I just read that Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed might have finally been found by a team of US explorers1. They’d been searching the Pacific for three months on the ship Deep Sea Vision, but didn’t realize they discovered something a month into their voyage. Only when wrapping up their mission did they go back through files they thought were corrupted, before deleting them, and find what looked like the outline of a plane some 16,000 feet down on the ocean floor.
Amelia Earhart’s plane disappeared July 2, 1937, twenty-two years before I was born. I turned sixty-five last week, and she has flown with me all these years.
Amelia was an inspiration and a cautionary tale to a girl growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s. That second wave of feminism, nearly a hundred years after the first, brought with it explosive changes and lopsided demands for reform. Birth control, Roe v. Wade, and The Feminine Mystique created a tsunami of potential for women. The previous twenty years especially had included the dumbing-down of women’s education, stressed the need for women to stay home and be mothers and wives, and magnified the blame and responsibility on women’s shoulders when their men returned from war and couldn’t adjust, their children didn’t perform as expected, their houses weren’t clean and tidy.
Now, women could be and do anything. They could all fly.
Well, maybe not all.
Hidden in the surge of feminism and the civil rights movement was another battle, one that had played out the first time as well. The first women’s suffrage convention took place in Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848, organized by a spitfire named Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others you may have heard of.
Twenty-two years later, in 1870, the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution granted… Black men the right to vote. Not women. This did not go over well with a certain demographic in the suffrage movement, the same demographic that today votes for a proud grifter savior of a once “great” America.
It would be seventy-two more years until the 19th Amendment granted that right to white women only.
I don’t know why or how I knew about the Combahee River Collective when I was very young—perhaps I read flyers as a kid who read everything. Perhaps I listened in on people talking in Harvard Square when I walked there alone as a little kid, or with friends as a tween or teen. But they pointed out that the faces and voices of the feminist movement we were cheering did not address or reach out to everyone, especially Black women. I was confused by the adoration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the support of the Civil Rights movement by the same neighbors who were, I understood, also closing their eyes to the racism within the feminist movement.
As with so many other examples in history, men with power had meted out precious rights to only some, pitting one part of the whole against another, ensuring nobody would ever take what was really theirs. Creating a false enemy, in this case women against women.
This made those with meager spoils blind to the bigger picture: that until all women were equal, none could be.
This country will always break your heart if you let yourself learn things.
But the voting Rights Act of 1965 would finally include Black women and other women of color. I was six years old.
My Lebanese mother would have passed as white in winter voting seasons when the sun was no longer browning her skin.
In 1976 Joni Mitchell released Hejira, the title a transliteration of an Arabic word meaning departure, or exodus. I didn’t love the album, but the song Amelia would join the legend, traveling with me from then on.
Amelia shifts and weaves between time signatures and keys, never resolving, never landing. Joni Mitchell describes it as “...sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.”
Women could be and do anything, but not without cost, and a fight. “Having something you must do” means sometimes making impossible choices. Think you’ve got success, love, happiness? Think you’ve got it all?
Oh, Amelia. It was just a false alarm.
The first time the Equal Rights Amendment was proposed was the 1920s. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who if his religious beliefs panned out is currently being basted on a spit, later had this to say about the ERA: “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't…”
He figured if women wanted fair pay and equal rights and no discrimination, that’s what the courts were for. Courts ruled by guys like him. The law was simply a textualist exercise to a man with all the power, and consequences were irrelevant.
One of the terrifying aspects of our current time is how little of our history we seem to remember, how little we seem to care, and how easily we let it go. “Feminism” has become something to mock by some women who take for granted their right to own a car, a condo, a phone, a dog, and who have the privilege to decide not to vote because they don’t like the options. As if there isn’t much, much worse waiting for us, barely camouflaged in all the bad.
Roe v. Wade is gone. The ERA still languishes, and the Voting Rights Act has been hollowed out by the Federal judges and Supreme Court Scalia thought we should rely on.
Amelia Earhart was confident, fit, brave, and game. She was brilliant, educated, and adventurous. She had a husband who loved and supported her, and millions of people around the world who admired her. One bright July day she disappeared.
