Diary Excerpts
Diary of a Second Wave Feminist
January 2006
Gray was my Oath Mother at the
Free Amazon Guild House on Indian Lake. She gave me the name of Sojourner and pretty much sealed my fateful future as a mountain guide for the Revolution. I spent months gazing out her kitchen window while she listened to my thoughts and doubts about taking on the mission to ratify the ERA, pondering whether the actions and commitment of one woman could even make a difference important enough to justify the loss of my family life, my status quo, my security. It’s been 28 years since I left her kitchen and my family behind to see if I could clear a Path my children could follow without compromising themselves. If I couldn’t make an honest, independent living as a Feminist in the sexist World, how could I expect my kids to survive the system whole?
January, 2006
Just woke up from siesta, and a miraculous dream of actually walking without pain or limp. I was thrilled to walk down a staircase and the first thing I did was take up all the throw rugs and take them outside to shake, and then my dogs followed me back inside to play and scrabble on the empty floor, barking with excitement, which woke me up into the real afternoon,
just in time to take some aspirin and see what Lillian was really barking at, outside. There was Jon across the road on a wood trip, and I was immediately taken back to when I was thirty, living on a communal farm outside Ithaca, New York. We had an old Chevy truck that we used to climb the big hill to the tree- line at the top side of the grazing field, and load up with dead wood for the stove in the kitchen. I learned real quick that the women I was with on the first wood run were way too macho with the chainsaw, so in self-preservation mode, I told them that I wouldn’t help with the work unless they let ME wield
the monster. They seemed relieved to concede to my conditions, I guess because none of them were as sure-footed as I was, and I got the job for the whole winter. By the time spring came around, I had developed a ganglia cyst on my left wrist from chainsaw related aggravation. One of the women let me read an article in one of her magazines diagnosing the exact problem, and recommending treatment with 1000mg of B6 daily, for six weeks, and it actually worked. It was so wonderful being Young.
A retrospective: January 2005
As I was approaching my Saturn Cycle, I dreamed of being more than just an average housewife and mother. I wanted to change the world I’d been raised to fit into, the world I’d delivered my children into, to be one in which adventure and personal growth could be achieved without being ground down to a common denominator of passive acceptance and dumb luck. I didn’t want an ordinary life of raising ordinary children to become ordinary cogs in a system of ordinary sacrifice and struggle. I wanted to walk the shining path I saw before me, the path that led to real freedom, and the chance to make a difference; a path that my kids could follow without losing faith in their abilities to make the World a better place. Liberation was not so much a goal for me as it was a means to become unshackled from the expectations that chained me to a grist mill, the same chains that my children would inherit from an average discontented mother, if I didn’t make a radical effort to change the course of my life. Having no marketable job skills, and only marginal talents, I had no other choice but to leave my kids safely tucked with their father and his family, as I made the jump into the ruthless, dog-eat-dog, world of sexist, racist, classist society of strangers, alone, with no economic, marital, or political status, with nothing but my naked feminism, and my willingness to hold fast to the idea that I had an obligation to do whatever I could to make the world a better place for myself, my children, my fellow travelers, in this one life I owned.
I almost didn’t make it thru the first two years.
