The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (10 page)

“Women have not only been educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been excluded from theory formation,” Lerner writes in
The Creation of Patriarchy.
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That is, we've been excluded from creating symbol and myth, from the meaning-making process that explains and interprets reality.

This has been particularly true within the church. There women have reigned in the nurseries and the social halls but have been mostly absent from pulpits and places where theology, policy, and spiritual meaning are forged. Within the church, women have
been more apt to polish the brass, arrange the flowers, put cookies on a plate, clean up, keep the nursery, be led, pass the credit, look pretty, and be supportive. In other words, women have frequently functioned more as church handmaids than religious meaning makers or symbol creators.

The Church Handmaid is a woman who tries to be a Good Daughter to the Church, trying to be everything it wants and expects her to be. Throughout my life I'd done this without question.

Now, sitting in church, I was full of questions. Why was God always the God of Abraham, never the God of Sarah? Why was it often impossible, rare, or difficult for a woman to hold real power in the church? Women had been the largest consumers of church, yet we'd held a vastly disproportionate amount of power compared to our numbers and commitment there. Why had my father always chaired the finance committee and my mother the social committee, even though my mother could manage household budgets and figures with the acumen of an accountant?

The congregation stood to sing. Unbelievably, as if all the irony in the world were crashing down at once, the hymn was “Faith of Our Fathers.” I tried to sing, but I could not open my mouth. It was as if something had given way in my chest. I lowered the hymnbook and sat back down. I was fighting tears.

Sandy bent down and nudged me. “Are you okay?” he whispered. I nodded, but inside I felt too heavy to move. Until that moment I hadn't fully understood.
I was in a religion that celebrated fatherhood and sonship. I was in an institution created by men and for men.

By the time I got home I felt disbelief that I'd not seen all this before—that the church, my church, was not just a part of the male-dominant system I was waking up to, but a prime legitimizer of it.

I was too dazed to be angry. Mostly I felt disillusioned, sad, betrayed. I stood in front of the closet in the bedroom hanging up my dress, thinking, But women have been so loyal to the church, so supportive. How could it negate and exclude us this way? How had this happened?

That afternoon I opened a book I'd recently brought home, Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex.
I read all afternoon. I read how religion had given authority to men. As de Beauvoir put it, religion had given men a God like themselves—a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority has been vested in them by the Supreme Being.

That night I couldn't sleep. I slipped out of bed and went to my study. I stood by the window, looking out at the night. The tears I'd suppressed that morning in church finally rolled down my face.

The Secondary Partner

I woke one morning and looked over at Sandy, still asleep on the pillow beside me. We had been married for nineteen years.

I thought about those years when I was a young wife starting my family, how the newly launched women's movement blew by me with hardly a rustle. Instead of meeting with a consciousness-raising group, I attended marriage and family programs at church. There I learned worthwhile things like communication skills, but I also learned a model of relating that unwittingly promoted women's psychological dependence on men and male authority. Women's personal journeys, goals, and quests were encouraged only to the extent that they didn't interfere with those of husband or children. A woman's surrender of herself on behalf of the rest of the family was (and often still is) extolled as the highest virtue.

In the world where I'd grown up, marriage for women had meant revolving around men like planets around the sun. As everyone knows, planets don't question their orbits; they just revolve. An enormous gravitational pull holds a woman in this orbit; it comes from finding approval and a sense of identity in her orbit, since finding these things within her feminine self is difficult in a culture where attitudes and conditioning are ranged against her.

I leaned up on my elbow and studied the tilt of Sandy's nose. In some way we did operate as if the husband's life was the sun while the wife's was the revolving planet. I began to wonder how a
woman defies gravity and changes heavenly courses. What would happen if I actually brought feminism into my marriage?

Not that Sandy was a dogmatically rigid or authoritarian person. He'd never demanded that I should “submit” to him. On the contrary, he was kind and fun and loving and shared decision making with me. His resistance to my journey (which he didn't verbalize so much as I intuited) came from his own fears about how that would change our relationship. I wasn't sure, but I did know one thing—introducing feminism into the orbits of our life would make me about as popular with my husband as Galileo and Copernicus had been with the Catholic Church. Bringing feminism into my marriage would turn our little universe on its head.

Gazing at him, I realized that the model of the revolving wife was an old model of marriage we'd both inherited—one in which the wife holds a key, though secondary, position. It was the model of the Secondary Partner.

In the model of the Secondary Partner, the woman may run things at home and have her career, her pursuits, and her quests, but there is a gradation of power in the relationship. As Jungian analyst June Singer points out, when a girl is growing up, it is
not taken for granted,
as it is with boys, that her life and needs will be primary, that she will have access to places of authority and power like her brothers or father. What
is
taken for granted is that she will find her main source of fulfillment through her husband and family, that she will be secondary to them.
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A man assumes certain entitlements simply because he's male. For instance, Sandy was entitled to go and come in the world as he pleased. If he had a business trip, he simply went, no questions asked. And lots of times I packed the bag. But if I should have a writer's conference or a speaking engagement, it was a big deal, something that needed to be discussed. How long would I be gone? Could he manage the children without me? What about meals? How many times a day is the dog fed?

At times like those I felt a nebulous guilt for pursuing my own life.

