave, wear high heels, or wear make-up. This is not to say I don’t groom myself (although my grooming has slipped a bit since my small children have transformed the simple ritual of showering into a major undertaking). 

I just don’t think women should be held to a higher standard of appearance—that is, one that demands more attention, time, and expensive products—than men. 

I hate that stock sitcom gag where a man rolls his eyes over how long it takes a woman to get ready to go out. On the one hand, the joke theatrically bemoans the vanity of women; on the other, it writes over the ways men have historically required women, as their property, to represent and display beauty and—by extension—wealth and class. Although most of us are no longer categorized as property, we can still be props—as adornment, as visual pleasure for the male gaze, as symbols of affluence, often in service to increasing men’s social capital. (And the methods of beautifying—the couture, the accessories, the jewelry, the shoes—simultaneously showcase yet hide the labor of those of far lesser economic and social status—mostly women, some even children.) 

My refusal to shave is one way that I opt-out of the expected time-consuming ritual of costuming for feminine performance. It’s my small, daily rebellion against this facet of sexism. By being “out” about not shaving, perhaps I can be Pia to another woman or girl. 

It is also an assertion of the importance of my pleasure, my time, and the integrity of my body. I have decided that men’s aesthetic pleasure does not rank above my bodily discomfort—pain from cuts, itching from rashes. I prefer to use my time doing something that gives me pleasure rather than removing my body hair. 

For some women, the removal gives them pleasure, and that can be a feminist act, too. 

But in a gender-equal world, every woman deserves the right to her own calculus. 

In Britain, women are going razor-free in August (i.e., Sleeveless Season) to raise money for women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). So if you do shave but are poils-curious, you can experiment for a good cause.

And now, to cheer us all up, please see this Robot Hugs comic on the Body Policing Police. Enjoy! 

Keystone, Climate Change, and My Children's Future

Image by Jmcdaid via Wikimedia Commons

I haven't written anything in about two months because my kids have been sick, I have been sick, my husband has been sick, the holidays happened, and now my grandmother is in the hospital.

But we are in the 30-day window for the public to weigh in on the Keystone XL Pipeline. Every day that we go without rain in California makes me nervous and edgy. This photograph makes it abundantly clear that a severe water shortage is coming, worse than any in living memory. I can feel, in my bones, that everything we have experienced — hurricanes, the Polar Vortex, record-breaking droughts — is only the beginning of the effects of global climate change. I honestly worry that my children will inherit a planet less able to support life than any time in human history. I had to speak up.

I decided to post this because I am hoping that others will also be moved to write. Please make your voices heard. Comments close on March 7, so please write today.

I stand against the Keystone XL Pipeline. The U.S. State Department has determined that the extraction, refinement, and transportation of the tar sands will not increase the effects of climate change, but ONLY because the Department claims that the tar sands oil will find its way to market one way or another. In other words, the State Department is advocating in favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline because it is protecting U.S. interests without accurately accounting for a rapidly warming planet and its effects on future generations.

Yet the Keystone XL Pipeline, in fact, threatens U.S. interests precisely because it will have climate effects. The U.S. is a global leader, and the action we take on Keystone will signal to the rest of the world whether we intend to take material action on the changing climate, which will affect every person on this planet, or whether we will ride cheap oil to oblivion.

If we wish to remain a global leader, must take a stand on climate change and our dependence on oil, for the sake of our homeland and for the home of our entire species. I have heard arguments that Keystone XL will make the U.S. energy-independent. Yet we cannot deny that oil will not and cannot be the fuel of the future. Our continued dependence on oil is a testament to the industry's powerful influence on national policy rather than an argument in favor of the status quo. Rather, if we continue to rely on oil, we will no doubt fall behind in the development of alternative fuel and solar technologies. Our country uses oil as a crutch, and it is holding us back.

During my childhood, during the administration of President Carter, the U.S. made first steps towards solar technology. The Reagan administration turned our economy back towards oil, bringing all that innovation to a halt. Imagine where we might be if we had, instead, aggressively pursued solar all those decades ago. Only now are houses and cars beginning to be heated by our most abundant energy source, and we are in competition with other nations to retain a slim edge. Are we going to turn the clock back again?

Our planet is already in turmoil due to human-created drastic climate change. Most of the country is suffering from frigid temperatures and massive snowfall due to the Polar Vortex. Here in California, we are laboring under the worst drought in our recorded history with no relief in sight. Our agricultural economy is threatened by a dire water shortage. Food prices are already rising. Across our entire nation, we are only beginning to feel the climate crisis that is building, threatening our economy, our food security, our infrastructure, and the very lives of our citizens.

