Check out this interesting guest post by Carla Goldstein, the director of the Women's Institute at Omega, on the feminist progress within her own family. This is one more voice to our continued exploration of generational issues, leading up to the conference this fall at the Omega Institute. We are publishing a series of guest posts as a fun way of initiating some of the speakers--who are generally new to blogging--into our exciting online community. Please make them feel welcome. And don't forget to turn in your scholarship applications! They're due June 1st.
My day began with bringing my pouting 8-year-old daughter to school, mad because we were late again. I felt sympathetic, remembering what it was like to always be the last kid at drop off and pick up. My mom, who was a single parent in the 1960s and 70s, was constantly juggling work and caretaking.
As I drove home I remembered that I had nothing in the fridge to feed my mother, now 70 and visiting from Florida for my daughters' dance recital. I made a quick detour to the supermarket. Walking into the store, I realized I was still wearing pajama bottoms. After a moment of panic, I decided whatever! I shopped anyway. Back in the car, I felt a well of gratitude towards my mother for her "whatever!" attitude that mortified me as a child, and turns out to be an essential source of my strength as an adult.
While unpacking groceries, I asked my mom what messages her mother had given her about being a woman. She had trouble finding something on point. Then out came a sequence of two short memories. The first was about her mother (my grandmother) who grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in the East Bronx during the early 1900s. When my grandmother had been a little girl, her mother (my great grandmother) had insisted she get a pair of roller skates because all children should have skates, not just the boys!
My mother's second memory was about her father refusing to let her take driver's ed in high school. He believed women had no need to drive. My grandmother tried to persuade him, but lost the argument. Years later, at age 55, my grandmother taught herself to drive and then helped my mother learn to drive who was then 35 years old.
Upon hearing these two stories, I had a new way of understanding my matrilineal heritage. Until this telling, I had always attributed my adolescent hobby of roller skating to be a happy accident and my early driving as a necessity. It never occurred to me that my mother's enthusiasm for my skating or her permission to drive as soon as I hit the age limit was connected to a family through-line of liberation. The personal stories that connect to the history of women's mobility reminded me that social change is an ever intertwined process moving between our private, day-to-day lives and larger political forces.
Over the past century, women's lives have changed so radically -- and unevenly! Some women still have no freedom of mobility, and even worse are stuck in slavery, violence and racking poverty. The promise now, aided by a global communications network, is that we can share information, knowledge, inspiration, and resources, as we build stronger coalitions to take the next leap in liberation for ourselves and the planet so desperately in need of women's leadership.
At this year's Women and Power conference at Omega Institute we will be talking across the generations to reflect on and celebrate how far we have traveled, to examine things left undone, and to inspire each other to take the next leap forward in building a world where women's dreams are valued and realized.
We are hungry to hear your intergenerational stories -- online at feministing, and in September at Omega in Rhinebeck, New York.
With love, Carla Goldstein
Carla Goldstein's complete bio is after the jump.
Carla Goldstein, JD, is Omega Institute's external affairs director and director of the Women's Institute at Omega. Carla is an attorney with 20 years of experience in public interest advocacy and has worked extensively in city and state government on issues related to women's rights, poverty, public health, and social justice. She has contributed to more than 100 city, state, and federal laws. Carla has appeared on local and national radio and television and makes public presentations to a wide range of audiences on issues related to women's empowerment and activism. Carla serves on the Advisory Board of Feminist.com and was featured at the New York State Bar Association's "Women on the Move: Successful Women in the Know."
Before joining the Omega Institute, Carla was the vice president for public affairs at Planned Parenthood of New York City (PPNYC), where she directed the agency's advocacy and strategic communications work. She also served as the founding director of the PPNYC Action Fund, the political arm of PPNYC. Before joining PPNYC Carla worked for the speaker of the New York City Council, where she helped craft and advocate for the City Council's state and federal legislative agendas. She joined the council after working as a public defender at the Legal Aid Society, where she represented clients in criminal proceedings. Before that, she worked for the speaker of the New York State Assembly as a policy analyst of human services issues. While in law school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Carla was a cofounding editor-in-chief of the state's first women's law journal, which just celebrated its 12th year of publication, the Buffalo Women's Journal. For her work with the journal, Carla won the Dale S. Margulis award, which recognizes the student who makes "the most significant contribution to the law school and the community." She was also the First Place Winner of the Desmond Moot Court Competition.
For the past eight years, Carla was an adjunct professor at CUNY Queens College, where she taught a course called Law and Social Justice, which was designed to empower students to be effective advocates for progressive social change. As part of Omega's Core Program, Carla teaches Introduction to Spiritual Activism, a workshop designed to help people develop their activism in creative ways that align with the rest of their lives.
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That's a great story. My mom has all sorts of stories about how she wasn't allowed to go camping with her brothers and dad, or have a pocket knife, etc. I didn't have any brothers, but my parents always made a big point that us girls could do anything little boys could do.
