"Free to be you and me", but only if you accept what someone else tells you you're worth
And other lessons I learned as a little girl tossed into the furnace of 1970s feminism
vol. 2 issue 17
Greetings,
Last night, I had an epiphany while watching the fifth episode of Mrs. America, Hulu’s brilliant serial docu-drama about the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and the ultimate failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to pass. The series is told through the lives of the era’s key figures, including Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem and Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly.
Watching it, I experienced a powerful enough jolt to stay my hand from hitting send on the Long Read essay I had spent days writing and which I already had announced I would publish. I hope you will forgive me for not doing so as scheduled, but watching the program, I was reminded that the most compelling arguments for or against something often aren’t in the argument itself, but in the story of the experiences that led us to adopt what “truth” means to us as individuals.
Sometimes, stories reveal how hard we are trying to throw others off the trail of what actually might be true about our lives. Put another way, people who preach loudest are the ones living out in secret the truth of what they preach against.
That was my epiphany, really: stories, not screeds, tell the truth. And anyway, stories are more interesting to read and hear.
So, for the time being, I put aside my 4,000+ word essay about our narcissistic leaders being avatars of our immature, shadow selves, and how the hierarchies implicit in the America Dream will lead us to authoritarianism, but the e pluribus unum ethos could deliver us a new democracy, and… wait, wait, wait…don’t run off. I know this all sounds too screedylicious to be true, but we can save it for another day.
For now, let me tell you a story.
I was born in early January 1968. I am not sure why I waited for the calendar to turn, but Mama Ersel, my late paternal grandmother, once told me I was supposed to have been her Christmas present, not her birthday gift. But, I was indeed born on Mama Ersel’s birthday, and that of her recently deceased husband, Daddy Mac, whom obviously I never met.
Maybe that is just an odd fact, but it is odd, isn’t it? Three birthdays on the same day in one family. It had never happened to my kin before and hasn’t happened since. I like to think it was a mark that singled me out somehow.
So, the first thing you should be picking up on is this idea that I have lived my life thinking I am special somehow. Now, I am about to share with you something I have never told anyone in print before, but this is 2020, and I am pretty sure no one I care to please gives a shit about this kind of thing anymore. And if I am wrong, I guess I’ll just have to answer for it.
First, you need a little context.
With names like Mama and Daddy, it sounds like I come from a bunch of hillbillies, doesn’t it? I sorta do, and in my head whenever I need to deliver to myself some common sense self-talk, my inner girl’s got a full-on briar patch way of sayin’ it ‘cause she knows that is the only way I will take heed. But it’s not so straightforward to say I think of myself as a straight up hillbilly.
My dad’s people do in fact hail from Eastern Kentucky, not as far east as the coal mines, but where the rolling horse pastures are. The family had a taste for whiskey, Mama Ersel in particular. My dad says she was a drunk, but that don’t bother me none ‘cause I was her favorite.
Photo: Mama Ersel with three of her four sons, circa 1930
And of course, being from Kentucky, Dad’s family had its Bible thumpin’ Baptists, even if Mama Ersel and Daddy Mac weren’t among them. Mama did hair, and Daddy sold aluminum siding. More hardscrabble than Scrabble players, my dad comes from some of the funniest, most sharp-witted folks you’d ever wanna know. Growing up, that was the side of the family always full of sugars and squeezes, which is what a kid needs.
If there was a family business, I reckon it was split between horses and hospitality, although one of Dad’s cousins headed up Kentucky’s FBI for decades. And of course, there was Uncle Harry Dean Stanton, the Hollywood star. But, for the most part, kindly though it was, it wasn’t a family of airs and graces. I’d bet none of ‘em had ever set foot in a Catholic church nor a country club.
Mom’s side
On my mother’s side were a bunch of German and Irish Catholics from further West, near Louisville, in Bardstown, where all the Bourbon is and where her father was in charge of distribution for several of the distilleries. Her people could count among themselves graduates of Yale and other fancy liberal arts colleges. My grandmother graduated from William and Mary. My great grandmother also had a college degree from the University of Minnesota. She could play the classical violin (on my dad’s side, my great grandmother was a champion banjo picker), and is said to have gone toe-to-toe with the Russian ambassador to the US during WWII when, as the head of the ladies auxiliary put in charge of coal rationing in Washington, DC, she didn’t like his attitude and told him so, threatening to withhold fuel to heat the embassy if he didn’t shape up, which I reckon he did.
My Germanic maternal grandmother’s people were country club denizens, unlike the Irish Catholics my maternal grandfather came from. He was the son of a grumpy faced bare-fisted boxer and letter carrier from further north near Cincinnati (pronounced “Sinsinata”) who had a passel of kids and what I gather was a fierce attachment to the church, which he passed along to my grandfather. I suspect it’s possible Grandpa McLaughlin, Mom’s dad, would rather have been a monk than a family man. He liked to spend time at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Bardstown where I am told he was friends with its most famous brother, Thomas Merton. I’m not sure how they would have struck up a conversation, given Merton’s vow of silence thing, but that’s the lore.