The Keystone XL Pipeline marks a watershed moment. Our decision to exploit the tar sands oil will not be a final carbon "push" that will send us into irrevocable disaster; alternatively, our decision not to exploit it will not halt climate change. Nevertheless, the world awaits our decision as a signal. The symbolism of the Keystone XL can be as influential as the movement of the markets that signal confidence or lack thereof in a stock or a country's economy.

For this reason, I urge you to in the strongest possible terms to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. We must send a clear signal that we will forge a new energy future rather than drain oil down to its poor, dirty dregs in the tar sands. Not only our nation's citizens, but our entire species is suffering from what are only the first effects of climate change. We must do everything in our power to halt our current path.

Oil is the handbasket. It's time to get out.

For a deeper analysis of the calculations regarding the carbon effects of Keystone XL, see this. For a more eloquent argument on behalf of the planet, please read this. Ultimately, I decided the numbers were less important than the symbolism of the pipeline, since the calculations are elastic and the effects likely won't be entirely known unless/until we go through with it. To my mind, the potential risks far, far outweigh the potential benefit.

Finally, if you still aren't feeling alarmed enough, there's always this: "How Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt."

Two Children in Poverty, a Century Apart

At the orphanage. My grandmother is in the center row,
fourth from the left. Year and photographer unknown.

I have been very sick for a week, and no end in sight. So today, while trying to force myself to stay in bed, I finally read the New York Times’ profile of Dasani, a homeless girl living in a shelter in Brooklyn. Once I started, I had to read the entire gripping, heart-wrenching account. 

“[Dasani] belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.” 

It made me think of another person I know who grew up in New York in poverty: my grandmother. 

My Armenian grandmother was born in Istanbul when it was still known as Constantinople. She arrived in New York at eight years old (although officially only five years old, for a lower fare in steerage), a refugee from Turkey who had escaped the Armenian Genocide. Her mother couldn’t support her, so she sent my grandmother to live in an orphanage for several years, until her mother married again and could afford to bring her home. My grandmother grew up in the city through the Great Depression. She was able to attend a public arts high school, which led to her first job copying French perfume bottles for a department store. She gave all the money she earned to her mother. 

In the course of her life in the U.S., she skyrocketed out of poverty into prosperity, a world away from where she started. She had a house in California with her own studio. Her husband owned his own business and passed it onto their sons. She died, essentially of old age, at ninety-seven and a half. 

Like many women of her generation, my grandmother safeguarded herself from deprivation, even in the midst of plenty. She bought oatmeal, canned tomato sauce, and soup in bulk. She cooked huge amounts of Armenian food—kufta, berag, lamajoon, kata, churag—and packed the leftovers into a second freezer. She hid money throughout the house; sometimes she forgot it, and we only found it after she died. 

Certain habits of caution and protection have lasted three generations, carved into my dad and me even though we have never known such want. 

When I read this story, about all the structural barriers that keep Dasani’s family trapped in a shelter for more than three years, I cried. My grandmother horrified me with stories of conditions at the orphanage, but the shelter trumps the hardships she endured. Adding insult to injury are the examples of Dasani and her family disregarded and unheard by those who are ostensibly charged with protecting children and the poor: housing inspectors, the Administration for Children’s Services, the shelter director. And above them all, the mysterious figure of Mayor Bloomberg looms, enacting laws from an abstract distance that affect their lives in concrete terms. His philosophy of ending poverty, based on ideology, instead closes down the family’s potential exits from the shelter to stable housing. 

In stark contrast, Dasani’s teachers and principal stand out as they try their best to keep her in school, to teach her the kind of impulse control she will need to succeed, and to provide structure and stability that she can find nowhere else in her life. 

America’s promise is deeply, deeply broken. That homeless children must survive in these places, just blocks away from $1.9 million condos, is profoundly immoral. We have absolutely no claim to the title “the greatest country in the world” as long as we are willing to allow children to grow up in circumstances like these. We must take steps to end such escalating inequality now. 

Charity is not enough. We need a transformation of how we conceptualize poverty. We need to take a hard look at the way inequality is built into the very bricks of our society. To provide Dasani with the same opportunities my grandmother had, we need to reconsider access to quality education, living wages, child care services, prenatal care, drug addiction and its criminalization, mental and physical health care, welfare, urban planning, and our institutional prejudices against women, against people of color, against the poor themselves. Most of all, we need to listen to the voices of people in poverty and take them seriously when they vocalize their needs. And their dreams. 