Leaving my family and sisters tore a whole in my heart, and I still weep when I remember the terrible loss, the awesome guilt, the horrible pain of knowing that I could never return to the fold that I had so drastically changed with selfish ambition and cold desire to become someone important enough to right the wrongs of an indifferent society. I was crazy with grief and the idiocy of believing that I could just volunteer my services to change the world, to heal the ignorant, to accomplish revolution of the social order, one person at a time. Suffice it to say, that I did get tutoring at the hands of the mental health establishment, which eventually convinced me that I had to learn how to make a living as something other than a revolutionary feminist, or die an unsung martyr to masochistic idealism. So I abandoned my attempts to infiltrate women’s centers and lesbian affinity groups, and took advantage of a displaced homemaker’s training program to become a member of the pink-collar labor market, as a nursing assistant in old folk’s homes. For ten years, I privatized my radical tendencies, complied to rules of behavior and dress codes, and actually learned to care about the needs of others. I loved the work, and it took me a long time to get used to being paid to do something I really would have done for just the satisfaction of being loved and needed. The paycheck gave me the freedom to make a home for myself and my community of misfit artists, and musicians, and poets, who did our living and loving, and world-changing, on the street, as guerilla thespians, and we did make a difference when we occupied the campus of Syracuse University to demand that they divest their stock portfolio of South African apartheid. We must have been one of the last straws, because very shortly after our movement hit campus, Apartheid fell, and we were all astounded further when the Wall fell in Berlin. My employment in nursing homes ended shortly thereafter, because I was arrogantly determined to make a comparable difference at my worksite by arranging to organize a Union presence, activities for which I got fired and blackballed. My co-workers did vote in the Union, and invited me back, but I was already suffering job-related wear and tear, so I left home again to join the Rainbow Family of deadheads and hipis. Only to find myself living in a Police State, where there is no free camping. I traveled in a Volkswagen, up and down the Californicated Coast, trying to make a home for my self and my dogs, only to be told that I am too old to be of use, and that I take up too much room, and that my grant-writing skills aren’t worth a salary, because the alternative culture is full of volunteers who are happy to donate their talents to the Cause.
So I went back to a Mental Health Councilor, got diagnosed with depression, lymes diease, and osteoarthritis, and retired to the Desert with a nut check from Social Security, something I had always avoided like the plague because I thought it would damage my credibility as a writer. I was delusional thinking I had any.
The irony of all the years I spent in Syracuse was that after hearing Karen DeCrow warn against the trap that was Women’s Culture, as she stepped down from the presidency of N.O.W. in Detroit, and after being barred from that culture on my arrival at the doorstep of her hometown women’s “club”, I was forced to gather beautiful New York men around me who could feel empowered by my Feminism, not threatened by it, and that we together could accomplish such a moral victory by making an ethical stand, and sharing a very certain pride of actually accomplishing real change. Karen must have been right, in her own way…Women’s Culture failed to get the ERA ratified, reproductive freedom is still a political football, and the politics of sexuality is clamoring for the bondage of marriage. Woman, as an independent individual is still shackled by trite convention, her dignity, security and pleasure still measured with the shortest stick.
This one woman, however, has accomplished much, on any everyday basis, with the life and time allotted to me, and I do feel satisfied, justified even, that my choices have been good ones, and that if my children knew the woman I’ve become. they would be proud to call me their Mother.
The personal is political is personal. And it’s all been worthwhile.
Back to the Lesbian Farm called Northwoods: January 15, 1981
Seperatism, as a philosophy, is not valid because
it represents an abandonment of the problem of sexism,
not the resolution of it on any but a personal level,
usually resulting in political stagnation and/or regression
into patterns reminiscent of, if not identical to,
the oppression of patriarchal systems.
Ergo: Lesbian Separatism can be seen as a corruption
of Feminist Theory.
NorthWoods Blues, Christmas 1980
The ‘couples’ have left for a vacation in Florida leaving me to feed the dogs and the woodstove so the pipes don’t freeze.
It’s raining, cold and dreary, and I wouldn’t walk the distance to the yokel’s bar for the Wednesday Special…draft, a quarter…game a quarter…5 for 2 on the jukebox. If I walked a mile and a half in the rain just for the company of straight neighbors, and the women came home to that kind of gossip, they’d think I was a politically incorrect drunk.
Post-script: After re-reading this entry that day, I felt defiant and went anyway, ‘they’ found out, and I was forcibly packed-up and moved-out before planting season.
August, 2006
I’ve written my own epitaph to be carved on a rock and placed in my garden over my buried ashes, when the time comes.
On this blog, I can share it with Gray, whose passion inspired it.
