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.
I loved your piece, and as a white man, I continue to be embarrassed by the unconscionable attitude towards women by many other white men out there. I have a mom and a sister and a wife and a daughter, all strong, accomplished women, and for that I am filled with happiness. I can’t understand why those guys don’t want the best for all women; it boggles my mind.
Thank you for talking about racism within the feminist movement. I grew up in liberal, "unsegregated" California and there was ONE African American kid in my high school of 2,000 students. The racism at large and later, within the feminist movement, was all but invisible to me until a decade or more later.
When I was in high school, I saw an ad (Where? But like you, I read everything) for an Equal Rights Amendment bracelet and asked my mom to order it for me. She did. I memorized the amendment and would recite it when people asked. We figured I'd wear the bracelet until the amendment passed. (Insert bitter laughter here.) It was a conversation piece, but a lot of people thought it was my initials. A smartass started calling me Eileen Renee Anderson. I should still be wearing it, but I stopped at some point in my teens.
I got phone calls to register to vote, and my mother had to tell them I was 13.
Wish I still had the bracelet. I'm including a link to one on eBay in case Substack will allow it.
Another beautiful piece, Marjie. Only more beautiful than ever. Profound and so well written. It should be in the New York Times and whatever right Republican papers exist because the points you make about how easy it is for these rights and equities to slip away is so true. People, including myself sometimes, just watch them disappear without a big, fat, outrageous fight.
I loved how you wrote about Amelia Earhart and the glow to remind us of what's at stake. Very moving.
The other day I came across in the Library of Congress archives a registry of members of the National American Women Suffrage Association in Illinois. I nearly jumped out of my seat when I found my great-grandmother in 1912 was a member. My grandmother in 1917 became a "farmerette," one of thousands of women who went to work on farms across the country when the men had gone to the front for the Great War. It was the farmerettes' contribution plus that of female ambulance drivers, mechanics, and nurses on the battle fields, factory workers, sewers of cloth airplane wings, gauzes, and bandages, and millions of women in paid and volunteer jobs that proved to Woodrow Wilson that women could contribute to society and economic growth. Finally in 1920, he approved women's right to vote. Nonetheless, two years after the war ended??!! Geez!
Never take forgranted what we have and those women who came before us.
Your post made my day and maybe even week. Thank you.
beautiful thoughts as always, spun out so well. I guess all I can say (because I refuse to start accusing any one type, race or gender: as history and time shows us the human race itself in general is incapable of rising above like we wish it would) - is that I wish there was such a thing as overall human kindness, awareness, altruism. But just look around you: there isn't. And I mean that pointing to all of the "sides", to what humanity will spiral to given the chance (just watch it now, every day). I've become quite the cynic, I guess.
Oh Marjie! I can't believe I missed this piece, thank you for telling me about it. I do often forget (and I think a lot of younger women forget) how difficult and long the battle for our current rights waged even before we got here. It's easy to become disaffected when we forget about feminism's long and flawed history. I don't think I ever *wasn't* a feminist, but I have become disenchanted with the greater movement. I think this, a dangerous year like you said, is a great time for me to revisit the roots and current state of the movement. Thank you so much for your words <3 (P.S., have you watched the Bob's Burgers episode about Amelia? It's Season 13, Episode 22. The show is typically so lighthearted and goofy but that episode had me tearing up.)
Oh wow… I got teary. I choose to believe Amelia is now untethered and love the idea of that image of her plane being a beacon of hope.
We need these damn beacons with the backward steps (Roe V Wade had me pacing around my kitchen here in Oz yelling “Noooo! No!” at the radio.
And I am as perplexed as you at women who don’t even know what it means to be a feminist, or understand how hard won our equality has been and how we just aren’t there yet, dammit, and that we should all proclaim ourselves feminists or hand back equal social, economic and professional opportunities to men coz we’re not interested in that. (I kinda want to quote Leslie Winkle from TBBT here and call them all “dumbass”. )
Phew. OK, I’ll stop now. Think you touched a nerve with this one. Thanks for letting me know they think they’ve found Amelia’s plane.
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.
I loved your piece, and as a white man, I continue to be embarrassed by the unconscionable attitude towards women by many other white men out there. I have a mom and a sister and a wife and a daughter, all strong, accomplished women, and for that I am filled with happiness. I can’t understand why those guys don’t want the best for all women; it boggles my mind.