No easy task, certainly. But we have a choice. When faced with the problem of every child like Dasani, will we throw up our hands? Or will we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work?

Rest in (People) Power, Nelson Mandela

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Madiba went home today.

The lesson of Mandela and the Anti-Apartheid movement is not about endings. I remember how elated and triumphant I felt in 1994, when South Africans of all colors went to the polls. But the path to liberation does not end with democracy. Democracy is but one step. We are still treading the path. 

That path started before Nelson Mandela, and it continues after him. No one person is a movement. Great shifts in history come from masses of people working together: drops of water that make a flood. 

After a liberator dies, power rewrites the story. So it’s up to the people to remember the truth. Human lives are never simple, nothing is just black-and-white. (Not even South Africa—the Anti-Apartheid movement included every constituency of the Rainbow Nation, including people of Southeast Asian and South Asian origins.) The South African constitution enshrined GLBT rights because people in the movement did not hide for the sake of the struggle, they instead made connections between racism and homophobia visible and visceral. The Anti-Apartheid movement aimed for nothing less than liberation for all, but only because people within the movement demanded it. 

Power sees liberation movements as the enemy. Power wants nothing more than Stasis, to continue itself into perpetuity. People want Change, because we are alive, because we grow and die, because we have children, because Life begins and ends and keeps going on, but never the same. 

Mandela gave us a gift. He gave us tools. We don’t need to mourn what we’ve lost. Let’s instead revel in the gifts we have received, in the knowledge we have gained. Power wants us to forget. We will not forget. For Madiba’s sake, and for all those ordinary, mundane freedom fighters whose names are forgotten to history, but not to their friends and families, we must remember. We have to take up the tools, well-worn. We repair and use them again. And we pass them on. 

******** 

Since the day of Mandela’s passing, I have heard from friends who are teachers that many of their students—elementary to high school—do not know who Mandela was nor what he accomplished. 

Zoë Wicomb wrote in The New Yorker, “Every schoolchild knows of his contribution to democracy in South Africa, of the sacrifices he made, of his status as an icon of reconciliation.” 

Apparently not. And they won’t unless we tell them.  


Readings on Mandela the man, not Mandela the myth:

"The Meaning of Mandela," The Nation 
"Don't Sanitize Mandela,"  The Daily Beast
"Three Myths About Mandela Worth Busting," Africa Is A Country
"That Time Reagan Vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act," Colorlines.

Multicultural Kid Blogs has a tribute page to Mandela, including a link to an elementary school lesson plan about Mandela.

Beyond Girls and Boys

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

This week, I’m very proud to announce that you can find me on Black Girl Dangerous:

“Beyond Girls and Boys: Teaching Gender to My Kids”

 

The Personal Is (Still) Political

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I want to stay in bed.

It feels like too much. The government shutdown and the debt ceiling showdown. Attacks on SNAP and ACA. Funerals of victims from the Westgate Mall in Kenya. The Canadian government muzzling scientists. The ongoing deaths of honeybees. The continuing gun debate after the mass shooting at the Navy Yards. And on and on and on.

When I was a child, my mother and her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad boyfriend would sometimes have screaming fights after my bedtime. I would wake to the crashing of things being broken. I huddled under the covers, terrified, paralyzed, eyes closed, wishing it would stop. On the worst nights, my mother would scoop me up, pajamas, comforter, and all, and bundle me into the back seat of her car to flee to my dad’s house. My mother and I would squeeze into my twin bed. The next morning, we returned to her house, and the clock would reset until the next time.

Decades have gone by, but it still comes: paralysis; hopelessness; the feeling that I can’t escape, I can’t make it change, I can’t make it stop. I want to stay in bed, but I’m a mother now. My family needs to be fed. My children need to be cared for. My household needs to keep going. They require money, effort, time, presence.

It comes particularly when I am sick, or stressed, or overwhelmed, or underslept. At least one of these conditions accompanies me every day of parenthood.

Parenting is hard for everyone. No less true for being oft-repeated: each child is unique, which makes advice by experts, family, and passersby of limited utility when raising your own child.

Most exhausting are the echoes of my own childhood that run in the background of my mind, the constant, constant, every-single-interaction fight I wage with my past whenever my kids are squirrelly, fussy, or just plain defiant. My goal is to be patient, to listen, to maintain firm limits while allowing my children to express their “big feelings.”