My mother was sent to an all-girls Catholic boarding school an hour or so away. It was the time of Vatican II, which was intended to usher the Catholic Church into the modern world, so there was the nip of change in the air. But, in a rural Kentucky convent school, it might as well not have happened at all.
Other than Kentucky plates on their automobiles, and a thirst for whiskey, the families of this young Catholic woman of means and “breeding”, and this young buck from a fun loving bunch of hillbillies who lived in and around the hollers on the other side of the state had nothing in common. Until they did: me.
That’s my secret: I am the out-of-wedlock baby of two Kentucky teenagers.
Now, that I have finished walking around in circles and have settled back down to finish the story, I’ll say that how my parents met and all that is a story for another time. For now, putting behind me how terrifying what I just told you was to admit, even more than half a century later in this world where these days women have children out of wedlock on purpose, let’s focus on how these circumstances set me up to view the world and why watching Mrs. America revivified my past.
My birth lit the funeral pyre to the moral constructs and hierarchical class dynamics of my mother’s world. Believing myself to be special is just the flip side of the internalization of the “fact” that I was a mistake, and not just a mistake, one that upset a bunch of people. This is why I will always cherish my Mama Ersel. She thought I was a gift and told me so.
After deciding not to kill my father, my grandfather relented slightly in his war against him, and my parents married, but not until after I was already here and the three of us were all living with Mama Ersel in Lexington.
Photo: Jerry and Joan McLaughlin, my maternal grandparents
As you can imagine, this was not a marriage built to last and within a decade, it was over. By then, we had moved to Florida, Mama Ersel had died, and before too long, I had step parents. Except for my step-siblings, I was the only one I knew who had this early 1970s novelty. At least, I didn’t know anyone else who admitted it.
My introduction to the ERA
Also an Irish Catholic, from a bayside town outside of Boston, my stepmother spoke often of her anger and guilt over the church refusing to annul her first marriage. She went to church all the time anyway. I didn’t understand it at the time. Why keep going to see people who reject you for who you are? There was something else incongruous about her: she was not only a Catholic seeking atonement for her divorce, she was an outspoken proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment.
She wore a pin that said ERA YES on it. She liked Gloria Steinem (my mother actually would wrinkle her nose when she heard Steinem’s name). She dressed in shorts made from cut-off jeans and often didn’t wear a bra but probably should have, endowed as she was. She had friends who’d moved to Florida from New York, and who intimidated the likes of country bumpkin me, with their strange accents and loud laughs and their salty speech. One of them was a social worker who specialized in children’s issues. I had never heard of such a thing. When I finally understood after asking several times what a social worker did, I thought she must be bad at her job because she sure wasn’t very nice to me, and she was always saying mean things about my mother while I was in earshot.
My mother most definitely was not in favor of the ERA. She had, however, left the Catholic church. Still, she dressed primly compared to my stepmother and her friends. She supported the Republican Party, which must have been hard during the Watergate era. She taught my brother and me manners. She didn’t use foul language. She taught us which fork to use.
Her values and my allegiance to them made me a target of the women I encountered when I visited my father and stepmother’s house. Those urban, college educated women made fun of me for being like my “simple, country” mother. They teased me for saying “y’all”. I felt self-conscious around them.
Photo: Me, my brother Chad, and Flower (in my lap), and Tricia, 1975
My stepmother, may she rest in peace, wasn’t especially nice to me, either. Years later, I understood why, and even though it really had nothing to do with me, as an adult I kept my distance from her. When she died late last year, I did not attend her funeral, although I did send flowers.
Watching episode 5 of Mrs. America, however, I felt unexpectedly close to her. The show ends with the title soundtrack from the Marlo Thomas and Friends television special, Free to Be You and Me. Thomas, along with Steinem and others, cofounded the Ms. Foundation, which at the time was more closely tied to Ms. Magazine.
As a kid growing up between two households, always feeling like I had done something wrong just by having been born, there was that soundtrack. My stepmother had given it to me, and as soon as I heard it on the show, I could picture in my mind the hot pink album cover with the show’s title depicted with cartoon drawings of kids climbing over the neon bright letters spelling out “Free to Be You and Me”.
Startled to hear it again, I still could sing every word of the song, and I did. And then I started to cry. It occurred to me that even though technically, I should be considered a child of the 1980s, since that is when I came of age, it was in the 1970’s furnace of feminism where this little girl got lost between two clearly defined points of view on what a woman should be and how she should act.
Even though as a kid who had aligned with my mother, this feminist-inspired song had meant so much to me. The album, filled with funny and clever songs imparted what was to me, the exotic, thrilling message that freedom was more than the American flag and the pledge of allegiance. It assured me that there were ways to be true to yourself that went beyond what society dictated. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it so clearly as a kid, but I felt it. I understood it. And I appreciated that my stepmother had opened a little window for me where the oxygen of self-acceptance found its way in, even if the air in that household was often toxic.
That the adults in my life who should have known better exposed to some class A bitches who might have had college educations but who were not emotionally complex enough to understand how hurtful they were being to a child who already had serious self-esteem issues is not the fault of feminism, but it is what made me wary of it for a long time. Looking back on it now, however, feminism’s imprint on the lives of both my mother and stepmother, and ultimately my own, is unmistakable.
