In the early 1970s, Helen Reddy “woke” an entire generation of young women with her hit song, “I Am Woman.” My own mother being one of them. It was an empowering anthem and the ripples from it are still being felt to this day. Baby-boomer females single-handedly changed America forever, and the music industry had a huge hand in it. Hyperbole aside, one thing is for sure about the ’70s, the music industry was less fragmented and had a much more powerful grasp on people than it does now.
Some of my earliest and fondest memories of my mom were of her playing music on the record player and singing along as loud as she could for both my sister’s and my amusement. Reddy’s hit single was probably spun the most on that old record player, and to this day I probably can sing the entire song in my head without even listening to it beforehand. It’s one of those songs that seem to get played on loop in my head for no apparent reason, and I wake up and think, “Why the hell do I have this song in my head?”
To say this song had an impact on my small fatherless family is an understatement. In fact, the idea of feminism itself, which the song represents, had a huge impact, not only on my mom but on all the women in my small neighborhood growing up.
My mother was a strong, stubbornly proud, beautiful woman on the surface, while at the same time completely narcissistic and entirely vulnerable on the inside. These traits were her weapon, her shield, and her kryptonite all at once. They may also explain her ability to jump feet first into things like feminism in the ’70s, gluttony in the ’80s, and now Catholicism in her senior years without ever looking at any of them objectively.
I imagine as a young woman with two children and no man around to help out, Reddy’s catchy song probably had an empowering effect on her psyche. Although I don’t have any statistics in front of me, I can certainly attest to my neighborhood having an abundance of women in the exact same situation as my mother — mainly because I was friends with all of their sons.
I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, in the ’70s and ’80s in a lower middle-class neighborhood right on the city/county line. The houses were tiny rowhomes with around 1,000 sq ft of living space. Just enough for a single parent and their kids not to constantly bump into one another.
The majority of the neighborhood kids mirrored my situation: they had a working mom, one or two siblings, and no father around. Sadly, I only remember one of our friends actually having two parents in the home. As you can imagine, this created an interesting neighborhood dynamic, which basically meant the police squad cars were always roaming the area and some kid was always being “picked up” for something. (I’ll save these stories for another day.)
I guess the only difference between our neighborhood and the neighborhoods downtown in the black areas were that the women in our neighborhoods had decent paying jobs. My mom was a registered nurse (RN), my friend’s mom was an executive at the Red Cross, and my other friends’ moms were store managers, and some even entrepreneurs. No mother in our neighborhood was ever on welfare and more than a few were college educated, but interestingly (or maybe not) all of our families shared the exact same issues of all the black single-mother homes downtown — they all had kids on the streets who were consistently in trouble.
My sister and I grew up on a steady diet of Swanson TV dinners and junk food. I can probably count on one hand how many times my mom cooked for us. The closest I got to a homemade meal was my sister’s cold, watery, meatless Ragu spaghetti. Bad pasta was the staple in my house. Of course, this probably explains why I was such a slender and sickly-looking kid inside and out in my youth.
Life growing up with a single parent was not only difficult in private, but shamefully painful for me and my sister in public. Although most of the kids in my neighborhood were in the exact same position, once we got off the bus at school everything changed. We lower middle-class fatherless kids were outnumbered by upper middle-class, two-parent kids. Our only peers at the time were the black kids they bused in from nearby housing projects, which, in retrospect, was a blessing because more than a few times they had our backs when we were bullied by the older, more affluent kids at school.
My mom was a loving and caring person like most mothers. But, par for the course of that era, that love had conditions. One of those conditions was not to interrupt her life, whether it be at home relaxing, at work, or anywhere else. Unfortunately for me as a young rambunctious boy, that meant I had to be put on Ritalin to stifle my behavior for my mom and all my female teachers.
She did try to be there for us as much as she could in our diaper years, but as the years progressed, her decision of becoming a single-mom started to weigh on her both mentally and financially. I use “her decision” because it was her grown-up decision (she was in her mid 20s) to get involved with a married man and birth two children (four years apart) without him around. It was also her decision as an adult to walk away without holding my father morally and financially responsible. My mother decided to “roar” back then rather than bite, and this would burden her dearly in the years that followed.
After a few years of my mom and my grandmother suffering together trying to raise two young children on my mom’s salary (not nearly what RNs make today), my mom decided to take a stand… and find another man. Unfortunately for my sister and I, my mom found the wrong man for the wrong reasons — someone she’d find out later on was speaking to my sister in extremely inappropriate ways. This man would be around for some of my most important years, playing solitaire, smoking menthol cigarettes, and watching Orioles’ games on the TV all summer long while sprawled out on our couch.
When her relationship with my stepfather fell apart, my empowered mom hit the dating scene once again. The only boyfriend I sort of remember back then was “Steve,” only because of his cool car (“a custom-built 1977 Monte Carlo with a Corvette engine in it”) and his love of actually throwing a baseball rather than just lying on the sofa watching someone else throw it. As far as I could tell, he was a good guy, but for whatever reasons things didn’t work out between them. By this time, though, I was becoming numb to it all, and although when Steve disappeared I was disappointed, I wasn’t really that surprised either.