Thank you for talking about racism within the feminist movement. I grew up in liberal, "unsegregated" California and there was ONE African American kid in my high school of 2,000 students. The racism at large and later, within the feminist movement, was all but invisible to me until a decade or more later.
When I was in high school, I saw an ad (Where? But like you, I read everything) for an Equal Rights Amendment bracelet and asked my mom to order it for me. She did. I memorized the amendment and would recite it when people asked. We figured I'd wear the bracelet until the amendment passed. (Insert bitter laughter here.) It was a conversation piece, but a lot of people thought it was my initials. A smartass started calling me Eileen Renee Anderson. I should still be wearing it, but I stopped at some point in my teens.
I got phone calls to register to vote, and my mother had to tell them I was 13.
Wish I still had the bracelet. I'm including a link to one on eBay in case Substack will allow it.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/196272430881
Another beautiful piece, Marjie. Only more beautiful than ever. Profound and so well written. It should be in the New York Times and whatever right Republican papers exist because the points you make about how easy it is for these rights and equities to slip away is so true. People, including myself sometimes, just watch them disappear without a big, fat, outrageous fight.
I loved how you wrote about Amelia Earhart and the glow to remind us of what's at stake. Very moving.
The other day I came across in the Library of Congress archives a registry of members of the National American Women Suffrage Association in Illinois. I nearly jumped out of my seat when I found my great-grandmother in 1912 was a member. My grandmother in 1917 became a "farmerette," one of thousands of women who went to work on farms across the country when the men had gone to the front for the Great War. It was the farmerettes' contribution plus that of female ambulance drivers, mechanics, and nurses on the battle fields, factory workers, sewers of cloth airplane wings, gauzes, and bandages, and millions of women in paid and volunteer jobs that proved to Woodrow Wilson that women could contribute to society and economic growth. Finally in 1920, he approved women's right to vote. Nonetheless, two years after the war ended??!! Geez!
Never take forgranted what we have and those women who came before us.
Your post made my day and maybe even week. Thank you.
great read, so deep and though provoking. Plus, I LOVE Amelia Earhart. There is a lovely little book called 'I was Amelia Earhart' that I adore....
Bravo, Marjie! What a stimulating piece.
beautiful thoughts as always, spun out so well. I guess all I can say (because I refuse to start accusing any one type, race or gender: as history and time shows us the human race itself in general is incapable of rising above like we wish it would) - is that I wish there was such a thing as overall human kindness, awareness, altruism. But just look around you: there isn't. And I mean that pointing to all of the "sides", to what humanity will spiral to given the chance (just watch it now, every day). I've become quite the cynic, I guess.
Oh Marjie! I can't believe I missed this piece, thank you for telling me about it. I do often forget (and I think a lot of younger women forget) how difficult and long the battle for our current rights waged even before we got here. It's easy to become disaffected when we forget about feminism's long and flawed history. I don't think I ever *wasn't* a feminist, but I have become disenchanted with the greater movement. I think this, a dangerous year like you said, is a great time for me to revisit the roots and current state of the movement. Thank you so much for your words <3 (P.S., have you watched the Bob's Burgers episode about Amelia? It's Season 13, Episode 22. The show is typically so lighthearted and goofy but that episode had me tearing up.)
Oh wow… I got teary. I choose to believe Amelia is now untethered and love the idea of that image of her plane being a beacon of hope.
We need these damn beacons with the backward steps (Roe V Wade had me pacing around my kitchen here in Oz yelling “Noooo! No!” at the radio.
And I am as perplexed as you at women who don’t even know what it means to be a feminist, or understand how hard won our equality has been and how we just aren’t there yet, dammit, and that we should all proclaim ourselves feminists or hand back equal social, economic and professional opportunities to men coz we’re not interested in that. (I kinda want to quote Leslie Winkle from TBBT here and call them all “dumbass”. )
Phew. OK, I’ll stop now. Think you touched a nerve with this one. Thanks for letting me know they think they’ve found Amelia’s plane.
And this is why I still call myself a feminist, and why it's a pleasure to take tea with you.
Jasmine tea is a favorite of mine, so I will definitely have to check out the jasmine lily tea.