The Women's Studies Program Not Taken

Image: Girl by Stream by Flickr user Wisconsin Historical Society, used under Creative Commons License

In his book, Coming to our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, John Kabat-Zinn describes this revealing scene of a group of very busy adults.

I once led a mindfulness workshop at a business conference in Chicago. About fifty people in suits showed up. I opened our time together by suggesting that we simply sit together for a few minutes with no instructions and no agenda. I suggested that we let go of whatever expectations and stories we were bringing into the room about the workshop and why we were there (after all, something brought them there, no one was in the room by accident), put down our coffee cups and newspapers, and just take a few minutes to allow ourselves to feel how things were for us in that moment, however they were. A few people started crying.
In the conversation afterward, I asked what the tears were about. One executive said, "I never ever do anything without an agenda." Heads nodded in agreement. Just the words, "let's sit without an agenda," were liberating, releasing dammed-up feelings of grief they didn't know they had.

The people in that conference room may have been masters of hiding those damned-up feelings of grief from themselves, but I wonder how successful they were in hiding them from their children. When the topic of teen suicide is discussed, the causes typically cited are drugs, the influence of fatalistic song lyrics, bullying and the never-ending pressure for grades. One cause that is often ignored is the despair that young people experience when they look at the lives that their parents lead. A teenager will hear his father angrily rehash the office politics, see the weariness in her mother's face from the long hours at the job, mark the hours his parents spend staring vacantly at the television, and ask, "Is this what my life will be like?""

That sense of despair is what I recalled when reading a post written by Her of Desire X entitled, Generation-Y. Coming of age in the late 1980's, Her is, by her own account ...a woman without a generation. Or maybe just without a cause. The radicalism of the 1960's came to Her in a watered-down version from teachers, erstwhile hippies, who

...waxed poetic about Abbie Hoffman. Our response, isn't Abbie a girl's name? The Black Panthers, The White Panthers. Was it the Chicago Seven or Eight? Had to remember that for the test.

In this post, Her gives us a snapshot of her mother who, in her own rebellious youth, was anything but watered-down.

My mother drove across country in a VW bus packed full of hippies, Grace Slick's White Rabbit blaring out of the window, scaring all-fuck out of the Provincials, swearing that the only way to truly change the world was to get naked and perform an impromptu, ad lib, acid induced version of Major Barbara on the courthouse lawn, and then get arrested for public indecency and inciting a riot. When her father drove cross country to post her bail he found that she had changed the name of the father in Major Barbara to his name. He looked at his daughter, standing in a holding cell with her hippie friends, wearing only a jacket that someone had given her and, staring straight into her eyes, said unflinchingly, 'I do not know this woman. This is not my daughter.' She swore she had seen the world with New eyes through a glistening ball of liquid on the end of a medicine dropper. She marched on Washington. She went to Woodstock. She was turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.

It is that firebrand quality that Her treasures in a friend destined for Berkeley and a major in Women's Studies:

I loved her because she loved my mind. I adored her because she called me brilliant. She was a radical, a rebel, a warrior: a simulacrum of my mother in her youth.

When Her announces that she wants to attend Berkeley, her firebrand of a mother objects, calling the university ...Berserkly from the drugs and craziness she had experienced there during her past.. But Her is determined. She begins writing a paper that will not only cure her generation of complacency, but her mother as well.

There were also some old photos of her tucked haphazardly into shoe boxes and pushed to the back of her closet. One in particular had always been my favorite, she was smiling, dressed in hippie beads, a brown mini-skirt and moccasin boots, her long blond hair a tangled mess. A too-big Army camouflage jacket was draped over her small shoulders. She had a joint in one hand and was making a peace sign with the other. She was beautiful, angelic, but her eyes were fierce, intense. She was happy. When I see this photo I'm always reminded of Raymond Carver's Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year. I've wanted my whole life to meet this girl. To know her. To be her friend and companion in chaos.

But when Her's mother reads the paper, Her does not catch a glimpse of that beautiful girl in the photograph. She is face to face with a woman who is ..pleased. Not excited, not enflamed. Her does not go to Berkeley:

Life took some turns for me that sent me in other directions.
I won't rehash it. What followed has already been written.
The Church of Coke Whores 1
The Church of Coke Whores 2

Be warned. The Church of Coke Whores offers only one sacrament: Extreme Unction.

I referred to Her's mother as a firebrand, which is defined as someone who deliberately foments trouble. But it is the word's second meaning that I had in mind: a piece of wood that has been burned or is burning. How long can one woman remain on fire if she does not have the support of others? For many of the women who came of age in the sixties, who were responsible for raising children in the seventies and eighties, there was little support for that rebel flame in the home or the corporate workplace or the university. Little support but a ready supply of misogyny, as the poet Sharon Olds found when, in the ninth month of pregnancy, she arrives for the review of her dissertation. The men who will review Olds' dissertation may have been so courteous as to offer a pregnant woman a seat on a crowded subway train. But they show no such compunction for the jabs they deliver to Olds' other child, the one she fleshed from experience and learning.

When I walked into the seminar room
with my dissertation, our son floated in out
before me, treaded water in,
almost nine months old, upside-
down, sucking his thumb. My advisor
had called my thesis original,
richly metaphorical, and so
free of footnotes--I secretly thought
I might win something. But he didn't show up,
and the Chair of the Department had a pillar of mail
and a wastebasket by his leg -- for two hours,
he disemboweled. Two other men were
muttering to each other out the sides of their mouths
and doing their hard har, har,
har. I cited my advisor for his
encouragement, I described the yards
of file cards, the research, but after five minutes of their
jokes and smirks, I saw they meant
to flunk me. I drew my powers together,
120 pounds of me,
40 of the pregnancy
and 7 of my baby. Two hours later,
they asked me to leave the room for an interval
and they voted: Fail, Fail, Fail,
Fail, and You Can't Do That--
the one woman. When I lumbered back in,
our son's sweet palate may have wrinkled up
at the taste of fear's sour effluent--
who was polluting his waters? (Rip)
They wanted (Rip) a dissertation
absolutely new, without one
word (Rip) of this one--except
"the" was all right, and "and." How much
time shall we give her, gentlemen? How about
--nine months? Har, har
har. My cervix bent, for a moment,
with intimate, private hurt. I said,
Thank you. I thought, if you have hurt my child,
if you have curdled my milk with that, I will find you, and I will kill you.
And at that, my son's hair stood
on end, in the saline.

"The Defense" from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds

I do not know if this scene is what Her's mother imagined when she read that fledging dissertation. But she had learned that an impromptu performance of Major Barbara could not change the fact that the world has little use for firebrands or brilliant girls. Perhaps being pleased rather than enflamed was the way that Her's mother tried to protect her child. Unfortunately, there is no way to protect a child, except to show her how to recognize danger, when to pick her battles, and that being a good little girl is the worst danger of all.

References:

Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, by John Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Hyperion, New York, 2005. ISBN: 0-7868-6756-6 (Quoted text: page 447)

"The Defense" from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001. ISBN: 0-375-40742-2 (Quoted text: pages 8-9)