A Feminist of a Certain Age

Charlie Chaplin wrote one of the most beautiful melodies I’ve ever heard.  It was featured in his film, Modern Times (1937). [The lyrics were added in 1954 by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons.]  It goes by the title “Smile.”  There’s little or no humor in the song.  It’s rather melancholy.  Though Chaplin is quoted as saying “I have many problems in my life. But my lips don’t know that.  They always smile.”

There are many versions of the song available on-line.  Here’s the great Nat King Cole (who recorded the first version of it that included lyrics) singing it:  https://youtu.be/TAjx0d-fda4.    If you listen to Pharrell Williams’ upbeat song Happy before or after you listen to Smile, you’ll immediately feel the difference. Somehow, I can’t see any male politicians or pundits telling Hillary Clinton to “Be Happy.”  If they did, it probably wouldn’t feel as demeaning as being told to smile constantly.

Today, 80 years after the melody was heard in Modern Times — and 60 years after Nat King Cole sang the lyricized version, women still hear the admonition to SMILE <DAMMIT> more often than we’d like to remember.  “If you’d only just smile you’d be ….. (fill in the blank):  so much prettier;   so much more likeable;   less threatening;  more ladylike).”  I remember a time as a young professor when a senior university administrator told me, as he passed me in the dean’s office,”You’d better just keep up that smiling.” It struck me as somewhat odd, even though it wasn’t the first time a man said that to me.

So it’s not really surprising to me that so many pundits are telling Presidential Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton she needs to smile more — and not shriek when she addresses the public. If you google “Hillary smile,” like I did a few minutes ago, you’ll get 3 million hits. Here are just two of the recent articles I found:

http://www.npr.org/2016/03/16/470627330/amid-big-wins-tuesday-clinton-told-to-smile-during-her-speech

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-smile_us_57d16d90e4b00642712bc259

Politics is  — and has long been — a very sexist (and racist and xenophobic) endeavor.  I remember when Geraldine Ferraro was on the Democratic ticket for VP, along with Walter Mondale.  This was in 1984.

They were running against incumbents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.  I watched the debate and paid attention to the comments that were made after it.  Yep.  Geraldine Ferraro was described as strident, emotional, etc.  And apparently George H.W. Bush, himself,  felt she was ignorant about international affairs (even though she had already served three terms in the House, representing the state of New York when she ran for VP) and “man-splained” the US foreign policy to her.  She very politely, but firmly, called him on his paternalistic comments.  GO GERALDINE.  You can see 2 minutes of the debate here: https://youtu.be/3ktVMf4JHGA   (The entire debate, which runs nearly 90 minutes, is available on-line, if you’re interested.)

One last observation.  The field of Law, and the law schools which act as feeders for politics in many states, apparently still has some remnants of sexism, as an article in my local newspaper reported today. [See http://www.gainesville.com/news/20160909/uf-law-school-dean-defends-critique-of-gender-bias]. The article calls out Laura Rosenbury, the Dean of the University of Florida College of Law, for a 4000 word article she published in the New England Law Review  this summer which, according to the newspaper, “ended  by recounting a banquet last fall when the male president of UF’s Florida Law Review introduced (her)” as young and vivacious.  Rosenbury speculated about whether a male dean would be described in the same way.  According to her article, when she approached the faculty advisor of the Law Review (which is a student-run organization), he said, “But you look so much younger.” (She is 46.)  He is, well, much older than she is.  She is now getting a lot of “pushback” (the  word used by the reporter of the newspaper article).  Michael Balducci, an alumnus of UF’s Law School and a former executive of the Law Review) has publicly commented that she needs to apologize to the male law student and his advisor.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME???????  Maybe she should just smile and say she’s sorry.  I hope she doesn’t.

