Second Class
I came to the woman’s movement later in life. The odd circumstances of my growing up held me back from seeing the urgency in the struggle. I say it was an odd upbringing, but it wasn’t so unusual as it was I saw no reason to regard women as lesser beings.
Had I believed women were second class creatures, being raised by two women on the edge of poverty would have been even more terrifying than it was. I had to rely on them for my survival, for food and shelter — most fundamentally for love — and a belief in myself. The most important person in my life was a woman. How could she be second class? It didn’t track.
The first editor to look at my writing, Dawn Field screamed at me in an email, “You don’t know!” when I said something to the effect of understanding the lives of women. There was no convincing her, so I understood it wasn’t a subject up for discussion. Over the several years we wrote each other, we lost a professional distance, only occasionally slipping into personal stories, but on this subject, she never yielded.
Though I still believe I stumbled on a way into my life on my mother’s thin reed. Reading the NY Times review of two utterly different books on and by women, brought this into focus.
Acceptance, by Emi Nietfeld is not a memoir one would chose to read for an uplifting subject. Jordon Kisner’s review, American Fantasy, is admiring without blinking at the subject. Now grown, Nietfeld is a Harvard-trained engineer who navigated a malignant mother’s treatments — surviving at what cost?
I learned about that kind of survival, since I was once married to a woman who was forced on that journey. Meeting her in a church-sponsored coffee house in Sumter, she was smart with a very dry, low-key wit. I swore to god, she knew something! Not too much later, I met her mother. Her abuse crippled her daughter and poisoned our marriage.
How it is possible that a parent can see their own child as something to warp into a mental cage of horrors? I had no experience with broken children — not being one.
The reviewer doesn’t say what had happened to Nietfeld’s father — divorce, death, hit and run, a one night party — she makes no mention. Just Nietfeld and a mother creature who tortured her for her own reasons. But the review makes clear is that whatever success Nietfeld has attained, she is badly scarred.
“Despite the narrative’s inconsistent pacing — exhaustively detailed at points and conspicuously glossed over at others — Nietfeld’s gifts for capturing the fury of living at the mercy of bad circumstances… make Acceptance a remarkable memoir. At every turn she asks us to remember the cost of success stories like hers: This all might make for a great story, but it doesn’t make for a very nice world to live in.” from American Fantasy by Jordon Kisner in the NY Times Book Review
The second book, Formidable by Elizabeth Griffith, is a tome of nearly 500 pages tracing the history of the women’s movement, subtitled American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920–2020.
100 years in 500 pages: five pages per year. Huh.
Mira Ptacin’s review is blunt regarding the earliest suffragette’s ambivalence toward slavery:
“Books of true feminist history are rare: Rarer still are these histories intersectional; feminist history tends to be synonymous with white women’s history. Not this book. Griffith delivers a multiracial, inclusive timeline of the struggles and triumphs of both Black and [White] women in America.” from We’ve Come a Long Way… Maybe? by Mira Ptacin in the NY Times Book Review
I suppose the review’s reader is expected to make the leap derived from the title —commenting on current events — but isn’t an essay’s title meant to speak to the piece itself? Just a quibble.
History is replete with fractured freedom struggles and the women’s movement is one of them. If it wasn’t, things might well have resolved years ago — like wide number of struggles. However on the subject of slavery, it would seem patently obvious both white men and women — even suffragettes — resisted accepting blacks as equal then and now. Otherwise, why else would racism still flourish?
It’s sadly ironic both sexes participate. But the tribe will always insist on its place in our minds, if not our hearts.
