Feminism vs. Moms

Despite my Clintonian-era liberal ethics in almost all other areas of life, I’m pretty damn conservative when it comes to families. More to the point, I think mothers, if it is economically viable, should stay home with their kids. Being a Mom and having a career are each, on their own, overwhelming responsibilities, and I think it’s too much to ask of anyone to do both and do both well.

However, that’s my personal point of view, one heavily influenced by my own upbringing, and I don’t necessarily condemn anyone who decides to do things differently, so why am I sticking my foot in the wasp’s nest at all?

Well, I came home last night and found my housemate’s Women’s “Marriage is the Devil” Studies newsletter on the coffee table. Apparently, there is a huge concern in this department at Dartmouth, as this month’s issue was addressing the shocking fact that growing numbers of college girls at Ivy League schools planned on dumping their careers once they had kids. The professors writing the newsletter had no explanation for this shift from the career-minded ideals of the 1970s generation of college women, blaming it on the lack of good female mentors in the math, science, and business fields.

Oh, come on! Mentors?! Do you really think women are still so frightened of male math-geeks that they want to run home and hide under an apron surrounded by infants? Are you so stupid that you can’t see the obvious answer for why the prevailing attitude towards motherhood has done a 180 within the last generation?

Because these are the DAUGHTERS of those 1970s WORKING MOMS, dumbasses. These girls grew up latchkey kids, and guess what - they hated it. And now, they don’t want to do that to their own children. There. Give me a fucking grant and call me an expert.

That’s not to say that every kid who grew up with a working Mom has attachment issues and is signing up for a Republican family=Jesus propaganda program. Of course not. But I think it’s probably safe to say that our generation grew up with more working mothers than ever before, and it’s an equally safe bet to say some percentage of the children in those households wished their mother was home more often. Therefore, those kids decided they would stay at home when they became Moms, and now they’re in college scaring the aging bra-burners.

As one of those highly educated college-aged women, I suppose I represent a part of the statistic that has the Women’s Studies department tying its panties in knots. But let’s face it: I don’t want anybody else raising my kids. Yes, I want a career, and hopefully one successful enough to allow me to have a car that starts every day, and a house bigger than one room, and a dog that’s big enough to eat a cat. However, I don’t want to sell my soul to making money. I don’t want to own nothing but business suits and plunge the next 50 years of my life working away at some corporate nightmare - for what? To feel good at the end of the day because I got a raise? A promotion? A pat on the back? What the hell’s the bloody point in that?

To quote one of my favorite plays, “You can’t take it with you.”

I'm not saying I don't want to have my own life, but I also don't want that life to take over and remove me from my family. In my old age I could care less how successful my career was. I want to be able to look back and be proud of my kids and that I was able to watch them grow up to become upstanding individuals - because I was THERE. Is it so evil that women might choose to choose to put their kids first?

A Used Purse Is Front Page News?

As I was waiting to meet with my students this morning, I was leafing through The Boston Globe. Imagine my surprise when Wheaton College was mentioned on the front page - because a girl there has a REAL Louis Vuitton purse. And not only that, but she is renting it. "Last month I had a Chanel," she brags.

Oh. My. God.

For all the amazing things Wheaton and its students have done, we are on the front page of one of the most widely circulated papers in the nation for THIS? Because some freshman chick thinks it's important to carry around a bag with a big price tag to feel special?

I almost spit out my tea across the classroom. I would expect something like this at Dartmouth (although here, everyone is rich enough to actually OWN the bag), but my sweet old Wheaton? And it's not like this was even on the "Style" front page, or "Living Arts." No, no, no. It was on the freaking FRONT PAGE, right next to important things like the thousands of people who died in the Pakistani earthquake and the fact that our next Supreme Court judge might help the conservative conspiracy illegalize abortion! Obviously, this is important journalism. What next?

I don't know who to be more disappointed with, The Boston Globe or Wheaton.

Memoirs Of A Geisha

"Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be."

- Sayuri Nitta, Memoirs of a Geisha

So I just finished reading Memoirs of a Geisha, a novel based upon the fictional life of Sayuri Nitta, one of the most famous geishas in Japan in the 1930s and 40s. Sold into geishadom at the age of 9, the book depicts Sayuri's struggle to make it in the competitive business of her okiya and understand and accept her place in the world as she learns the ancient craft of entertaining men. The preface to the book indicates that the story is taken from a series of interviews conducted by the author, a friend of the geisha after she emigrated to the U.S. later in life. According to this "interviewer," the geisha agreed to tell her story under the stipulation that it could only be published after her death. In reality, this book was written by a college professor who wove together stories from several Japanese geisha which he'd researched. Regardless, the tale is absolutely fascinating, told in a beautiful, couragous, honest voice filled with a soul that only comes with those stories rooted in truth.

Like many of my favorite reads, I came across this book almost entirely by accident. I developed a passing interest in geisha after I watched a really fascinating Japanese documentary on current geisha on the flight home from Oxford this summer. The hour long film followed two 14 year old girls training to be geisha, as well as one adult geisha and a number of men who act as both teahouse patrons and geisha dannas. I was both fascinated and horrified by what I saw; it was at once unspeakably beautiful and heartbreakingly sad. The overall practice didn't surprise me as much as the fact that it was still going on today. The young girls, although they had chosen to pursue geishadom of their own free will, seemed both brainwashed and horribly sad. The ending description a laughing danna gave, calling them "souless dolls" made me want to stand up and jump up and down in protest, until I realized I was on a plane with hundreds of sleeping passangers who wouldn't necessarily appreciate my outrage. Nevertheless, the haunting images of the dancing girl stayed in my mind long after I landed in Boston, and so when I was searching for a beach book upon my return, this title jumped off the shelf at me. I had actually walked into the store determined to grab a copy of Lord of the Flies since I had never read it in high school and had always wanted to. However, I couldn't recall for the life of me the name of the author, so as I scanned the novel shelves I saw this book staring at me instead. Ironically enough, Lord of the Flies sat right next to it, so I grabbed both. I read Flies first since it was more of a beach read, and started Geisha a couple of weeks ago. I had a hard time putting it down, greedily gulping down chapters in the 15 minute breaks between my TA sessions and dance rehersals. If I had more time, I'd have finished it in a night.

Interestingly enough, the book itself shares something in common with another one of my favorite books, Life of Pi, in that it is a combination of a novel and an oral history project (yes, my thesis is always on my mind). Both books are supposedly based upon true stories dictated to their respective authors, although instead of quoting them directly as oral historians do, the authors of these books took more artistic liscense and transformed them into novels. Of course, the danger in this is it causes me to wonder exactly how much of the story is true and how much was "tweaked" to make a more compelling book. I think the story works regardless, although I'd love to read the biography of one of the real geisha interviewed to compare notes.

Also, last week, when I was about halfway through the book, I was watching Entertainment Tonight and caught a trailer for the upcoming film version of the book. It looks incredible, directed by the same guy who did Chicago and populated by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon alumni, the acting and cinematorgraphy look outstanding. From what I have seen so far, they have captured the allure of the story quite well. The film comes out in early December, only a couple of weeks after Goblet of Fire. So not only do I have a new book to add to my favorites list, but the winter movie season is looking up. Rock on. And what did LeVar "Geordi LaForge" Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow? Check it out! And I'll leave you with another great quote:

"What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? And yet, if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performace she would never give."