Endless Rebellion
As I watched the young pregnant woman push her way through the door of a doctor’s waiting room in San Francisco, I thought, “Mom would have had a cow.” My mother had clear ideas on the subject of what “good girls” wore (and did and thought and said). If she had seen a woman who appeared to be nine months pregnant with twins “prancing around” in stretch hip-hugger jeans and a thin top that clung to her fecund form, my mother would have been so embarrassed that she wouldn’t have known where to look. Mom belonged to a generation raised with rules. The boundaries of “goodness” had been drawn in her mind around a territory as well-defined and pristine as the north forty acres of her family’s farm in upstate New York. Those forty acres were all forest—tall trees, clear springs, moss and shy wildlife—set apart by one of those stone walls that Robert Frost wrote about when he said that good fences made good neighbors. As she saw the world, good guidelines made good behavior, and made possible a world in which each person lived undisturbed inside his or her own space. Sexuality was among the things people were supposed to keep inside their own walls, out of sight. You might think that being raised on a farm, she would have been comfortable with the idea of procreation, but I remember asking her once why a cow, bellowing with pain, was so huge and restless. I hadn’t been raised on a farm; I’d never seen a cow in labor. But my mother just blushed. She didn’t like to talk about such things.
That generation’s particular view of life was not difficult to rebel against. Some of my friends made a lot of noise about free love, communal living, the beauty of the braless body, the joy of expanding their worldview with weeds and mushrooms. Even I wore miniskirts, though modest ones. Throwing off restrictions felt grand; it felt like liberation. As I sat watching the young California mothers and mothers-to-be gathering in the doctor’s office, though, I wondered what today’s women have to rebel against. There they were, confident, proud of their bodies and everything their bodies could do. No one told them their pregnancies had to be hidden under ugly tent-like clothes. One mother picked up her crying infant and began to nurse, right there—a perfectly natural, beautiful, and loving act. Most women of my mother’s generation felt too uncomfortable and insecure with the whole idea of breastfeeding to give it a try. By moving to India, I guess I rebelled, in my meek way. I went to a place where prudery may have been as deeply ingrained in some sections of society, but at least the doctor didn’t take your baby away as soon as you gave birth, and mothers were expected to be full of love, hugs, and milk. I moved away from the attitude or conviction that Americans were real people, but others (the Vietnamese, for instance) were strange beings floating out there in some kind of primordial soup known as “The Rest of the World.” I moved away from the idea that a woman’s work primarily consisted of the nurturing of her man and her children, and that “good girls” would be silly to demand more of life than the security they could earn only by behaving well. I wanted much more than security, even if I had no words to define my goal. I rebelled by flying past the borders of the life I knew, into the unknown. I’m still flapping my wings mightily to keep moving over the boundless sea of all that I don’t know about life, but it delighted me to see the bright young women in that doctor’s office, so free to enjoy their bodies, so radiant and confident in their womanliness. American women today seem to have won many of the battles my generation thought would never end. The changes are remarkable. Girls are encouraged to think of themselves as humans with brains and ambitions and bodies; they don’t have to be ashamed of any part of themselves. They are free to get married (or not), have children (or not), have a career (or not), and work at an increasingly varied selection of jobs; though the economy may not give them exactly what they want, at least they can dream. All these remarkable women—do “good girl” straitjackets confine them? Do they rail against closed boundaries? Do they need to rebel? My daughter was among the young women in the office, and I was overwhelmed with the intelligence and concern with which the doctors and nurses encouraged expectant women to express their wishes. The office provided information and described options; the women made the decisions. Among the informative pamphlets provided was one on the subject of breastfeeding. An illustration showed a young mother in a business suit, toting a briefcase, waving goodbye to an infant held by a handsome young man who also wore a suit, carried a briefcase, and clearly was on his way to work. Interesting, I thought. Where was this story going? Did they all ride off to the office where Dad took short breaks to bond in some charming childcare environment? Did Mom come over whenever a beeper informed her that her baby needed nursing? (Such a solution seemed a bit utopian, but, then, this was San Francisco. Perhaps things really had changed that much since I left home.) But that was not the story that the pamphlet told. It told working women how to pump their breasts with a machine and store bottles in the freezer so their babies had healthy, human milk to drink, even though Mother was off in the office, fighting her daily battles on the job. I have to confess that I couldn’t help but think of the clanking milking machines that sucked gallons of milk out of the cows on my grandfather’s farm—an unfortunate mental connection, no doubt, for a device that probably makes a lot of women and babies healthy and happier. But as I thought of the machine, it seemed almost as though society’s new expectations of women, and women’s own unlimited expectations of themselves might now be demanding that women be both high-powered, creative, competitive career persons—and calm, contented cows. No insult is intended to either species—bovine or human—in expressing it this way. All I’m trying to say is this: isn’t it asking almost too much to expect a woman to achieve in so many ways? Perfect mothers, focused working women, sexy mates—is that what the freest women of this day and age expect themselves to be? How many can cope with such multiple kinds of “goodness”? “Can you reschedule me in the afternoon sometime?” one woman asked the receptionist. “There’s no one else in the office today; I really have to go in.” She was due to deliver, and had started saying something about “mild contractions,” until she was told that the doctor had gone for an emergency and wouldn’t be back for an hour at least. She walked out with the rushed steps of someone trying to keep up with a life so busy that it ran on ahead of her. It looked as though some American women may be trying to “have it all” in a way that runs them ragged. Others, I am told, give up on that and rush to embrace the “femininity” of pink lingerie, fad diets, and uncomfortable shoes. Some drop their jobs like discarded candy wrappers in order to stay home and raise children. Who knows, perhaps each of them is rebelling against something in their background that tried to tell them that “good girls do this; bad girls do that.” Perhaps room always exists to rebel against what society expects of women—even if society is only egging them on to achieve ever-higher goals. Many women my age rebelled when they were told, “Good girls aren’t sexy. Good girls aren’t self-centered. Good girls stay home.” Millions of today’s women the world over still may feel those stifling restrictions. But others may have been told that “good girls” are the ones with the great job descriptions, the ones who kick butt—and they rebel against that. Still other women may feel only desperation when they are told repeatedly that they shouldn’t try to be “good girls” but should try, instead, to be Superwomen. Maybe we all have to fight our own personal revolutions, our insurrections against the expectations others have for us, for our behavior and our lives. Women rebel by throwing off definitions of what they should be, and becoming what they want to be, instead. Long live that rebellion, and may it come out well for every one of us.
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LUCINDA NELSON DHAVAN first went to India on a Fulbright Foundation grant, immediately after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. She is still there. After several years devoted to domestic bliss, child rearing, and learning Hindi, she joined the staff of a regional newspaper. She now feels she may have learned enough to write fiction, and is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. Contact Lucinda at: ldhavan@yahoo.co.in ARTIST'S STATEMENT: Creating Life Art ~*~ Celebrating the Sacred |
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Endless Rebellion | What Did You Say Your Name Was? | Love in the Time of Typhoid best of theme | columns | fiction cover | arts department | sections |
MAGICIAN Issue — June - September 2008