When I am tired or hungry (again, most of the time), I eventually start to lose the battle. My intellect gives way to patterns deeply etched in my psyche, patterns of yelling, of biting sarcasm, of calculated grown-up words to make a child feel small and ashamed to push against parental power. I am learning to bite my tongue and walk away, which only leads my daughter to run after me, hold my legs, cry, and otherwise completely exacerbate the situation I am trying to escape. I go to my bed and lock the door. Mama time out.

I want to be there for my children; but sometimes, I dread the emotional minefield.

It’s layers upon layers. Near the surface, stresses of adult life: finances, politics, family, sex, time pressures, obligations, balancing. Underlying these, trauma from my childhood dredged up as I relive it through my own children. I push back against ingrained habits carved into me before I knew childhood could be different. The mother-drive pressures me to make it better for my kids, I have to make it better for my kids.

I inherited a history of depression passed down generation to generation, a switch flipped in my genes for self-preservation, a legacy that means that any setback or barrier puts me in fight-or-flight. In clinical terms, I have anxiety and panic attacks. In non-clinical terms... I don’t know how to describe it. Like walls closing in. Like a personal raincloud. Like the apocalypse coming and everyone is going to be raptured except me.

I just want to stay in bed.

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I don’t write this to say poor me. I am hardly unique. I write this because none of us parent in a vacuum, because no day is a discreet moment in time. Every day is a convergence of the past—history, ancestry, echoes and reverberations. We try with every fiber to make the past clean for our children, a source of strength, not a weight holding them back. We look at them and see expanding possibilities. I want to lift my children up, not push them down.

Remember your diaper bag? Remember how light it was unwrapped at the baby shower? And then you put so many small objects in it. Diapers. A pacifier. Wipes. Changing pad. Extra clothes, each piece so tiny. A jacket. A blanket. Clothespins, to hold the blanket on the stroller. A bottle and extra formula, maybe. Or a nursing cover. Plastic bags to hold pooped-on clothing. Teething ring. Snacks. Water. Phone. And then, with the baby on one arm, the diaper bag on the other no longer felt light.

I feel this way now. Each piece by itself is not so weighty, but taken together, they burden me. What if we could lighten the load? What if I didn’t have to worry about affording enough child care? What if I knew I could get a job and still be available to pick up my kids after school, stay home with them when they are sick, go to parent-teacher conferences? What if I didn’t have to add fundraising for our schools to my to-do list? What if I could feel confident that we would have enough money to put our kids through college and retire? What if I didn’t have to worry that my husband or I might get seriously ill and drain our account on medical bills?

When I say universal child care, single-payer health care, a living wage, flexible work, paid family leave, accessible education, it all sounds so abstract. But when I live the worries, every day, it feels beyond real—it feels material.

I can’t escape my past. I can’t change how I grew up. I can’t stop the way memory and history trip me up on the path to being the kind of parent I wish to be. But with a little more support, maybe it would be easier to get up in the morning.

Resources

National Organization for Women
Moms Rising
National Partnership for Women and Families
National Center for Children in Poverty

  

Changing Schools

First day of kindergarten.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Today, I took my daughter out of our local public school and enrolled her in a charter school.

I didn’t think I would announce it, but then I realized, hey, I write about parenting and politics, and I have just committed a huge political act.

We live in an excellent school district, and our home school is one of the most desirable in our district. We were looking forward to our daughter receiving a solid education while also enjoying a truly diverse peer group.

My daughter, I should say, adored her preschool. She came home covered in paint and mud every day. The love between Silver and her teachers was plainly mutual. At school, she would pet animals, make rivers in the yard, create stories with her friends, pick and eat vegetables from the garden, and pretend to be a kitty, or a mama, or an astronaut, or an excavator. On the way, she learned to write and gained the fundamentals of reading, math, and science.

In the first few days of kindergarten, my family experienced the shock of transitioning from preschool to the regular school system. My daughter seemed oddly unenthusiastic, and one day as she settled into her car seat, she asked, “What does it look like inside your body when you cry?” My husband and I tried to take statements like these with a grain of salt, unsure of how much weight to give them during this time of flux.

The afternoon before Back to School night, I asked her what problems she had that she wanted me to talk about. In order of importance, she listed:

• Sometimes my teacher yells really loud and it hurts my ears. 
• Leila gets lunch at the cafeteria and sits with all of those kids, but I want her to sit next to me, but she never can. 
• Sometimes we have to sit on the rug, and it’s boring. 

So I sat through the Back to School night rally in the auditorium, then we parents filed away to our children’s classrooms for another presentation by their teachers. I sat down on a tiny chair and filled out several forms. The teacher talked about curriculum goals—writing aptitude, sight words, scissor skills—and also described the kinds of homework he would assign. He held up a composition notebook showing lines of upper- and lowercase L’s on one side and cut-out photos of a lion, a llama, and a child licking an ice cream cone on the other.

