2023.03.19 Blindness Of One and Of Many, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

I never forget journalist Betty Friedan, the woman who in 1963, the year my oldest daughter was born, published her first book The Feminine Mystique. It begins:  "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'" 

That question sparked a second wave of feminism in the United States, after the first one led by Suffragettes in the early 20th century under the banner “Votes for Women” brought the painful truth of political lop-sidedness into American life.  Is that all?  Of course not. Friedan’s book would permanently transform the American social fabric and inaugurate a pioneering moment in American history as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. For me, I wanted my own self-honesty and freedom, and I wanted to stay close to my children and theirs—at once.  

*  *  *  *

I’m in the 21st century now, and with conversations much has healed in my family, and I still have blind spots. I wonder why God is still clad in masculine gender. Is this all? 

What about larger questions? What about all our warrior language about peace? Do we make war for peace? Do we “battle” cancer? Do we call domestic violence, abuse? Do we “hate” or “demonize” or “fear” people in a political party not our own? Is this all?

Just today an anonymous person delivered a package we had ordered to our door. It meant we didn’t have to travel down to the first floor to get it. It was toothpaste! We laughed. Such a small gesture felt so silly and small and wonderful. This is all. 

May we be courageous enough to be open-minded not single-minded. More dependent than independent?

Jesus and a Samaritan woman, as well as Jesus and a man born blind, had conversations that changed both of them, both perspectives, and left both to ponder. Me too.  Is this all?  YES. 

2013.08.03 Writing Alumnae Blurb

What to do, besides tap delete, when your class secretary sends an email asking for Class News for the Smith College Alumnae Quarterly from the college you graduated from 55 years ago, and you’re happy but not a hot shot.

What do I remember about college?  Exams, papers, panic, bridge, good friends, overstudying and becoming a true nerd while dreaming of a weekend date or a weekend at the local bar playing “The Prince of Wales had no tails.....”—a beer game designed to get you loopy.  

I also remember falling in crush with the college chaplain, a handsome dreamy type who guided me to the Episcopal Church where I found my spiritual home and eventual vocation. And, swooning over a Spanish (my major) professor, a suave Iberian poet who helped me appreciate Spanish poets. My favorite  poet was Nicolas Guillén, a surrealist whose one line captivated me enough to remember it :Todo en el aire es pájaro. (Everything in the air is bird.) Not translatable, which was its attraction. I learned to swallow it whole.

We lived in houses not dorms. I remember our housemother Mrs. Breakey. She presented a stern front and when she walked her ample thighs rubbed together making a swish-swish sound.  I grew to like her.

Most seriously, at Smith I re-learned what I’d learned in my all-girls NYC school, Nightingale Bamford, where I went from from grades 1-6: that girls could think, learn, and have strong voices intellectually and aesthetically. 

But the class secretary wanted to know our thoughts about The Seventies.  How do you blurb a decade, especially one that for me felt completely out of control?

So I wrote:

The 70s was a time when everything seemed to happen at once—all the good, bad and beautiful. It was the decade when, awakened by the furor of the 60s Civil Rights and the feminist movements, I broke out of rule and role in some mighty sloppy ways. Words of Smithies, Gloria Steinem, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" and Betty Friedan "the problem that has no name"(that is, women discontent even though they’d followed their generational prescriptions for happily ever after) rang in my ears. They drove me on, along with my religious faith.  In time I became an Episcopal priest, a kind of brass ring I'd always wanted but never dared grab for.

I would not have had the chutzpah to do all this if it weren't for the 70s and for Smith where I learned to think, ask questions, and dare.

2012.02.19 The Feminine Mystique Turning 50

It would have been easier for me to get ordained in the Episcopal Church back in the late 70s when I started naively out on that track—an aisle that turned into a maze—if I’d been a man, not been the mother to four children, timed my calling so it didn’t collide with my wild midlife awakening, and not read Betty Friedan.

I’m not bitter about the struggle or sexist attitudes in the church, and have written about the many graces that came my way including a few amazing male bishops! Also part of the maze was my own grievous chaos that daunted my patriarchal uptight church. It daunted me, too!

Bette Friedan, a Jewish woman and a graduate of my alma mater Smith College, was not on anyone’s list of required reading for those feeling called to ordination to the priesthood. Nevertheless she found her way into my restless heart right alongside God, and the two cooperated within me to move me along against seemingly impossible odds.

Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique" published in 1963 when my first child a daughter was born, begins: "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'"

That question would end up sparking a second wave of feminism in the United States, would permanently transform the American social fabric, and the book would come to be seen as a pioneering moment in American history and one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.

Betty’s silent question hit me with arrow depth. So did the silent question God-in-me asked one day in the midst of whatever number batch of chocolate chip cookies I was making in my own suburban kitchen: Why are you doing this?

The two questions precipitated a quest toward a vocation I’d longed for and lingered around since childhood. It took me a record 11 years (usually 4), two bishops (usually 1,) and the kind of “patience” the biblical Job gets credit for but never had to get ordained.

I have no regrets. Adversity strengthened my resolve and my vocation. And I continue to squawk, occasionally too loudly,about gender justice and call myself a Christian feminist. (My dear 1963-born daughter gets lovingly impatient with me.)

However I do wonder if today women feel Friedan’s vague “sense of dissatisfaction” as they continue to struggle to balance careers and child-rearing in a still patriarchally ordered church and society. Or are too many of us too affluent, or maybe too guilty, in this country to feel the “strange stirring” toward empowerment and equivalence?