January 16, 2012

Feminist Role Models

I have had many amazing women role models in my life, including a Chicago immigration attorney, a master chef from Los Angeles, a New Orleans-based ballroom dancer, and a hair dresser from New Jersey. Each time I meet a strong, interesting woman, I allow that meeting to expand my understanding of who and what a woman can be. There are people, even in the twenty-first century, even in the United States of America, who believe the only proper role for a woman is that of wife and mother. Those are wonderful things to be! But as long as they are the only things a woman can be, then they will simply never be good enough.

That immigration attorney in the Windy City was someone I met as a teen. She showed me that intelligence, wit, and advocacy were possible. She created opportunities for Western-style freedom for women from dozens of more repressive countries. I will always admire my role models.

January 4, 2012

Headship & Agency

“”Headship.”" It sounds like a made-up word, but to many in Fundamentalist or Evangelical Christian churches, it is a very serious matter, and it controls women to a degree most Americans think exists only in Saudi Arabia and other such places. “”Headship”" means that a male is and always must be the head of household, and no woman is ever to have freedom and agency entirely of her own. A daughter is subject to the headship of her father until the day the father hands her over, lock, stock and virginity, to a husband, who then becomes that woman’s head.
MBS coming 2012
Creative Commons License photo credit: Gaga M13
Suppose a girl growing up in a Fundamentalist family doesn’t want to marry young, or at all? These movements allow no room for that. In the Quiverfull movement, for one odious example, a woman is expected to be more or less perpetually pregnant. Each child is an “”arrow”" in the “”quiver”" of soldiers of Christ, and a woman’s job – her only job – is to produce a full quiver of arrows under her husband’s (you guessed it) headship. Never mind that perpetual pregnancy takes an enormous toll on a woman’s body. Never mind that, for many women, pregnancy is a plague of nausea and weakness. Never mind that raising a lot of small children can be exhausting. The church wants it, and the woman’s health and desire don’t factor into the picture.

Many women find the strength to walk away from these patriarchal movements, and many websites have sprung up where such women can find fellowship and support. They can learn to improve their education, express themselves artistically, select their own clothing, and go on dates without an authority figure allowing or disallowing it: In other words, to run their own lives, under no one’s headship but their own.