Silver expresses her displeasure with me.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I had my reservations about my child having to sit and write letters in long rows, when all the writing she has done so far has been on her own initiative: grocery lists, birthday messages, angry letters to me when she is mad. Nevertheless, I could see that her teacher, trained in studio art, was trying to work creatively within the limits he was given. Their first homework assignment would be to draw a picture of something fun from the summer, label all the parts, and write a sentence or two about it. (A rather long assignment for kindergarten, admittedly.)

With only 10 minutes until 8 p.m., the scheduled end of the evening and my children’s bedtime, he asked for questions. On my turn, I asked, “Can you talk about your philosophy and some of your methods of discipline?” The teacher walked over to a small rectangular table with three chairs ranged around it: green, yellow, and red.
 
The red chair was the last straw. My daughter had, in preschool, participated in a democratic classroom. As she has told me many times after I apologize for yelling at her, “The teachers at school don’t yell.” It’s true: they don’t. Of course, at preschool there are five teachers for 25 kids. In kindergarten, there are two. But my daughter is accustomed to being part of the classroom process where limits are agreed upon collectively and enforced gently, and I’m not ready for her to grapple with an authoritarian system yet.

The charter school I am moving her to practices project-based education, which to my mind, is what every school in the U.S. should practice. Diversity and social justice explicitly make up part of their mission. They emphasize experiential learning tailored to each child’s particular style. Collaboration forms the foundation of their structure.

I am, in theory, committed to public education. And yet, as every parent realizes when her or his child begins school, I want my daughter to have an excellent education right now. Public education in this country is a large, unwieldy vehicle, constructed rigidly, and difficult to turn in a different direction.

If our education system is supposed to prepare our children for life as adults, what are we teaching them? To respect authority. To tolerate repetitive, boring tasks. To understand that the system is unresponsive to their desires, needs, and emotions. And, above all, that the pleasures of education—personal attention from a teacher, play- and project-based methodologies, richness of materials, opportunities to go outside in a beautiful environment or take exciting field trips—are limited by economics. That we live in a two-tiered society, between those who find school a trial and those who find school rewarding, becomes obvious to our children from an early age.

People always scoff that we can’t buy our way to a better education system. (But maybe we can.) And yet, what would it be like if we abolished private schools and channeled all those funds to public education? What if we did only this: reduced class sizes, paid teachers wages respectable for trained professionals, and improved facilities so that schools could be open, airy, green, and pleasant places to be? What if we could make arts available to every child, every single day? You can’t convince me that education wouldn’t improve.

And what if we went further and made the goal of education to instill a love of learning in every child?

I know, it sounds like I am asking for the moon. And yet, like every parent, I want my child to be happy and smart; I want her to have ambitious goals and feel capable of reaching them. I want her to delight in learning rather than approach school with dread. It doesn’t seem like so much to ask.

How Long?

I’m in Canada on “vacation”—i.e., on duty with my children 24 hours a day while we visit family. I have to, once again, pause between sections of Significance: I have been transported back to 2003, where the only access to the internet is via a single cable inconveniently located in the room where the kids sleep. Online research is, as they say, not happening.

Additionally, deprived of preschool hours, finding time to write has been challenging. Most of this post I wrote after being awakened at 3 a.m., unable to get back to sleep, tapping it out with two fingers on my iPhone.

In the absence of the internet, I have fallen back on my dad’s issues of The New Yorker. So I finally read Louis Menand’s article on the Supreme Court’s decision to strip the Voting Rights Act of its teeth, something I couldn’t bring myself to do at the time because of my overwhelming feelings of frustration and despair. 

Today marks the 48th anniversary of the VRA.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, Reverend David Abernathy,
Mrs. Juanita Abernathy, and their children at the front of the Selma
to Montgomery March in 1965. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Menand doesn’t so much analyze the Court’s decision as retrace the steps of the Civil Rights Movement that led to the VRA. His words bring it vividly back: the unbridled use of state power coupled with vigilantism to terrorize the Black population of the South. Beatings. Shootings. Firebombings. Lynchings.

(Note to pro-gun people: the era of the Civil Rights Movement saw private citizens wield guns far more effectively as instruments of terror rather than as defense against it. Imagine if the Klan couldn’t access guns.)

I am, of course, interested in how the leadership developed and adapted the strategy to realize Civil Rights, a delicate balance of economic pressure through boycotts and international pressure sparked by the horrifying footage of repression in action—exactly the opposite image the White House desired during the Cold War.