It’s only been in the last decade that my mother and I have been able to discuss the details surrounding my birth. “I was depressed,” she told me. It turns out, just prior to meeting my father, my mother had approached her maternal grandfather – the one married to the woman who’d sassed the Russian ambassador, and an assistant attorney at the Department of Justice – and expressed that her most heartfelt desire was to become a foreign intelligence officer.
No job for a girl
His response had been to laugh and tell her that was not a job for a girl. She was crushed, but she got the message: it was motherhood or not much else. Even her own mother, with her Ivy League double major in history and Spanish, and an educated mother who’d threatened a foreign dignitary, was now teaching arts and crafts to elementary school kids in rural Kentucky.
I have thought of that conversation between my mother and me more than once as I have watched Mrs. America. The series skillfully dramatizes the inner story of both Schlafly’s and Steinem’s lives, the stories they presumably kept to themselves, but which we can see as outside observers onscreen. Regardless of what we might conclude about either women based on our own personal values, I find no problem being sympathetic to them both.
For the Catholic all-girls’ school educated Schlafly who had a degree from Radcliff, but who was not taken seriously as a scholar, in part because she wasn’t scholarly and often made baseless claims instead of using facts, we see her inner turmoil when she realizes that she is not valued for her mind. The identity crisis she experiences when she can’t integrate being a public figure and activist, a housewife and mother, and an academic is her secret hell. She eventually earns a law degree, and uses it to fight even more vociferously against the women who were claiming the right to what was patently clear she herself wanted most: respect for the totality of who she was as a person, not a woman with assigned roles. In a word, freedom.
For Steinem, we see she has had to go overseas to have an abortion, illegal in the US at the time, and is asked by the doctor to promise her that for such a price she has paid, she should do exactly what she wants with her life. In each episode, the camera and storylines find ways to demonstrate the pressure she feels at all times to uphold her ideals, even if sometimes she is unsure whether they are selfish or radically liberating, and in that way, selfless.
Why can’t we say both women are brave? Both are struggling with what it means to be free and strong. It’s hard – maybe impossible – to make people into all one thing or another and not turn them into caricatures of themselves. Their shared flaw, as I see it depicted on the series, is that they pushed what didn’t fit about their identities – the very identities that made them powerful figures – onto each other. They rejected what they couldn’t integrate of themselves out of fear that to own it meant they would lose their “right” to be heard, to claim rectitude, to be right. That’s not freedom, it’s hierarchy.
And that is largely what the point of my screed was to have been: in this country the questions over whether women should be paid equal to men, or whether non-white, non-Christian immigrants should be allowed in to our country, or whether the current stimulus packages should favor states or corporate interests…these aren’t real questions.
My experience growing up during the second wave of feminism has taught me this
Always framing everything hierarchically requires assigning value to people based on what we think they are worth. But who gets to make that decision? Men? White men? Women with college degrees? Women who raise kids and stay at home? No matter the answer, in a hierarchical system that strips each of us of the fullness of who we have the potential to be, at some point everyone is at risk of being devalued and placed in submission to someone else. Who gets lifted up in that equation? In the end, no one does because not everyone does. That is not freedom.
This kind of talk invariably brings up comparisons between Capitalism and Communism; Schlafly was herself an arch anti-communist and often said so. That argument comes out of the old hierarchical framework that harkens back to Manifest Destiny which essentially says divide and conquer in order to control the resources so we have the upper hand with which to spread democracy. That’s just simply the application of a capitalism that turns everyone and everything into a commodity.
That, too is not freedom.
As for whether or not I am special or a mistake, I have thought about that. I am not special in liking to think I am special. Most of us are expert in coming up with reasons for why we should have access to resources, whatever they may be, more than someone else. When we’re diminished by hierarchical thinking, telling ourselves we’re special is an understandable defense mechanism.
I can’t explain why my mother and stepmother made the choices they made, church no church, ERA YES, ERA Hell No. But I suspect it’s how they tried to integrate the shame heaped on them by class, church, and a male dominated society and government, in a word, hierarchies.
When hierarchies make us feel ashamed of who we are so we will back off and let someone else have the goods, including the power, that’s definitely not freedom. That leads to the shame, devaluing, depression, anger, guilt, and low self-esteem my mother, my stepmother, and I endured because we didn’t fit into the identities the church, society, the government, tried to squash us into.
We can be equal and not the same. That is e pluribus unum: out of many, one. I don’t think we’ve really tried that yet. If we had, we wouldn’t even need an ERA. With the current decimation of the economy, we are going to have to rebuild. We’re going to have some choices to make about who gets the limited resources. I might not be able to tell you what they will be or how government should look, but don’t think our choices have to be either/or. The more diversity of equal but not the same, the more options we have, not less.
Which brings me to the actual moral of the story: My quirky, canny, stoic patriotic mom would have made a great spy.
What other creative solutions and innovative thinkers are the narrow-minded Powers That Be causing us to miss out on by not focusing on how to make one out of many, instead of one over all?
Whitney