Break the Shackles of Conformity

I’ve been wondering why I have a certain lack of enthusiasm for Women’s Month, Women’s Day, et al. It seems a betrayal of the active feminists I know—the few that seem to be left—and of my other women friends who may flinch at calling themselves feminists but do good and important work for women.

My ongoing struggle to preserve my original vision for Hopscotch House is partly the cause of my disillusion. I never thought I’d be in court fighting for that vision against women since for many decades it seemed that we were all in agreement, with some small and often fruitful differences. I remember when we first began to diversify the KFW board, we had some difficulty because the African American women were angry (this was the early eighties) and saw no merit in a foundation devoted to supporting the art of mainly white women. I’m not sure this effort to diversify continued but the scope of our grants did broaden.

First things first: as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. ordered years ago, break loose “FROM THE PARALYZING CHAINS OF CONFORMITY,” and for upper-class white women like me, the shackles are gilded. We owe our status, our education, and often our income to our relationships with upper-class white men; certainly, I do. Due to the cursed, long-standing and unbreakable tradition of family trusts, created to avoid Federal estate taxes (originally designed to prevent unearned wealth passing from generation today) but also creating the system of inherited money—but only for those who conform.

This of course is not a legal definition; trust law prohibits cutting any inheritor out, but through a combination of guilt-mongering and alienation, it is often possible to make it very difficult for a convention-breaking inheritor to be enriched for the rest of her life.

I’ve just met with a group of privileged white women here who, unable to deal with the originating questions about aging, could find no other theme or purpose around which to gather and do something. Not politics, oh no! And yet the most inspiring political slogan I’ve ever seen, created by former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland who is running for New Mexico Governor, is “BE FIERCE!” accompanied by a stern image of this remarkable Native woman, no smile in evidence. Because the truth we try to ignore is that smiles get us nowhere.

Women who, because of our class status, never work may never experience what every woman in the modern workforce deals with every day: humiliations, subtle or dramatic, sexual innuendos running up the scale to assault, pay that after all these years is still only 86% of what men make in similar occupations.

So why cast off the gilded shackles of conformity? We’ve been draped in them since we first put on our Mary Janes and were told we were pretty.

And yet there is no ability to organize, protest or fight without painfully and with great difficulty breaking those shackles.

So how to do that? It is a lifelong struggle, especially for inheritors. For those who somehow missed the important feminist books of the 1960s, 1970s and early eighties, education is lacking. Go out and get (or borrow from the library) Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan, who died recently, had the courage to describe the unhappiness of upper-class white women in our beautiful clothes and our luxurious routines, which somehow didn’t scratch the persistent itch of our discontent. The first issue for those of us who can’t think or do because of our gilded shackles is to admit the problem.

Our comfort and conveniences, our status and sense of superiority allow us to separate ourselves from what is going on so dramatically in the world around us—but we are and will be affected.

In Women Feminism Debra Haaland Kentucky Foundation for Women