In all the years she’s been with me, I’ve never stopped wondering if she was afraid, as I would have been; if she’s been lonely out there, somehow, lost, with the water hiding her, keeping her from getting home. Or is that where she belongs, a citizen of the globe, untethered and unbound by a puny plot of land or a headstone?
The image from the Deep Sea Vision shows a brilliant yellow glow radiating up from the depths. The crew needs to return to the site and send a camera down to confirm that the image is even a plane, and if so, if it’s the one that flew into history with all those dreams aboard so many years ago.
If it is, they plan to bring it up. In today’s news cycles, I imagine that will make headlines for a day or two, with accompanying stories of Amelia’s many accomplishments. That won’t happen soon.
But maybe, in this dangerous political year, that glow is a beacon to remind us of what’s at stake, how close we came to succeeding in the past, how long it took to get even there, and how quickly what we gained is being lost.
Oh Amelia, dreams and false alarms.
Morning Teaistisms
Well that was a little grumpy.
To make it up to you, I’ll remind us that this is being published on the first day of spring, or the second, depending on where you are.
I just brought the beagle in from a cold walk, and while she demolishes yet another bully stick—she’s no cheap date, this dog—I’m making a pot of jasmine and lily blossom tea.
A friend and I drove to H Mart a couple of days ago, where I found miniature mangoes among other treasures. Another friend brought me flowers to celebrate my dotage.
The tea is warm and sweet, with a touch of bitterness.
Reminds me of someone I know…
The LA Times article is behind a nasty paywall, but here are a couple of spin-off articles:
Marjie, you are turning into a writer! Your grandfather would have loved it, as your father does.
Oh Marjie. As I listen to Joni and read this piece (I will not diminish it by calling it a mere "post" - which relegates all things to the meme pile - which this that you have written is NOT), I am sobbing and sobbing. . . OK, yes, in part, it is the Grateful Dead-flavored guitar solo towards the end of Mitchell's "Amelia" playing in the BG, but your words this morning slayed me. And in both the best and worst ways. That is, almost (I say almost because a few bits are your personal things) every word you wrote, memory you shared, event you described resonates in my own cellular memory like tiny time bombs forever alive as if they took place just now, and you have given them permission to rise up in me. . . So, in the best ways, my heart cracks open to it all - the times in history, the struggles for all of us who have suffered throughout time at the hands of (sorry, friends, I am gonna say it) WHITE MEN, yes, I remember so many moments in my own, and in solidarity with those of others, lives in which we FOUGHT to simply be human. . . And I so side with you on every word (though I think we need at least a third option to vote for this November). . . Yet in the worst ways, my sorrow rises for us all, for all the reasons you mentioned, but maybe perhaps most for the lost awareness; for the ways "we" do not recall who suffered for all we now take advantage of (owning a dog!!). I blame evolution, in a way, as the human being was made to favor ease and sugar - two things that back in cave days were very difficult to find, so, we needed to have an inclination to seek them out for our own well-being. . but now "ease" - which is EASY to come by - has sucked out our brains and hearts - we text rather than call or visit, we read memes rather than articles, some of us cannot even write a letter by hand anymore. We eat "fast" food, we believe fast answers dished out by politicians who know how to distract us, we bother to know only what we need to know to to enable us to turn on our devices and do as little as possible. . . etc etc. So, my heart also cracks for the loss of humanity, courage, resilience and love (the James Baldwin kind: https://www.dailygood.org/2023/02/19/the-light-that-bridges-the-dark-expanse-between-lonelinesses/ ) that keep us human.
All this - sorry it's so long - I did not plan it, just logged in to say I like what you wrote, and I guess now I realize that its a bit more than "like" I am feeling. Rather, you have unraveled me, in all the ways I like to be unraveled, all the ways I need to be dismantled and re-stacked, on any given day. As a person who interacts with dying people every day, I want always to be as wide as I can be, to see and hold and remember and stand watch for our collective humanity's decline (individual, national, global). I rarely come close to holding it all, but your words this morning have opened me to my deepest despair and my deepest hope. I could not ask for more. Bowing to you and your muse.