But I’m also curious about the foot soldiers of the movement, whose day-to-day logistics are rarely documented. How did each family organize their participation in the movement? Who in the family attended the meetings? Who watched the kids? Extended family? Neighbors? Or did they take them along? (Clearly they did sometimes, since we have images of children blasted by firehoses, set upon by dogs, and shocked with electric prods.)

I frankly cannot imagine an equivalent mass movement taking place today. The last gun control rally I attended, on the six-month anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, was held from 5 to 7 p.m. We stood on the corner of a busy intersection and held signs. When it was over, we all went home. In the course of those two hours, a maximum of 150 people attended.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of the organizers, who, I know, meet regularly and devote so much of their time and energy into making real change on gun control in the U.S. Nor can I fault the participants, who not only show up at the rallies, but also write letters, sign petitions, and donate money to end gun violence. 

One difficulty I see is that few of us are as single-issue as African Americans were on the topic of Civil Rights. Segregation affected every African American personally and outweighed any other injustice. Facing death at the hands of a state trooper seemed a reasonable risk to end the possibility of being dragged from your house and lynched in the dark of night. 

In contrast, my activism includes GLBT rights, immigrant rights, food policy, regulation of toxic chemicals, use of drones, Edward Snowden and the NSA surveillance policy, the targeting of Assata Shakur, reproductive rights, workers’ rights, gun control, and on and on. Not because I am somehow more aware or more enlightened, but because no one is going to kill me, or my family, or my friends over any one of these issues. (This is not to say that some aren’t life-or-death issues—many are, but few of us, proportionally, will experience it as immediate, direct terror.) The complexity of our society now can mean more freedoms, but it also multiplies the ways that these freedoms can be picked away or assaulted, often indirectly or surreptitiously. 

A second factor I see is time. For example, I am ancient enough to remember when I could call a business or a company and a living person would answer the phone. Then companies realized they could use technology to save labor costs, but that labor of “directing a call” then got passed to us, the “consumers.” Whether we saved money on products because companies cut their labor costs is debatable. That they stole our time is demonstrable. This kind of “savings” to corporations and “costs” to the rest of us continues in ways large and small. Consequently, we now spend more of our lives as consumers than as citizens. 

When we are working more than eight hours a day- 
When we spend hours in our cars commuting between our homes and our jobs- 
When our work follows us home and occupies our “leisure” time- 
When we care for our children alone, far from the support of extended family- 

How can we take the time not just to write letters, but to demonstrate in the state house, attend a march, gather for movement meetings—not just once in a while, but for days and years until the campaign is won? How long does it take to establish our rights? It takes decades of unrelenting effort: the accumulated minutes, hours, days, and years of thousands of people’s lives. We give our time, and money, and work, and sometimes blood. How long does it take to strip those rights, and erode the landscape of equality for our children? As long as it takes a decision to be read, and for the gavel to bang down.

PETITIONS TO RESTORE THE VRA:

NAACP

People for the American Way

The Nation

And, as always, contact your representatives directly via e-mail, Facebook, and/or Twitter. For the greatest impact, I kick it old school via snail mail. 

 

Significance, Part 3

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

One day, in Dakar, my family decided to prepare fried fish for dinner. The women all sat down together around a basin of whole fish about the size of small trout. My “grandmother” showed me how to slice behind the gills, pull out the guts, then cut down the belly to prepare the fish for cleaning. The first fish I tried by myself, I got the order wrong and cut into the guts. My teenaged “little sister” laughed and took the fish from me, and my “mother” gently suggested that I do something else. 

Graduating, with Denise Uyehara—both of us pre-kiddos.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I thought, “Four years of higher education, and my Senegalese family thinks I’m an idiot.” 

Apart from when I was a small child, I have never quite felt so much like an “Insignificant creature” as when I became a mother and my work ground to a halt. School had not prepared me for Senegalese society; nor had it trained me in parenting. Becoming a mother requires no education, no certification, no proof of intellectual prowess. What could be less extraordinary than mothering, something that anybody can do if she has a working uterus? 

Knowing all the emotional contours of why I am at home with my children does not release me from feminist-mother guilt for making this “choice.” Women instigated the Second Wave of feminism specifically to be able to participate in paid work and achieve financial independence. Moreover, we live in a culture centered around our jobs, where “What do you do?” comes in around number 3 in the “getting to know you” list of questions. 

