I Am My Grandmother’s Dream

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio, Pexels.com

Briefly, I imagined having a t-shirt made with this slogan as a Christmas present for my three grown granddaughters, then realized that their dreams, and the accomplishment of those dreams, belong to them, not me. And yet for all of us fortunate enough to have granddaughters, it is appropriate to applaud the changes in our culture that have allowed these women to grow into adulthood free of the shackles—at least in part—of harassment and intimidation that made my young life such a challenge in the 1950’s.

These changes are, and have been, immensely important and will continue, but it is not vainglorious to claim that those of us who came of age in the 1970’s women’s movement, in existence for two hundred years but buried from time to time by the patriarchy, have shown these young women the path—or the paths—to a satisfying adulthood. They will have their battles to fight, of course, and may seldom ask for our help or opinions, but they saw our faces, glowing with success or withered with defeat, during their childhood, and they knew, not through lectures but through our behavior, the rewards and the dangers of our fight.

They will face challenges, of course, as we all do, but the greatest of them, I think, will be finding a partner who is their equal. For heterosexual women, the challenge is and will be that men, no matter their class or level of success, were raised in a patriarchy that led them to believe that they will always be favored socially and in employment. Men are falling behind in college enrollments and graduation rates—although I’m not sure what good college is now that the humanities are being pushed out of the way for skills that may perhaps lead to a job. They may never learn to work as hard as their mothers and sisters and girlfriends and wives, and increasingly they will depend on us to support them financially and emotionally. Many men have always counted on us for the second, but we used to count on them for the first.

Our gift for empathy, our free-flowing understanding of the problems our male counterparts face, will lure us into being helpers and providers as well as the mothers of children, and I’m not sure women who love other women escape all of these problems.

How to raise sons who don’t count on their gender for advancement?

I don’t know.

First, we need to reconsider what we mean by achievement. Is the house husband whose wife works 60 hours a week doing his share by shopping for groceries, cleaning and cooking, and will his ego be fed by reactions to this work—and praised for a term, house husband, that at this point many men would reject?

Is being a full-time father enough, both in terms of self-esteem and the value for the community as well as for the children? And if the role of the father, beyond its sexual aspect, is viewed as essential, wouldn’t we be hearing all these stories about men who impregnate women and then, it seems, flee? Our tales of unwanted pregnancies and the horror of forced births never even mention the father’s name, as though these babies came about through the activity of the Holy Spirit.

The work of redefining success will be long and slow, but no matter the outcome, all lives required the ability to work hard. My male friend who gets up at three AM in this cold winter darkness to cook for as many as twenty at a local Bed and Breakfast is rewarded not only by the pay (probably low) but by the satisfaction of feeding people, as well as the satisfaction of knowing he is equal to the task.

As the world starves, is the answer a new mission for men? To feed the hungry…

In Women