The months and years that followed continued along similar predictable paths — new boyfriends would appear for a while, and then they would go. The only real bump in this routine was that my sister was becoming an anxious teenager, she was getting into more frequent trouble, and would soon be out of the house with all of her own relationship baggage to deal with.
Those days were rough on me, too, obviously, but at least I had the support of all my friends in the neighborhood who were in the exact same boat as me — although, in retrospect, this support was misguided. By the time I was an early teen, our neighborhood had descended into what I like to refer to as the “Lord of the Flies” chapter of my life. It was an entire group of boys raising themselves on the streets without parental supervision — learning hard lessons that involved fraud, theft, petty crime, brutal fights, drugs, alcohol, and the Baltimore county court system.
By the time I was 17, I was out of school, out of my mom’s house, on probation, and stealing cans of soup from local convenience stores just to feed myself (at the time this seemed easier than getting a job). Luckily, I at least had some loyal friends that took care of one another, so I always had a roof over my head, even though sometimes that roof was an old car.
Over the years that followed, my mom’s roar had become somewhat of a whimper, and she flipped the script in regard to priorities and started chasing stability instead of fun. This really just meant she started chasing primarily older men with money. She did find some early success in the late ‘80s — until she had to bury him a couple years later. Not one to give up easily, she managed to hook up with her newly buried ex-husband’s brother-in-law and keep her pro-stability policy going for quite some time, even though this relationship would inevitability end the exact same way as the previous one.
These days, my “invincible” mom is in an assisted living facility in Baltimore living out her golden years broke and alone. This, after she went a decade or so dependent on opioids, anti-depressants, and anti-anxiety medications. It got so bad at one point that she seriously injured someone in a car accident (subsequently sued after it), was caught by the police shopping at a local all-night store in the dead of winter in the middle of the night in her pajamas and bare feet, and then finally spending her entire life savings (a couple hundred thousand dollars she received from her last husband’s passing) on QVC and Amazon right under my sister’s and my noses. (I’m opting to leave out many other details surrounding these chaotic times.) The only thing that prevented her complete financial meltdown was her pension (thank god for those baby-boomer entitlements, yeah?)
Now that both my sister and I are grown up and have families of our own (call it “skin in the game”), we both unabashedly resent my mom on many different levels. My sister’s resentments are the same only harsher, as one might imagine between mother and daughter. My sister’s relationship with my mom has always been rough and tumble — one of odd competitiveness from my mom’s side. My own resentment is a little less complex than my sister’s, maybe some will think it’s out of touch, but I simply resent her for listening to that cringeworthy Reddy song over and over again when I was a kid and actually taking it as gospel!
The disappointing part of all this is that this story doesn’t end with me, nor with anyone else. No, you see, the same tacky cosmopolitan companies, institutions, and organizations that helped fuel and exploit 2nd wave feminism feel it’s ripe to start a new 3rd wave of feminism — and to keep this community-destroying idea going for another few generations. All I can think is why? Why do they want to further destroy our society, our neighborhoods, our families, and our women and men with this false premise of “inequality?” What good has it done for me and my family? What good has it done for my friends? What good has it done for all of the broken, fatherless communities in Baltimore?
All one has to do to compare is to take a look at more intelligent (as in IQ average), conservative, stable, and safer countries like Japan or South Korea to see that traditional male and female roles do create some sort of social harmony (although admittedly imperfect). As well as, Scandinavian countries like Sweden, where they’ve done extensive research on male and female roles and have concluded what we’ve known for thousands of years — that women often prefer care-giving roles (i.e., homemakers and mothers) over most others.
I personally believe that this new wave is even more dangerous than the last, because these same complicit groups are making it even easier to stop and/or destroy the traditional family unit. They’re fraudulently empowering women and tearing down men more than ever before. They’re making it evermore easier to be a single-mom by providing misplaced government “assistance.” They’re making it even more convenient for moms to toss kids in childcare for most of the day while they slave at a corporation marketing and selling plastic crap manufactured in China, or creating some new hypocritical and useless dating app, or saving some investment bank from a lawsuit it probably deserved.
This is the true irony of it all. Tearing down the traditional family unit ultimately does nothing for local communities — it only helps multinational corporations find more “talent” and the government collect more taxes. If you want me to back these claims up, first look around your city and ask yourself if your city and local community are healthier because of two-parent working homes and/or single-mother ghettos… the answer is a resounding NO!
It’s a shame people like my mom couldn’t see the forest beyond the trees way back when. Yes, some brilliant women like Camille Paglia and many others have already solved this riddle and are speaking out now, but clearly the vast majority have not, especially inexperienced University professors who are doing a disservice to many young and idealistic kids with these ever-expanding useless gender studies courses.
To try and be perfectly fair here at the conclusion, I searched for some Helen Reddy interviews on YouTube to help me try to understand her point of view and whether or not my perspective of her song was somewhat skewed. The most recent interview I could find was of her living alone in some small apartment overlooking one of the beautiful Australian coasts. In this short Aussie local interview, she seems to ramble on about how free she felt now living alone… but for some odd reason, all I could think is whether or not she’s putting on a face for the camera, and what type of hardcore anti-depressants she might be on.