Mama-in-training.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

When I ask my daughter, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and she answers, “A mama,” I feel a sinking in my chest. “You can be a mama and be something else, too, like a teacher or a doctor,” I reply. “No,” she says. “I just want to be a mama.” 

What kind of ambition is that for a child? 

Of course, I’m taking what my 5-year-old says much too seriously. She is at the age when what she wants to be when she grows up is... me. She decided to grow out her bangs because I did. She wears my dresses. She uses an electric toothbrush because I do. (Strangely, this penchant for imitation does not extend to eating kim chee.) 

And yet, I think of my mother the English professor, and I wonder, “What kind of feminist model am I for my daughter?” Because, of course, this isn’t the Victorian era. I have a Master’s degree. I left my Northern California town and traveled to five continents. In my peer group, I am an outlier for staying at home and not working. 

Let’s set aside, for the moment, my history and emotional reasons for this “choice.” 

Of course, everyone knows—or should know by now—that these “choices” are abetted and constrained by several factors, class and gender foremost amongst them. Before I got pregnant, I was working freelance, which allowed me to weather my nausea-plagued pregnancy and, after my daughter’s birth, care for a small baby. When I gave birth to our son two years later, my husband got A Job—the one he was preparing for through nearly 10 years of graduate school, which not incidentally provides us with a steady paycheck and health care—that makes it difficult for him to take time off work to care for a sick child, take the kids to their swim lessons and dance classes, or volunteer for classroom time at our co-op preschool. I know that any salaried job I could get would likely pay less than what he is earning. But I am also privileged in that a family business helps me to uphold my financial side, which makes staying home and writing a viable option for me. 

I never imagined this for myself. I assumed I would work, like my mother. And because my mother had a job that gave her a sense of purpose, that also contributed to the greater good, I expected this for myself as well. 

My working life has been a search for meaning beyond a paycheck, whether through health education, or writing, or book publishing, or teaching. I tried to find the equilibrium between personal fulfillment and service to my progressive ideals. When pregnancy and motherhood brought my working life to a halt, I still hadn’t found it. 

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

As for so many parents, that changed when I gave birth to my daughter. I nursed her, looked into her eyes, nestled her on my chest, and thought, now this is a project I could devote my life to. 

Parenthood offers a completely different kind of significance. I don’t think I can ever leave a mark on a life the way I can with my children. I am not a “genius,” whatever that is. I don’t have the depth of agape in my soul to save humanity by spending long hours away from the people closest to my heart. 

In the funny contradiction that is life, I feel completely insignificant as a mother, yet the devotion of my small children offers significance unparalleled by any of my previous jobs. I want to inspire them most of all. And as I pursue writing now, I do it in part because I want an intellectual life of my own: I want to model for them a mother who is fulfilled, who is more than “just” a mother with frustrated dreams. 

To be continued in Part 4.

I Am Not Trayvon Martin's Mother

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I interrupt this regularly scheduled blog because of an egregious case of injustice: the verdict in favor of George Zimmerman.

This morning, I received an email in response to this travesty from Moms Demand Action with the subject line: "Today, We Are All Trayvon Martin's Mother."

I understand what they are trying to say. I know they want us all to realize that gun violence can strike any of our children, anytime, as long as guns are unregulated in this country. I know that their hearts ache as mine does, as we imagine—or remember—what it is like to lose a child.

And yet, I cannot fully embrace this statement. My children, despite their 1/4 Filipino heritage, are not brown, and they will never be considered dangerous simply because of the color of their skins. No one will feel automatically threatened to see my son walking down the street in a hoodie. My children have the privilege of the light-skinned, and it will protect them up to a point.

Particularly after the mass shooting in my neighborhood, I am afraid that someone will shoot my kids. But I don't think I can compare my fear to the fear that mothers of young black men must feel. It's not just the chilling fact that young African-American men die at a greater rate than other young men, nor that the homicide rates for them far outstrip the homicide rates for young men of other races. 

It's the historical reverberations that I find especially devastating. I will never experience it myself. If, heaven forbid, either of my kids gets shot like Trayvon, it's not going to have the echo of over two hundred years of history of young black men killed simply for being young black men. Trayvon's death brought to mind a litany of names: Jordan Davis, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, Emmett Till. There are more whose names we know. There are more whose names we don't know. 

So I am not Trayvon Martin's mother. But it doesn't stop me from feeling wronged to my core and betrayed by my country. "Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

 

What you can do:

- Sign the NAACP's petition to Attorney General Eric Holder calling on the Department of Justice to bring civil charges against George Zimmerman. 