When a woman lives out the Secondary Partner, she tends to believe, not so much consciously but deep inside, that she is there to be of service to her partner. She might become his inspiration, investing herself in his creativity and work rather than her own. She may become the “woman behind the man,” the hostess who initiates dinner parties for his associates, the one who makes sure his clients get Christmas cards. In the extreme she may become completely deferential and adaptable where he's concerned, shaping herself to his opinions, beliefs, and wishes or, as a friend of mine says, “being wax to his flame.”

While I didn't go quite that far, I realized that I did often look to Sandy for identity, approval, and validation. I depended on this the way he depended on my being in the self-sacrificing role.

Another film comes to mind, this one portraying a forty-two-year-old London housewife who is living the Secondary Partner to such a degree it has taken on the overtones of parody.
Shirley Valentine
opens with the soundtrack singing, “I'd like the chance to be the girl who used to be me.” The recurring question in the film is: What happened to Shirley Valentine? Shirley Valentine was her maiden name, the name she had when she lived from her own center, when she was daring and stuffed full of passion for life. Her quest is to recover her essential self, her Shirley Valentine self.

With her children grown and her marriage settled into deep, deadening ruts, her existence is like modeling clay, stretching and molding itself to her husband's life. He wants chips and eggs on Monday, steak on Thursday. He wants his wife always nearby to meet his needs but not too intrusive; she should be just there, available and useful like an umbrella in its stand.

When Shirley gets a chance to go to Greece with a friend, she seizes the trip as part of her quest, though her husband forbids her to leave. One night sitting beside the Greek shore, Shirley thinks to herself, “I've allowed myself to lead this little life when inside me there is so much more. . . . That's where Shirley Valentine disappeared to. She got lost in all this unused life.”

She meets Costas, a fun-loving Greek restaurant owner who takes her out on a boat. She tells him that when she was a girl—when she was Shirley Valentine—she used to be daring. She used to jump off the roof. Encouraged by Costas, she begins to recover this lost self as the two of them jump off the boat into water that, he tells her, is as deep as forever.

When the vacation is over, Shirley stays on, working in Costas's restaurant, waking up with the sea outside her window, soaking up life in the tiny, sun-drenched village, learning to laugh and dare again, and gradually reclaiming herself. She blossoms, ignoring all her husband's angry orders to come home.

My favorite scene is when her husband arrives in Greece in order to try to reconcile their lives. She waits for him at a table by the sea, watching him trudge up the hill. He passes her, then turns back. “I didn't recognize you,” he said.

“I know,” she tells him. “I used to be the mother. I used to be the wife. But now I'm Shirley Valentine.”

That morning as I lay in bed watching my husband sleep, I yearned to transform the model of our marriage, to find my unused life, which is the work a Secondary Partner will need to do. I needed to find the woman I'd left behind and to challenge the conventional orbits of my relationship. But if I did all that, what would happen to my marriage? Could it sustain that sort of transformation? I had my qualms about it.

The Many-Breasted Mother

Another blueprint given to women, the Many-Breasted Mother, is one of the more revered. The image came to me as I watched a peculiar sight on the television news, an overwhelmed mother dog nursing a small litter of newborn kittens along with her own brood of pups. The kittens had been brought to her when their mother died. The mother dog lay sprawled on her side overrun with mouths, some that naturally belonged to her and some that didn't. “Poor thing, all she seems to do all day long is nurse something,” said the owner.

Women have been encouraged to embrace the all-nurturing (many-breasted) role of womanhood as the jewel in the female crown. And while mothering can be a deeply beautiful role, it can also become distorted by self-negation. The Many-Breasted Mother ends up caring for an array of children, including projects, needs, groups, and persons, that may not even belong at her breast.

I remembered a verse I'd scrawled once when my children were small and I was feeling engulfed by the role of mother:

Priestess of dutiful sacrament.

You knead your soul into bread.

You serve it on a silver tray,

Bright morsels for your family to eat.

Aren't you hungry too?

Even as my children grew and became teens, many times my role as nurturer allowed the very essence of my life to be overrun and eaten away. Sadly, I know women who keep doing this even after their children have grown and left home.

When my Many-Breasted Mother really kicked in, I even found myself taking care of my husband. I would be sure he ate well, encourage him to exercise, make sure he had a shirt ironed for his meeting, table my issues to soothe his bad mood.

Women have been trained to be deeply relational creatures with “permeable boundaries,” which make us vulnerable to the needs of others.
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This permeability, this compelling need to connect, is one of our greatest gifts, but without balance it can mean living out the role of the servant who nurtures at the cost of herself.

Referring to this feminine script in her essay “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf describes the syndrome and offers a drastic remedy:

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to
sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. . . . I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me.
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At the very least we need to disempower this part of ourselves, to relieve ourselves of the internal drive to forfeit our souls as food for others.

The Favored Daughter

One of the more uncomfortable discoveries I made about myself during this time was a need to prove myself to the father-world—my own father, the cultural father, the church father. The powerful male presence. I began to recognize how important it was to me that he be aware of my accomplishments. The need surfaced from a deep place in my feminine wound.

I'd grown up the firstborn in a field of bright, athletic brothers, unconsciously trying to convince everyone that being a girl was every bit as worthy. Certainly no one ever said to me that girlhood was less valuable. I simply picked it up by virtue of being female on the planet. And I set out to prove it wrong. I tried through a blaze of achievement: A's on the report card, school honors, swimming trophies, cheerleading trophies, church awards. I did it through compliance. I did it by being everything I imagined a good girl should be.