frail gestures

Got back from Albany at about 11 this morning. Beautiful wedding, even if it was in upstate New York in February. We arrived Friday evening and drove north to Saratoga Springs to discover that power had been out since midday due to a wind storm, a revalation that put in context the awful turbulence we experienced upon landing. So, the four of us essentially camped in our unlit, unheated, fourth-floor hotel rooms, made comfortable by flashlights a la Target and the fact that heat rises. I later read that about 300,000 people were without power. M and I were awoken at 10 a.m. by the buzz of electricity returning, only to be disappointed 20 minutes later when we returned to the Stone Age. It came back for good at 4 p.m.

To give you an idea of the awesome cold that is Albany in February -- clearly my time in the District has spoiled me -- check out the photo. It dropped another 6 degrees that night, and with the windchill it was -1F. (The rest of my photos are on my camera as are some month-old shots of the panda cub. I don't motivate easily on such things.)

While I was there, I bought a sequel of Pride and Prejudice. I love the original, but this one by a modern author reads like a drug-store romance novel. It's called Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife and it's by Linda Berdoll. I think I might be killing brain cells, but I need something to balance the book on the evolution of the English language that I'm reading too.

Berdoll seems to be emlulating Jane Austen's writing style, but it often reads like a college freshman trying to sound smart. For the sake of keeping this blog PG, or at least PG-13, take the following passage:

Desperation had begun to make a nasty crease betwitxt his usually unfurrowed brows. Was that not vexation enough, to be confronted in London by an obviously indignant Darcy whilst in lascivious company with the unwed, underage Lydia would have been quite unnerving to any man who valued his bursa virilia. (p. 14)

Um, yeah.

But the power of Jane Austen, to anyone who really loves her, is in the characters a reader grows to love. So Berdoll's novel might not win a National Book Award, but it's worth my while none the less.

Speaking of less-than-fine literature, I picked up a copy of March's Allure magazine, which has a rather astute short essay on being a petite woman. I often say that my personality was compensation for my small size growing up, and it seems I'm not the only one who sees herself that way. The writer, Ayelet Waldman, is 5'. She writes:

That paradoxical sense of empowerment may explain the reputation for a certain Napoleonic, domineering quality that we small women enjoy. It also helps account for the hatefulness of the adjective that is our bane, our kryptonite. Ostensibly a compliment, it serves to upset our precarious balance, to throw off our navigation of the big waves and high winds of the world. Not willowy. Never lissome.
Cute.

Waldman beautifully explains the problem witht he word.:

My four-year-old daughter is cute. Her Hello Kitty lunch box is cute. When our Bernese mountain dog was a puppy, she was very, very cute. But don't call me cute. Cute is powerless; cute is sexless; cute can be dismissed.

Precisely!

I struggled with my size as a child, weighing 40 pounds in the second grade, according to my school records. My first communion dress, worn soon after my eighth birthday might have fit an ordinary five-year-old child. I think I felt as a child that I had to overcome being small, being easily overlooked and trounced in gym class. (I have an occasional recurring dream about having to retake gym.)

As it turned out, I stand a victorious 5'2", a good two inches taller than my mom thought I would likely be. But my personality was formed my body, and it will always reflect my childhood. Somehow, I'm thankful for that.

I had to share this ... New Jersey's state song ...

I'm From New Jersey

Written & Music by Red Mascara

Verse (Ad lib)

I know of a state that's a perfect playland with white sandy beaches by the sea;

With fun-filled mountains, lakes and parks, and folks with hospitality;

With historic towns where battles were fought, and presidents have made their home;

It's called New Jersey, and I toast and tout it wherever I may roam. 'Cause . . .

First Chorus

I'M FROM NEW JERSEY and I'm proud about it, I love the Garden State.

I'M FROM NEW JERSEY and I want to shout it, I think it's simply great.

All of the other states throughout the nation may mean a lot to some;

But I wouldn't want another, Jersey is like no other, I'm glad that's where I'm from.