STEEL CITY SAGE
Woman of an Age
Fired by her Anger
Woman of a Rage
Tempered by her Love
1941Gray Fitch Scariot2005
January 2006
Gray was my Oath Mother at the
Free Amazon Guild House on Indian Lake. She gave me the name of Sojourner and pretty much sealed my fateful future as a mountain guide for the Revolution. I spent months gazing out her kitchen window while she listened to my thoughts and doubts about taking on the mission to ratify the ERA, pondering whether the actions and commitment of one woman could even make a difference important enough to justify the loss of my family life, my status quo, my security. It’s been 28 years since I left her kitchen and my family behind to see if I could clear a Path my children could follow without compromising themselves. If I couldn’t make an honest, independent living as a Feminist in the sexist World, how could I expect my kids to survive the system whole?
January, 2006
Just woke up from siesta, and a miraculous dream of actually walking without pain or limp. I was thrilled to walk down a staircase and the first thing I did was take up all the throw rugs and take them outside to shake, and then my dogs followed me back inside to play and scrabble on the empty floor, barking with excitement, which woke me up into the real afternoon,
just in time to take some aspirin and see what Lillian was really barking at, outside. There was Jon across the road on a wood trip, and I was immediately taken back to when I was thirty, living on a communal farm outside Ithaca, New York. We had an old Chevy truck that we used to climb the big hill to the tree- line at the top side of the grazing field, and load up with dead wood for the stove in the kitchen. I learned real quick that the women I was with on the first wood run were way too macho with the chainsaw, so in self-preservation mode, I told them that I wouldn’t help with the work unless they let ME wield
the monster. They seemed relieved to concede to my conditions, I guess because none of them were as sure-footed as I was, and I got the job for the whole winter. By the time spring came around, I had developed a ganglia cyst on my left wrist from chainsaw related aggravation. One of the women let me read an article in one of her magazines diagnosing the exact problem, and recommending treatment with 1000mg of B6 daily, for six weeks, and it actually worked. It was so wonderful being Young.
A retrospective: January 2005
As I was approaching my Saturn Cycle, I dreamed of being more than just an average housewife and mother. I wanted to change the world I’d been raised to fit into, the world I’d delivered my children into, to be one in which adventure and personal growth could be achieved without being ground down to a common denominator of passive acceptance and dumb luck. I didn’t want an ordinary life of raising ordinary children to become ordinary cogs in a system of ordinary sacrifice and struggle. I wanted to walk the shining path I saw before me, the path that led to real freedom, and the chance to make a difference; a path that my kids could follow without losing faith in their abilities to make the World a better place. Liberation was not so much a goal for me as it was a means to become unshackled from the expectations that chained me to a grist mill, the same chains that my children would inherit from an average discontented mother, if I didn’t make a radical effort to change the course of my life. Having no marketable job skills, and only marginal talents, I had no other choice but to leave my kids safely tucked with their father and his family, as I made the jump into the ruthless, dog-eat-dog, world of sexist, racist, classist society of strangers, alone, with no economic, marital, or political status, with nothing but my naked feminism, and my willingness to hold fast to the idea that I had an obligation to do whatever I could to make the world a better place for myself, my children, my fellow travelers, in this one life I owned.
I almost didn’t make it thru the first two years.
