I'm incredibly excited to present the final guest blog post during January's exploration of patriarchy: Dr. Rae Colley, formerly a professor at the University of West Georgia and presently my esteemed colleague. She's a deep thinker on the issues we've probed this month (her dissertation was entitled "Domesticating the Frontier: Representations of Native Americans in U.S. Women's Prose, 1820-1885"). You can read her literary criticism on her blog, Read This Book, Y'all. Below you will find a heartwarming and hilarious exploration of someone who identifies as a feminist and who has raised both daughters and sons.
My first experience wrangling with the concept of patriarchy occurred some years ago (I won’t say how many, because my commitment to feminism does not diminish my commitment to personal vanity) when I was a graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta. I was a young Ph.D. candidate in English, and I thought I would like to earn a certificate in Women’s Studies. Also, I was recently married. And, shortly after making that fateful decision, pregnant. But nevertheless, I wanted to fight the power of the male gaze and began taking classes in Women’s Studies, where I produced papers entitled, “The Hegemony of the Governess: (Re)inscribing the Patriarchy in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” I love this title because it contains so many of the academic markers of the day: parentheses, dependent clauses, and of course a colon. [Side note: this paper was a finalist that year for Most Outstanding Paper by a Graduate Student. It didn’t win, and to this day I wonder if I invested too heavily or not enough in the academic markers.]
At the time (ok, fine, it was the mid 90s) I was proud of my commitment to feminism. A professor of mine wrote a newspaper editorial arguing that everyone who was in favor of equal pay for equal work was a feminist, and I couldn’t really argue with her logic (mainly because I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about when she mentioned an Aristotelian paradigm of something or other). I strutted into my Emory class on Women in American Popular Culture full of ideas about how to elevate popular culture (occupied by women) into the stratosphere of intellectual culture (occupied by men.) My pregnancy was a frequent topic of discussion in my all-female class of varying gender identities. My child was born in June, and when I returned to class in September, everyone was eager to hear about my new daughter. The only problem was that she was a son. I don’t mean that the baby was transgendered or confused about his gender identity (to my knowledge). Rather, in our enthusiastic reimagining of American popular culture, everyone had imagined a culture that included another open-minded young woman. I was so proud of my perfect baby boy and not a little offput when a classmate jokingly [I think] moaned, “Not another member of the patriarchy!”
I laughed, but then immediately began to worry: how would I prevent my innocent baby boy from joining the tidal wave of repressive male power? I thought I had the answer. I would not play into restrictive gender stereotypes! My boy would not play with guns or swords or army men! He would have a Barbie doll, and he would play dress-up! I would buy him a Baby Alive and teach him to change her diaper! He would wear pink, for heaven’s sake! While he was a swaddled infant, it was relatively easy to enforce these strictures. He wore his cute pink onesies with aplomb, and threw up on them just as efficiently as he did on the blue clothes. He gnawed on the Barbie’s shaved head when his teeth were coming in, and he actually asked for a Ken doll on his second birthday (I still don’t know if he knew I was going to get him one anyway, or if he genuinely wanted a tanned partner for Malibu Barbie. Or two Malibu Kens).
In the midst of all my self-congratulatory gender reassignment exercises, I became pregnant again, and this time to the delight of Women’s Studies students everywhere, I had a little girl. I knew what to do: regift her pink clothes and baby dolls to her brother, and make sure she had a full supply of Thomas the Tank Engine books and action figures. A funny thing happened here: Grace exhibited no interest whatsoever in her brother’s collection of Matchbox cars, and the only thing she liked to do with Thomas the Tank Engine was wrap him up in a blanket and pretend to rock him to sleep. To be clear, Thomas is a train. And he was swaddled nicely in a Barbie blanket. At least I think the blanket was a nice, gender-neutral yellow. More horrifying, despite my desire to avoid firearms of all kinds, my son Jackson had a real knack for weapon formation. He could make a gun out of a stick, a pencil, a shoe; he was a regular little Smith and Wesson MacGyver. And he quickly lost interest in the Malibu Ken that he had requested [accepted?] the previous year.
Over the years, my children have accepted and rejected gender norms in varying degrees: Grace never did enjoy the toy trucks I bought her, and I eventually had to cave in and buy her an American Girl doll to replace Thomas the Tank Engine. Jackson enjoyed dolls intermittently, but once he discovered Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that was all over. And to my immense chagrin, he has always loved guns: Airsoft rifles, BB guns, and violent video games. There, I said it. However, for years he played with the kitchen set I bought them, and now he’s studying to be a chef. My daughter is president of her school’s Business and Entrepreneurial Club, and is a master at outside sales (I myself could never even sell Girl Scout cookies). What does all this mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
This entire post has been one long piece of anecdotal evidence about my experience trying to carry the banner of feminism as a mother, first of boys, then of girls (I now am the proud mother of two beneficiaries of the patriarchy and two future breastfeeding advocates [optimism reigns here]). Society has changed a lot in the years since I earned that elusive Ph.D./Women’s Studies certificate, although maybe not so much as my classmates and I would like to believe. We are nearing the end of Barack Obama’s second term as the first African-American president, but we are also forced to listen to debate on how the infidelities of Hillary Clinton’s husband disqualify her from the presidency. Not to veer off into the political, but the personal is political, or so I’ve come to believe. I wanted to end with a pithy quote, but when I went to Tumblr, I kept getting distracted by the vitriolic comments and hate-mongering under each quote. Why is feminism such a dirty word to some? I did find one quotation that spoke to my story, though, from Gloria Steinem: “Though we have the courage to raise our daughters more like our sons, we’ve rarely had the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Here’s to a judgment-free, egalitarian childhood, with all the dolls, trucks, cake pans, and sword-wielding turtles that implies!
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