Swapping Knowledge Across Generations

Every now and again, I’ll hear someone make a remark that goes something like this:

“Racism in the movement is just hold over bitterness from the second wave. We third wavers know better than that.”

Upon hearing/reading this statement, I find myself clutching my stomach from laughing so hard.

Now second wave feminists (and the movement they lead) had their share of problems, no doubt. But some of the things I hear coming out of the third wave aren’t much better. (Hint: Writing about an issue that impacts women of color once every six months does *not* make you immune from spouting racist or xenophobic bullshit the rest of the time. Just a statement for the record.)

In DaisyDeadhead’s first post, she wrote something that stuck with me:

I realized, while observing the talking head, that he was too young to have any first-hand knowledge of what he was talking about. This was his Received Wisdom, the ‘official’ version that has Been Decided Upon by the Powers that Be. And as progressives, we should worry. History is written by the victors, and consequently, a lot of ours has been erased.

A history book can tell us a lot. Talking to the actual humans involved can tell us a whole lot more.

I have also been thinking about this ever since Carmen and I were accepted into the Progressive Women’s Voices program, and subsequently had the time to hang out with a lot of older women who are feminists. Now, I generally tend to hang out with folks a bit older than I, especially after I started working in my local library system. The average librarian is about 55-65 where I live, and they are the people that give me the most hope about living a full active life all the way to the end.

I spoke with one gentleman for whom the library system was his third career – after 25 years in the military and 25 years in private sector.

He often joked that he goes skydiving every year just to prove to his kids he doesn’t belong in a nursing home.

There was a wonderful woman who was retiring when I started, who told me about the history of where I lived, and how all the areas that I lived in/grew up in were strictly segregated.

Another older sub saw me reading Jabari Asim’s the N-Word and told me stories about how that was the absolute worst, most gut wrenching thing you could call someone when he was growing up – and how he used it once in the earshot of his mother and received the beating of his life.

“My mom never touched me before then, and she never touched me after,” he said, wincing at the memory, “but she made sure I remembered that word would earn me a whipping!”

Another fabulous woman I know had devoted her remaining time in the library to providing teens with accurate information about sex and sexuality.

And *every* librarian I’ve met has been an avid defender of free speech and the right to information.

I hang with the grown folks often. However, I still wasn’t prepared to meet older feminists who were (really, still are) trail blazers and luminaries.

So meeting Alida Brill and Gloria Feldt was a bit of a mind blower, to say the least.

Alida Brill is a proud second wave feminist and a prolific writer. Her bio is serious:

Alida Brill is a writer and a social critic whose interests span diverse topics. She has published books, essays and monographs on such issues as the debate between freedom and control in democratic society, privacy rights, the ethics surrounding decisions about dying and death, the policy and politics of reproductive technologies, intolerance and prejudice, community transition and economic dislocation, the changing meaning of patriotism, censorship, pornography and popular culture, women’s equality, girls at risk and the coded journals of Beatrix Potter.

She is the co-author (with Herbert McClosky) of Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Believe about Civil Liberties, Basic Books, 1983 (second revised edition 1985.) She is the author of Nobody’s Business: The Paradoxes of Privacy, Addison-Wesley, 1990 (second revised edition 1991.) A Rising Public Voice: Women in Politics Worldwide, which was published in the spring of 1995 in collaboration with the United Nations. This book was distributed to every delegate of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, China, as well as being featured at the NGO forum that accompanied the Conference.

[...]

A frequent contributor to anthologies her longer essays and monographs have appeared in numerous volumes, including, Freedom, Fantasy, Foes and Feminism: The Debate Around Pornography, in Women, Politics and Change; Tomorrowland at 40: Lakewood, California, in Rethinking Los Angeles; From the Shards, in To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11.

She is currently writing Dancing at the River’s Edge: A Patient and Her Doctor Negotiate a Life With Chronic Illness (Schaffner Press, Inc./January 2009 www.schaffnerpress.com) a personal dual memoir, written in collaboration with her physician Dr. Michael Lockshin.