I was just thinking about this very topic. I was having a conversation with my dad about my almost absurdly progressive 92 year old grandmother. At her 92nd birthday party she advised me to add "in bed" to the end of fortune cookie fortunes, to make it more fun. She's college educated, spent a year at the Sorbonne, and worked at the FBI as a codebreaker during WWII- at double my grandfather's pay! As we talked my father asked if I remembered HER mother, my great-grandmother, after whom I was named. I said just barely, and he started telling me stories of her defending friends who were living together but unmarried in the early 70s, and getting cranky when people acted shocked about gay and lesbian relationships. She apparently said something along the lines of "well it's not like this hasn't been happening all throughout history!" My dad's conclusion about my feminism was "you come by it honestly."
Love it, love it, love it. My maternal great-grandmother was the first woman in her Northern Iraq village to start a "woman's day" tradition - all the women in the village gather together for an all day picnic and fun. Her daughter, my grandmother, was the first woman to wear pants - yes pants - in the same village. She was married off at 15 by her father. So her daughters, my mother and aunts, all finished university and were literally not allowed to get married before they finished - a huge deal in 1960's Iraq. And me, I was given every freedom my brother had, that my mother didn't have, growing up in Chicago - from what clothes I wore to what I studied to whom I dated to when I married.
All because of a kick-ass great-grandmother.
And I wasn't the only one affected: My brother is an outspoken feminist, as is my father.
Loved this story!
While none of the women in my family identify as feminist, there has always been a strong love of education. Both my grandmothers were teachers and wanted the best education for their sons and daughters. It's why my Nana, who is probably less of a feminist than my paternal grandmother, had nothing but encouragement for my mother, who wanted to be a computer engineer at a time when, fortunately for her, colleges and companies were finally actively recruiting women for their image.
My mother always worked and had her own career, and always wanted to. I never even knew that some women didn't, or that there was anything unusual about this, until I was a teenager.
My mother was really good at her job, and when computers first came out in the 80s, she got one and learned how to use it. She and my dad started and ran several businesses, but there was no question that she was the brains and organization behind them. When she was in her late 50s, after my father had been dead 10 years, she started exploring the internet, met someone on Match.com, and married him. She was fearless.
I lost her just a month ago, and we had our problems, but she is still a role model to me.
There's so many strong, amazing women in my history. My grandmother survived the second world war and emmigrated to Australia with my grandfather. She worked and helped the war effort while it was all going on, and when my Grandpa got here he went on with his musician work, being an electrician during the day and a musician at night. She loved to support him, so she'd go with him to his gigs. She was a dancing queen right up to the week she died. Hilarious woman, once she said to my sister who was lamenting being heartbroken by a man: "A standing cock has no conscience!" Both she and Grandpa brought up their kids to be self-sufficient, clever and strong.
My Mum is a mental powerhouse and she never let anything stop her. She loved reading as a kid, even if they couldn't afford books. She worked hard at her school work, despite the fact that she didn't have all the texts she needed for the courses. She did well in English and science anyway. She didn't pass high school, though, but she just went back a few years later after getting married and having some kids and got her diploma. Then she decided she wanted to do some teaching, so she got her diploma of teaching as well! She studied art, she raised seven beautiful children, she entered into local politics and has been a strong representative for the voters here for sixteen years now. Possibly even longer. They tried to get rid of her (the rich dudes in council who didn't like her messing with their money-making motions) but she got voted back in - they couldn't get rid of her that easily! She decided in the early nineties that she really liked computers, so she learnt how to use them. Then she learnt how to build them! At 55! She knows more about computers than I do! She also manages to be the best cook I've ever come across.
The most important thing about my Mum is that she has never, ever in my life told me that I couldn't do something. I'm not talking about "Don't play with those sharp scissors!" I'm talking about things like - when I was a little girl, I was free to play-fight with my big brother. I was allowed to be intensely interesting in his model trains, his remote-control cars, his huge lego sets. I was allowed to climb trees with wooden gun analogues with my brother and my male cousins. I was allowed to follow my Dad around and play with wood and nails and build things. I was also allowed to follow around my sisters and play dress-ups with their pretty clothes, and try on their shoes, and do my hair with them. Get make-up tips. I played with my dolls. I could pretend to be a singing superstar or a high-powered editor running a magazine (and compiling it on my brother's Amiga 500).
I never heard "Girls don't do that." I only ever had my mother there, smiling, encouraging me to do what I wanted. It was a shock to me when I discovered that the rest of the world wasn't like this.
Now my nieces are getting into their teens. My niece Emerald said to me that she didn't like Twilight because she hated how Bella was so subservient and passive. She loves dancing, but she doesn't want to do it as a career. She loves reading and writing and is starting to write her own novels. She's cut from the same cloth, I think. She makes me very proud.
I hope I can have a kid one day that makes me that proud.
(Sorry about the damned essay!)
Oh and I forgot to say - excellent post, I really enjoyed it! I love the fact that you guys loved rollerskates!
I had a lot of trouble getting the math enrichment I needed, even in gifted classes, partly because of sexism. It helped me a lot to know that my mother took a lot of university math and physics, and had been known to elicit comments of "See! A girl can do it." to her classmates from her grade 12 physics teacher. She's also never owned mascara or nail polish in her life.
I really appreciate my mother teaching me by example that I could pick and choose which aspects of traditional femininity I wanted to keep and which I would discard. I ended up with adult interests ranging from bunnies to Dungeons & Dragons, and I like that about myself.