TROUBLESOME WOMEN

Very seldom does a well-behaved woman make history-a quote from my granddaughter

Women Fighting for their Rights

I met with three women from our book club today. We laughed at a possible name taken from a book we decided to read titled Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick. We are going to usurp this title for our group.

It’s no surprise we like that word, TROUBLESOME. Our group ranging in age from late sixties to mid eighties share an understanding about the impact of years of programing on us. We were supposed to be sweet, caring and accommodating, anything but troublesome.

I see her sitting, looking out the window, gazing into what she could not recognize. Feelings changing in her body, blood coming, fantasies of hearts and flowers covering up enslavement, a young woman who will be passed from father to husband. Approaching that age when women were expected to marry, a repugnance grew inside her. No one could see it, and in her silence, she could not articulate it, otherwise she would have screamed, “They give me tools to barely survive in a male dominant world, but never the tools designed for my escape. From my essay Without a voice/No Escape

Things have changed from her generation, yet the programming of what constitutes a good woman or a good mother are deeply rooted. We understand that to create change calls for the structure of culture to change since we take our clues from those narratives, beliefs often taken as absolutes.

“I have always struggled,” she tells me. “I want to be a good person, a good woman but I always feel like I want to scream, like something is suffocating me. I cannot be the accommodating woman always willing to sacrifice for others!” I nodded and shared, “My mom always told me to do the best but never celebrate it, that people would resent me.” “That was a confusing message, wasn’t it?” she said. “My gut tells me the truth, at least for me, but it scares me because it often doesn’t fit with others so I might end up alone.” “Fuck others,” I shot back enraged. “We need to be brave, to take the risk to be honest, at least with ourselves!”

A troublesome woman realizes they are not absolutes and to gain more space, she must push the edges according to her uniqueness.

This reminds me of the words of John Lewis, the Black senator who recently passed. The words he used to describe how certain actions are crucial for serious change: he called them good trouble.

Good trouble makes sense, at least to me and my peers. But good trouble is not appreciated by those tied to the patriarchy or the status quo, who enjoy a certain power over politics, religion even sex. For example: our super rude president calling a woman reporter “piggy,” or how he degrades people of Somalia, Mexico, and other people of color. Or how he touted to “just grab them by the pussy and you can do anything,” or “if she wasn’t my daughter, I’d be dating her.” Or how our vice president degrades women saying that they need to stay in violent marriages. Or “If you’re a woman without children, you already know people regard you as a lesser being.” And let’s not forget his obsession with women’s fertility. It is no surprise that those who hold this power do not fancy losing it and detest troublesome women. And it started long ago.

Attempting to find examples in the pre-Christian era in which women were teachers, philosophers and leaders, is difficult. Aspasia, the only woman, teacher of Socrates held a place in history as most others were wiped away with the rise of the patriarchy and the rise of Christianity.

The foundations of patriarchy grew within the Church back as far as the third century BCE; the sacred feminine was systematically removed. By the fifth century an edict of the pope declared women witches and vehicles of Satan. The loss of power escalated in these early centuries as women were denied access to the priesthood, the line of descendance shifted from mother to father, European kings and nobles held top positions in the power hierarchy. Within the centuries that followed, women were denied access to education and other ways of acquiring financial power even as recently as in the forming of the American Constitution, women were excluded along with indigenous and people of color by the white, rich land-owning men from Europe.

Troublesome women are necessary. They always have been that irritant that sooner or later brings a pearl.

1)The Suffragette movement-Emmeline Pankhurst, a troublesome woman and her badass crew took it to the streets with protests, a hunger strike that rocked the UK and laid the foundation of global revolution for voting and women’s rights. 2) Fannie Lou Hamer-a troublesome Mississippi sharecropper, risked her life for Black voting rights in the south, sharing her raw account of the violence she faced ignited the civil rights movement. 3)Troublesome women who marched in the 60’s and 70’s for changes in gender roles, reproductive and workplace rights, who notoriously trashed the Miss America pageant to protest beauty standards. 4)Women with the guts to stand up and speak, led by Tarana Burke, a troublesome woman, instigating the Me-Too movement. Started as a grass-roots project, it grew, exposing men in power who had to answer for their actions. The Me-Too movement in India in 2018, likewise identified those men in power as inequality within the cultural tradition lessened, as they demanded solutions that should have come years earlier. 5)The three women at the core of the Black Lives Matter movement, forced the uncomfortable national conversation about how racism, inequality and white supremacy are embedded in most aspects of America from classroom to courtroom. 6)Malala Yousafzai- a young gutsy woman who got shot for her wanting education and ended up running programs in ten countries to get girls into school. 7)The women’s march in 2017 in which millions of troublesome women and their male supporters marched for reproductive rights, immigration and healthcare. 8)Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) erupted against gender-based violence with a raw fury after another brutal murder in Argentina. Femicide of Argentina, Mexico, India along with global trafficking is in the spotlight as troublesome women make their voices heard.

There are many more troublesome women around the globe: Global Fund for Women that funds women for economic empowerment, Women’s Earth Alliance because climate change severely hits women first, The White Ribbon Campaign of Canada that has recruited men as active allies in ending gender-based violence.

And this story from my journal: That troublesome little girl stands at the edge of the well. She carries her bucket; it is her duty to draw the water for not only her immediate family, but the extended cousins, aunts and uncles. There are no symbols in her work yet those of us who watch her, understand. This place, this dry and parched earth needs the water. But she knows they need more than just water, they need how the water floods their narrow attitudes and beliefs. They need the emotion she brings although she is considered just a lowly girl. Some of the leaders of this place begin to frown, frowns questioning what they are beginning to sense as a certain power in this girl. Among themselves, they plot and plan ways to keep her unimportant. But they cannot. She begins to whisper into the ears of those yearning for the water for when her family drinks from her pail, they begin to understand, especially her mother. She wonders why her daughters, all her daughters, are unimportant. But she fears for her youngest whose strength is beginning to shine. Her daughter is becoming troublesome, her mother thinks; she has a deep remembering as to what it means. This confuses her mother, struggling between freedom and survival, between tradition and evolution. Many years later, long after her youngest daughter left her bucket near the well and wandered into the land. Her mother knew she was the one, the troublesome one who brought change to all the ancestral line, especially the women who followed her.

Troublesome women have many tools. Some have a big hammer. Some deny sex. Some teach. Some live according to their own truth, regardless, troublesome women are a key to transform a limited reality, flooding it with the beauty of water washing away the limitation, fear, destructive memory and abuse of power.

There we were sitting at the coffee house, enjoying the idea that we are troublesome women. “We can step up and support our sisters to be brave and gutsy enough to stand up for ourselves and all women.” Words followed by a unanimous “Amen!”