Leaving my family and sisters tore a whole in my heart, and I still weep when I remember the terrible loss, the awesome guilt, the horrible pain of knowing that I could never return to the fold that I had so drastically changed with selfish ambition and cold desire to become someone important enough to right the wrongs of an indifferent society. I was crazy with grief and the idiocy of believing that I could just volunteer my services to change the world, to heal the ignorant, to accomplish revolution of the social order, one person at a time. Suffice it to say, that I did get tutoring at the hands of the mental health establishment, which eventually convinced me that I had to learn how to make a living as something other than a revolutionary feminist, or die an unsung martyr to masochistic idealism. So I abandoned my attempts to infiltrate women’s centers and lesbian affinity groups, and took advantage of a displaced homemaker’s training program to become a member of the pink-collar labor market, as a nursing assistant in old folk’s homes. For ten years, I privatized my radical tendencies, complied to rules of behavior and dress codes, and actually learned to care about the needs of others. I loved the work, and it took me a long time to get used to being paid to do something I really would have done for just the satisfaction of being loved and needed. The paycheck gave me the freedom to make a home for myself and my community of misfit artists, and musicians, and poets, who did our living and loving, and world-changing, on the street, as guerilla thespians, and we did make a difference when we occupied the campus of Syracuse University to demand that they divest their stock portfolio of South African apartheid. We must have been one of the last straws, because very shortly after our movement hit campus, Apartheid fell, and we were all astounded further when the Wall fell in Berlin. My employment in nursing homes ended shortly thereafter, because I was arrogantly determined to make a comparable difference at my worksite by arranging to organize a Union presence, activities for which I got fired and blackballed. My co-workers did vote in the Union, and invited me back, but I was already suffering job-related wear and tear, so I left home again to join the Rainbow Family of deadheads and hipis. Only to find myself living in a Police State, where there is no free camping. I traveled in a Volkswagen, up and down the Californicated Coast, trying to make a home for my self and my dogs, only to be told that I am too old to be of use, and that I take up too much room, and that my grant-writing skills aren’t worth a salary, because the alternative culture is full of volunteers who are happy to donate their talents to the Cause.
So I went back to a Mental Health Councilor, got diagnosed with depression, lymes diease, and osteoarthritis, and retired to the Desert with a nut check from Social Security, something I had always avoided like the plague because I thought it would damage my credibility as a writer. I was delusional thinking I had any.
The irony of all the years I spent in Syracuse was that after hearing Karen DeCrow warn against the trap that was Women’s Culture, as she stepped down from the presidency of N.O.W. in Detroit, and after being barred from that culture on my arrival at the doorstep of her hometown women’s “club”, I was forced to gather beautiful New York men around me who could feel empowered by my Feminism, not threatened by it, and that we together could accomplish such a moral victory by making an ethical stand, and sharing a very certain pride of actually accomplishing real change. Karen must have been right, in her own way…Women’s Culture failed to get the ERA ratified, reproductive freedom is still a political football, and the politics of sexuality is clamoring for the bondage of marriage. Woman, as an independent individual is still shackled by trite convention, her dignity, security and pleasure still measured with the shortest stick.
This one woman, however, has accomplished much, on any everyday basis, with the life and time allotted to me, and I do feel satisfied, justified even, that my choices have been good ones, and that if my children knew the woman I’ve become. they would be proud to call me their Mother.
The personal is political is personal. And it’s all been worthwhile.
Back to the Lesbian Farm called Northwoods: January 15, 1981
Seperatism, as a philosophy, is not valid because
it represents an abandonment of the problem of sexism,
not the resolution of it on any but a personal level,
usually resulting in political stagnation and/or regression
into patterns reminiscent of, if not identical to,
the oppression of patriarchal systems.
Ergo: Lesbian Separatism can be seen as a corruption
of Feminist Theory.
NorthWoods Blues, Christmas 1980
The ‘couples’ have left for a vacation in Florida leaving me to feed the dogs and the woodstove so the pipes don’t freeze.
It’s raining, cold and dreary, and I wouldn’t walk the distance to the yokel’s bar for the Wednesday Special…draft, a quarter…game a quarter…5 for 2 on the jukebox. If I walked a mile and a half in the rain just for the company of straight neighbors, and the women came home to that kind of gossip, they’d think I was a politically incorrect drunk.
Post-script: After re-reading this entry that day, I felt defiant and went anyway, ‘they’ found out, and I was forcibly packed-up and moved-out before planting season.
August, 2006
I’ve written my own epitaph to be carved on a rock and placed in my garden over my buried ashes, when the time comes.
On this blog, I can share it with Gray, whose passion inspired it.
STEEL CITY SAGE
Woman of an Age
Fired by her Anger
Woman of a Rage
Tempered by her Love
1941Gray Fitch Scariot2005
posted by sage @ 12:42 PM
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