Emerging Women

By Kim Wilkens

Rebellion permeates all aspects of human life. It originates from the subconscious will of mankind not to surrender to destructive forces. But rebelling is not the same as defining a cause that would improve the quality of human life, or formulating a constructive program of action. Marching in a parade is easier than blazing a trail through a forest or creating a new Jerusalem. Daumier’s hero looks like many rebels in our midst. He is fighting against evil rather than for a well-defined cause. Like most of us, he is a rebel without a program.4
— René Dubos

I’ve always had a rebellious nature. I don’t think it’s riotous or boisterous; it’s more driven and determined. My primary cause has been feminism. My earliest memory of this rebellion was at some extended family gathering, probably Thanksgiving or Christmas. At the end of the meal, I noticed the women go into the kitchen and the men go to the living room. That didn’t seem right to me, so I announced that I was not going to the help in the kitchen, I’d hang out with the guys instead. And as I’ve heard my mother say to me on many occasions the response I got was, “Where do you get these ideas?”

Well, she’s not completely blameless. Even though she did a majority of the domestic chores and actually claimed to enjoy cleaning — “it’s therapeutic,” she said — my mom also balanced being a stay-at-home mom with a part-time nursing career (working the late shift). She was on the cutting edge of childbirth education, bringing couples into our home for Lamaze training when other facilities were not available or more likely not ready to support this radical new approach to childbirth.

My feminist rebellion energized me to excel academically. It droveme into the male-dominated field of computer science. It pushed me up the corporate ladder. It alienated me from religion. Sue Monk Kidd in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter gives a very good description of what this alienation feels like:

A girl, forming her identity also experiences herself missing from pronouns in scripture, hymns, and prayers. And most of all, as long as God “himself” is exclusively male, she will experience the otherness,the lessness, of herself; all the pious talk in the world about females being equal to males will fail to compute in the deeper places inside her.

For several years, I was humming along quite nicely in my feminist cause, but then I had a child, left corporate America, turned forty and had a huge identity crisis. I had done well in a man’s world, but now I found myself in the world of motherhood. How was I supposed to excel at something I had no training for? What was happening to my feminist agenda? I thought I was helping to pave the way for the women after me to be treated as equals, but instead I was just playing by the rules of corporate America and they no longer seemed adequate for my life. I felt like a rebel without a clue. I needed to redefine the rules for living my life.

First, I tried finding balance. I searched for the magical formula that would give me just the right balance between family-life, career-life, community-life, volunteer-life and church-life. It felt like a juggling act and when I would get too much of one and not enough of the others, I started feeling out of control and unbalanced. I would lose track of some of the balls. I would have to regroup and try to figure out the formula again. Usually the new formula worked for a time, it was fresh and it was fun and exhilarating! But I would end up in a cycle of trying to arrange the balls just so, putting them up in the air, and juggling them for a while until I started to lose some of them. This strategy for living wasn’t working either.

Then I heard an interview on NPR with a soldier in Iraq. He said he had to compartmentalize his soldier-life and his home-life. He gave an example of a cell phone conversation with his wife: She’s talking about her “bad” day with the kids and he’s thinking about his “bad” day cleaning up dead bodies. Compartmentalization was necessary for him to focus on the task at hand or he might get shot. But the cost is high as it wreaks havoc on relationships because the whole person is never completely present.

It struck me that this is what I’ve been doing. I hadn’t been thinking of it as compartmentalization, but as I was performing my juggling act, I was really assigning out pieces of myself to get the tasks done. When I was working on one task, another part of me was usually occupied with lists that need to be completed for other tasks. I was rarely wholly involved with the task or relationship or situation at hand.

My new cause is wholeness. “There is nothing more important than being fully where we are, in the plain ordinary events, day in and day out. I think women understand that we create change as we live out the experiences of our souls in the common acts of life.” Where I used to be like Martha, worried and distracted, I am trying to be more like Mary, taking time to learn about Jesus (Luke 10:38-42).

I find my new cause still has room for the frustration I feel toward gender issues found in many religious institutions. Instead of fighting against the male/female stereotypes that have kept me from moving forward in my faith, I feel that God wants me to walk humbly through these human failures and acknowledge them. I believe that God can reorient the whole world from one of inequality to one of equality and I believe God wants you and me to help.

Kim is a daughter, sister, wife, mom, aunt, friend, geek, activist, volunteer, mentor, student, teacher, postmodern, seeker, writer, child of God. She and her dad have recently co-authored the book, Un-American Activities: Countercultural Themes in Christianity. This awakening is from Kim’s response to her dad’s chapter on “The Mothering Vocation of God.”