Second Chorus

If you want glamour, try Atlantic City or Wildwood by the sea;

Then there is Trenton, Princeton, and Fort Monmouth, they all made history.

Each little town has got that certain something, from High Point to Cape May;

And some place like Mantoloking, Phillipsburg, or Hoboken will steal your heart away.

My boss pointed out how much more attention the death of Corretta Scott King has gotten in comparison to Betty Friedan's. Certainly, King deserves the honors bestowed upon her, but why doesn't an revolutionary like Friedan?

I hope he doesn't mind being quoted:

She [Friedan], too, helped remove shackles. She, too, helped force major changes in civil rights, in society and, in some cases, in individual behavior. She, too, altered the fabric of the nation, in a great and positive way. My goddaughter and my nieces are in a better place because of her.

There is a lesser awareness of the women's movement than of the civil rights movement that brought racial politics to the forefront. I think that is for several reasons:

• Inequalities among racial groups are still painfully evident to anyone who has seen an inner city or who paid attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. However, while unfair advantages still exist for women, it's often more subtle, and it's hard to separate what differences are by choice and which are imposed from without.

• The Civil Rights movement is remembered in a national holiday, Martin Luther King's birthday, and is a part of children's education from a young age. But we seem to forget that women have been voting nationwide for less than 90 years, and that so many strides have been recent. And we lack a face with whom to connect the movement, its ideas and its accomplishments. I don't know why that is, though I wonder if we as a society are more skeptical of women leaders. Or if perhaps, they are just more easily demonized. Or perhaps our memories of leaders are improved with time. Being 24, I don't know how Americans, white or black, perceived King or Friedan in their heydays.
  

I don't mean this to be a competition between two movements that really are intertwined, but I do wonder what the women's movement can learn from the civil rights movement and vice versa. Any ideas?

Betty Friedan died. I had long meant to writer her a letter.

When I read The Feminine Mystique a few years ago, I looked her up and noticed she's in the phone book. I wanted to write her and thank her for the opportunities I and other women of my generation have because of her and and other trailblazing women. I didn't go to college as way to kill time until marriage, to make myself a well-rounded wife or to meet an up-and-coming man to marry. That in itself is a huge transformation from my mother's generation -- her father thought she should attend college so she didn't "marry a cop." And when my mother announced, 25-plus years ago that she was pregnant with me, her employer laid her off. It was illegal then, but attitudes hadn't caught up with the law, and it simply was expected that she would quit.

Without a doubt, women of my generation -- the granddaughters of Freidan's -- still struggle with issues of womanhood and the workplace. I have seen my friends take divergent paths, some refusing to cede scholarly and professional ambitions, some eyeing futures as stay-at-home mothers, and others making it up as they go along. I think all three groups should be thankful to her because they have those divergent paths to choose from. I struggle with it, with being a woman and wanting a family in that "some day" way that is completely intangible and noncommittal to the nth degree. I'm in the "see what comes" camp, leaning much more toward ambition in the raw sense; but I don't think anyone -- woman or man -- can plan his or her own life to a T. What comes at you is half luck, blessing or curse, and you make the best of it.

In what I suppose must have unintentionally coincided with Friedan's death, teacher Deborah M. Hoffman wrote in Sunday's Washington Post that society's low expectations for boys' and mens' behavior does them and women a disservice. In her piece, "What Does 'Boys Will Be Boys' Really Mean" she writes:

You can hear and see evidence of this longstanding folk "wisdom" about boys almost everywhere, from the gender-typed assumptions people make about young boys to the resigned attitude or blind eye adults so often turn to disrespectful or insensitive male behavior.

What results is a pardon of boorish behavior by men toward women, and an expecatation that women should keep them in line. It not only forgives, but encourages, teenage boys and young men to pursue members of the opposite sex like predators on their prey, reducing women to animals by analogy and asking very little of men as moral beings.

So much for the all-to-widely held belief that the women's movement is passe.

(P.S. Two for two on schools, eight to go, and no idea what I'll do.)