- Donate to the Trayvon Martin Foundation. Dave Zirin posted earlier on Facebook that $450,000 was raised for George Zimmerman's defense. The Trayvon Martin Foundation raised $150,000. Sadly, we know that justice is not independent of finances, so please give what you can. 

- Join Moms Demand Action, the Brady Campaign, Mayors Against Illegal Guns (founded by Michael Bloomberg and Thomas Menino), and/or Americans for Responsible Solutions (founded by Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly) to stem the tide of gun violence in this country and to repeal Stand Your Ground laws. 

- Search #HoodiesUp and #NoJustice on Facebook and Twitter to find a vigil, demonstration, or march in your area.

- Go see the movie Fruitvale Station about the day Oscar Grant was shot down by BART transit police. Make sure Hollywood knows that these stories matter.

- Always write your representatives. The NRA continues to out-call, -write, and -tweet those of us who believe in common sense gun restrictions. We have to even the score.

Significance, Part 1

Ben Franklin taught his younger sister Jane to read.
It's the other way around for these two.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

“The most Insignificant creature on Earth may be made some use of in the scale of Beings.” —Jane Franklin 

“The Prodigal Daughter,” Jill Lepore’s latest piece in the New Yorker*, is a meditation on mothers and their longings. Her own mother yearned for travel and adventure beyond the confines of her New England town. Jane Franklin, sister to Benjamin, wished to correspond with her brother with the fluidity and skill that he possessed. Ben assures his sister that, as a literate woman in eighteenth-century America, she is miracle enough; she continues to feel shame over her misspellings and her obvious exertions to express herself in writing. 

When I read Jane’s quote, I immediately teared up. My chest ached with what felt like an ancient injury. Why? I wondered. What was going on here? 

The lives of Benjamin and Jane Franklin tell a compact story of the politics of sexism made personal. Lepore sums it up neatly: “No two people in their family were more alike. Their lives could hardly have been more different.... He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman. She became a wife, a mother, and a widow. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name.” 

The struggles of feminism, particularly second wave feminism, have been largely to change this narrative, to allow women to fulfill those frustrated longings: go out in the world, gain renown, participate visibly in history’s great events. 

As a child growing up in the late 1970s and the 1980s, I benefitted immeasurably from the second wave, but what I knew of feminism during my childhood was mostly this: my mother worked. 

My mother taught English and Spanish to middle- and high school students at the K–12 school I attended. She didn’t just work—she had found her calling. In addition to the fundamentals of English and Spanish, she also undertook to instill in them the ability to express themselves fully and accurately in writing and to think critically. She eventually became an English professor at a community college and found her niche, determined to help underprivileged students attain college degrees. Now, not only does she teach classes, but she has become one of the leaders of her college’s Puente Project, a comprehensive program to provide underserved students with mentors, writing instruction, and support to attain academic success. 

Over the years, many of her students have fallen into two camps: those who appreciated her unstinting efforts to get them to achieve above and beyond what they thought was possible, and those who found her an immense pain in the ass. 

I feel like I absorbed teaching through osmosis. My mother’s passion for her job meant that she has always shared her thoughts and struggles with me, and I sometimes watched her classes. The times in my life I have worked as a teacher—as a teaching assistant for writing during college, as an ESL instructor in Senegal, and a teaching assistant during graduate school—I felt that my joy in it, my comfort with it, and my ability to improvise in the classroom stemmed directly from her. I learned from her that my primary job was not to be my students’ friend, but to goad them to think, sometimes unwillingly, beyond their assumptions and received wisdom. 

I think I could have been a teacher, but for my chronic bouts of illness. During my years in graduate school, where we were groomed to become professors at research universities, the manifold ways that I saw how teaching was devalued, how it came at the end of a professor’s to-do list, far below research and the chase for grant money, discouraged me from pursuing a higher degree. (That we, in the United States, hold educators cheap is a discussion for another time.) 

What I have now is parenting. Instead of guiding young adults to unpack the cultural and political significance of performance, both artistic and quotidian, I am pushing my preschoolers to find alternative resolutions to their conflicts other than calling each other “Stupid.” 

So here I am, a wife and a mother, stitching together scraps of time trimmed from child care, household management, cooking, grocery shopping, finances, and my relationship with my husband to write. Looking at my life—absent my laptop, my preschool, the internet, the empty spaces where extended family and/or servants should be, the car, and my brown self—I ask: 

What is this, the Victorian era? 

(To be continued in Part 2.)

*Lepore’s piece is like a well-cut jewel: sharp, revealing, finely crafted, beautiful. Go read it.