By Sonja Andrews

I’m sitting in the rink on an early, early Saturday morning once again, having driven here with a quiet but not sullen pre-teen next to me. He was eating a bagel. The pouring rain and inky, black pre-dawn required most of my concentration, but in the quiet times I’ve had recently I’ve been thinking about anger. More specifically, how we treat anger and gender. I had a couple of instances recently that brought it to my attention, one is personal and the other happened to a friend.

First, the friend: Makeesha writes about her anger – “I have never felt this much anger – ever – and I don’t know what to do with it. I know anger is a secondary emotion and I can identify the primary emotions but I still feel angry and I still don’t know how to stop feeling angry.” Go read her whole post so you know what’s driving her anger … I’ve only copied the part that’s pertinent to what I’m writing about here.

I had a recent incident with LightGirl’s hockey team in which I had an inappropriate outburst at her new (male) teammates for treating her poorly. She has a couple of guys on the team who are making life miserable for a lot of kids, but they are using her gender to make life miserable for her and that is steaming me up. I lost my temper after a recent practice and … well … let’s just leave the details out of it, but the boys in question just laughed. And, to be fair, I bet I was pretty funny looking. We talked it through with her coach and it’s being worked out. But that’s not the point of all this.

I began to specifically think about women and anger. I don’t think women are supposed to be angry in our culture. We’re considered either funny or unacceptable in some way when we get angry. When men get angry, they are frightening and taken seriously. Women are … something else.

The other thing that I’ve been tossing around both in my mind and in conversation (with LightGirl) is the idea that we should “stop feeling” anger (as Mak puts it). That anger is an emotion to get rid of. What if it’s an emotion that is to signal that something is wrong (which it is) and it is to give us energy to change that wrong or walk through the wrong (if we can’t change it)? I wonder a lot about our culture’s desire to ameliorate negative emotions so that we don’t feel sadness or anger or pain for too long.

Which brings me to a quote I heard on a new drama on NBC called “Mercy.“ The main character is being convinced against her will to get marital and PTSD counseling by some friends. They are giving her all the standard advice about why she should talk about her feelings and her response? “I like my feelings all pushed down and compressed. That way they pop out at random and inappropriate moments.” This is not the way we should live, but it’s the way most of us do live despite all that we know about how to be emotionally healthy individuals or communities. No one likes to see a sad face or someone with angry eyebrows, so we put on masks for the outside world. Women in particular are very good at this … and we’re expected to be. We’re expected to smooth the waters for the family, for any given mixed gender group we are a part of, and when we do not the labels that are attached to us are not complimentary. To say the least.

So I have not come to any conclusions; I still have questions and wonderings about what role anger should play in our lives. Should we embrace it? Sit with it longer and see what it will tell us about ourselves and what we need to do? Without allowing it to control us (that is). Do you see things differently than I? Are women treated the same as men in anger? Or are they treated differently? What are your thoughts about all of this? I’d love to hear them …

This post first appeared at Sonja’s blog Calacirian.

By Deb Falank

I just came across an article promoting the legal institution of marriage. The excerpt below is from the section titled “Evidence From the Social and Biological Sciences”.

Fathers excel when it comes to providing discipline, ensuring safety, and challenging their children to embrace life’s opportunities and confront life’s difficulties. The greater physical size and strength of most fathers, along with the pitch and inflection of their voice and the directive character of their speaking, give them an advantage when it comes to discipline, an advantage that is particularly evident with boys, who are more likely to comply with their fathers’ than their mothers’ discipline. Likewise, fathers are more likely than mothers to encourage their children to tackle difficult tasks, endure hardship without yielding, and seek out novel experiences. These paternal strengths also have deep biological underpinnings: Fathers typically have higher levels of testosterone—a hormone associated with dominance and assertiveness—than do mothers. Although the link between nature, nurture, and sex-specific parenting talents is undoubtedly complex, one cannot ignore the overwhelming evidence of sex differences in parenting—differences that marriage builds on to the advantage of children.

I’m all about marriage and stable families and agree with much of the broader outlines of the article. However, I find the particular stance in this paragraph to be a little disconcerting on two points, the idea that effective discipline requires particular physical characteristics, and that men are more likely than women to instill perseverance and inquisitiveness. What do you think of these premises? Is effective parenting really defined by gender in this specific way?

Deb Falank writes about women, animality, violence and Christianity at the soulful eye.