Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash
My first cousin Austin Brown witnessed reports of the rebels’ pleas for assistance when she worked for the Voice of America in New York. Earlier, V.O.A. had broadcast promises of our support. I’ve often wondered if her horror and despair at what she was helplessly witnessing contributed to her suicide, later, on the railroad tracks in Princeton, N.J.
Now we hear of the increasing number of suicides among young people, including the son of a U.S Congressman who killed himself the day before the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. Is there a connection? Young people are sometimes idealists, their hopes smashed by current events.
I sometimes wonder if we in this country, having never been bombed or invaded—unlike most of the world—can’t really imagine what the overthrow of a government means. After all, many here in the eighteenth century opposed our own Revolution and fled its results.
The U.S. has never really been a revolutionary country; only our young people rebel and their targets are not always political. We see the results of what seems to be our innate conservatism all around us; after all, Donald Trump would never have gained his power if he had not tapped into a large hidden reactionary reserve.
Now, as always, there is the question of our minor influence as women on public events, even now when our faces and voices seem to indicate our ascendancy. But women who have become high government officials or heads of corporations (those few) may have attained their positions through their skilled ways of dealing with men, the power brokers. Along the way we may have absorbed their opinions, then found we must parrot them to keep our power.
Virginia Woolf, as always a prophet, wrote presciently of our current situation in her long essay, “Three Guineas,” published on the eve of World War II in England and arousing immediate opposition.
She builds her argument on the assumption, which many share, that men are war-like and it is this impulse that threatens our world.
She writes, “The daughters of educated men have no direct influence, it is true;”—this was decades before we achieved the vote—”but they possess the greatest power of all; that is, the influence they can exert upon educated men. If this is true, that is, that influence is the strongest of our weapons and the only one that can be effective in helping you (men) to prevent war” why are we constantly fighting?
She concludes that our influence is largely ceremonial; we stand at the top of stairs, we receive and entertain powerful men. But they are not standing at the top of stairs. They occupy the seats of real power in government. Now, when some of us have fought for and won those seats, are we really able to combat their wishes?
“The real nature of our influence,” Woolf goes on, “is either beyond our reach, for many of us are plain, poor and old; or beneath our contempt, for many of us would prefer to call ourselves prostitutes simply and to take our stand openly under the lights of Piccadilly Circus rather than use it.”
Many of us would argue with this description, yet when I remember the way my child’s heart used to soar when I read of the bravery of Sir Walter Scott’s knights, and when I find my heart soaring again when I read about citizen volunteers in Ukraine defeating Russian cyberattacks, I know I, too, am as attracted to displays of male valor as are all women who have some vestige of political influence but chose not to use it.
We have the examples of many women heroes in all of history but they generally do not shoot off rockets or—sometimes wearing sneakers!—arm themselves to repel invaders.
Yesterday, on a dark Ash Wednesday, when some of us wore the cross of ashes on our foreheads (to the bewilderment of nearly everyone who sees us), we have recourse only to the old prayer, “Dear Lord, give us this day our daily bread”—as the people fleeing Ukraine or huddling in subways must also be praying with much more urgency.
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