Alida has written poetry since childhood, and is editing a collection of her work, entitled Songs From An Unsheltered Place.

In real life, Alida is charming and open. She is happy to tell stories about her work and her activism, and the difficulties she and her friends face. And Alida has a lot of friends.

“So, when I was talking to Kitty MacKinnon…”

And I’m sitting there going, Kitty…Kitty…wait, you mean Catherine MacKinnon?

Alida looked at me over her glasses.

“Honey, she’s always been Kitty.”

She told stories about sitting and planning things with Gloria Steinem in her living room, about working with Flo Kennedy, about the true character of Andrea Dworkin, whose purist anti-porn crusader ideology did not reflect the caring friend she was in private.

“So, should I actually read that book she wrote?” I asked, referring to the controversial tome Intercourse, which doesn’t really mesh with my philosophy.

“Don’t bother,” she said, but I put it on my reading list anyway.

More than just being feminist starstruck though, talking with Alida really illuminates a lot of the personal struggles that come out of a movement like feminism. Like what it means to give so much to a movement that your personal life suffers. Or what happens when you realize you made key mistakes. Or what happens when older things you have said, or done, or written, come back to haunt you.

“We got so much wrong,” Alida told me openly. “We got the race thing wrong, and we got the lesbian thing wrong, and we are still getting things wrong. I just hope we have the time to fix it.”

Hearing her say that reminded me that while we tend to think of movements as immovable, inflexible things – not a reflection of all the people who create a movement or participate in one. Sometimes, as she tells me a story, her pain over something long past is palpable.

But most of the time, her tone is hopeful.

For you see, talking with Alida is not like listening to someone who could care less about what you think. Talking with Alida as a young buck is actually an illuminating experience because she doesn’t address me (or us, rather – there are 10 women in the program) as some insolent child sullying up the grand second wave legacy.

She is my elder, but she is also my peer. She is just as interested in hip-hop feminism as I am, asks a lot of questions about the internet (even if she is a little afraid of it) and is always open to the understanding that her interpretation may need an adjustment for the times. It has been a pleasure talking and learning from a feminist who lived through the struggle, and I look forward to more conversation.

Meeting Gloria Feldt was a little different, as she is not in the program, but just came to speak with us for a couple of hours. She came to talk about living on the front lines of controversy and did she ever have stories to tell. The ones I can remember: the significance of introduction of the birth control pill, roe vs. wade, dealing with the Catholic Church. I remember looking at her and thinking “How does she do it? How does she deal with all of the drama and controversy?”

[Her answer was basically, learn to love it, use it to your advantage.]

There are some things that are so private to me that I can’t imagine blogging or writing about them. So, when I was listening to Gloria talk about heading up planned parenthood and giving the sign off on the “I had an abortion” shirts I felt a question coming up.

I asked her something like “How do you know when something is too private? How do you find the courage to share that part of yourself?”

I guess the answer I expected was something about sacrificing for the greater good, but she didn’t say that at all.

She sighed, and sat back, and then said “It’s hard.”

Then, Gloria Feldt, controversy courting expert, told me about how she struggled with telling certain parts of her story, about finding the strength in other women’s shared stories to find the story of her own. She talked about how hard it is to open yourself up, and how much criticism comes, and how sometimes, you really have to think things through. She mentioned that she was still trying.

And then she looked at me.

“I’ll try, if you will,” she said.

And that honest answer from an icon did volumes for renewing my need to open my mouth and speak.

Those are just a few stories. But I do want to make sure that I stress while I am here the importance of listening to others, particularly those who have a completely different experience or life view than your own. Often, we get so weary of the fighting between waves or the fighting between ideologies that we lose track of all the people behind these ideas, the stories that framed the theories, the voices that combine to a movement.

And the elders have the most stories of all.