I am a Baby Boomer and have been a feminist since the 7th grade. (It’s a long story.  I may come back to it later.)  My mother is largely responsible for my feminist perspective.  Though she — being a housewife and mother in the 1950s and 1960s — did not participate in any nascent feminist groups — did encourage me to explore the world through science (and public speaking, music, whatever).  She bought me a telescope, a microscope, a chemistry set (which had lots of substances that, when combined, could make delightfully horrendous smells), an “invisible” woman kit (which was a plastic model with all of the body parts, I think) that I put together.  She bought a piano and paid for lessons for my sister and me.  She bought me a real-hair “fall” (now called an extension, I believe) so that I could play the lead role in the Junior Class Play.  Anyway, my mother believed in me and told me I could do anything I wanted.  My world crashed in 1969, when my mother died at age 41 from systemic lupus. I was in high school and had absolutely no idea about the future.  The US had landed a “man” on the moon just a few days after my mom died.  I don’t remember any of the historic moon landing. But I did later write a poem about my mom’s death (one of many), which references it.   (Not sure why I put the word  man in quotation marks because it was, indeed, a male astronaut.  Later, I’ll talk about the rampant sexism in America’s early space program…)

Of course, now that I am an adult with a Ph.D. in Sociology, I realize that a young girl from a blue-collar family in the upper reaches of Appalachia cannot always be what she wants to be. My high school had no language lab — and I was a French major.  We had only one women’s sports team — softball — which was not my thing.  This was pre-Title IX, after all.  We had very caring teachers but most had been educated at regional teacher’s colleges.  We did have a great drama teacher and that became my thing — which paid off later when I became a university professor.

So now I’m a professor at a large public research university — in the South. Well, Florida.  OK — It’s the University of Florida.  I’ve been studying, learning about, teaching about, and experiencing feminism here for more than three decades. Oh, do I have a lot of personal stories about sexism.  But that, too, is for another post.

I teach and study  women’s lives, primarily in the spheres of work (in and out of the home) and families in all their variations.  I’ve also written about women’s bodies as a social and cultural battleground. (Examples of which are abundant in the world today. 24-7, in fact.)  I am a feminist, but I don’t limit myself with a specific branch of feminism or identify with a specific wave of feminist thought and action.  I actually don’t subscribe to the latter.  I came of age as a young woman and a feminist after The Feminine Mystique was published.  And after all of the ground breaking legislation of the 1960s.  I missed the Summer of Love (1967) because I was a young teenager who lived in a town where there was a very embedded double standard about sexuality.  Roe v. Wade hadn’t been passed yet.  My decade was the 1970s.  Which is fortunate, because that was truly, IMHO, a breakthrough decade for feminism.  If you just watch reruns of some of the old TV shows from that decade (i.e., All in the Family, Maude, Mary Tyler Moore) you’ll catch a glimpse of some forward thinking that came to a dead halt in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected President.  (Things weren’t perfect, of course.  Mary Tyler Moore’s character was regarded as an old maid because she was a “single girl” — at age 30 — with a career.)

Before and during the period in which I was coming of age, feminist activists and intellectuals (sometimes the same people were both) were fighting for — and winning — victories, small and large.  And this is what, indirectly, has motivated me to write this blog with this name.

I am a woman — and a FEMINIST — of a certain age.  I have benefitted personally from the valiant efforts of those who came before me.  I am well aware of the limitations of the early, “second wave” feminists.  But without them, where would we be? Ranked at the bottom of the world’s list of countries in terms of women’s status, just as we are in terms of paid maternity/parental leave?  So, when I hear, as I have often over the previous year as the Democratic primaries were being held, very dismissive comments about “second wave feminists,” I am surprised, discouraged, and frankly, pissed off.  The media love to play up any type of “division” among feminists.  They believe it’s a way to divide and conquer.  So it is my purpose in writing this blog, to provide some historical background about the women’s movement as it played out in the 1960s and 1970s, reflect on my own personal awakening to feminism, and start a fruitful conservation with feminist of other ages about our shared goals… That’s it.  End of Post #1.  Mic drop.