Our discussion this week about Douglas' book struck me as somewhat interesting...
In the past few days, I have recently seen several instances of burning of the bra's...
The other day I was waiting in line at Harmon's buying some needful things *laundry detergent, Diet Pepsi & toothpaste*
A lady had 3 kids on her cart...In all honesty, it looked exactly like a truck full of militants/Islamic militia men from Palestine...One was hanging out the side....the other was sitting in the child seat facing the mother...and the other was jumping up and down on the random stuff in the cart, itself...
She had her hands full...With a deep breath and her eye's bulging out of her head...She stared at the groceries slowly moving on the conveyer belt, in which she was about to purchase...
The register lady had to chuckle...She asked one simple question, "How do you keep up?"
The lady replied, "It's a marathon when your a single mother!"
She then chuckled out loud and said, "These three I can handle, but my ex-husband heck-no!"
The register lady jokingly said, "I know your feeling!"
& they both talked excessively about their ex-husbands by agreeing, they are better off without them...
Another instance was on Monday....I was hanging out with my daughter and I called her my baby...
She responded, "No I am not a baby, I am a woman"
I wonder....because throughout my life, I could understand woman and why they rebell to either be free from men or their past...but what I didn't know is how it all came to start...
In Douglas' book I have come to understand the beginnings of the woman's movement...While some people I know in class hate this book....I find it rather enjoying...to understand the hardships and struggles of women the past 50 years....
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Its kinda fun to watch the shopping circus when its someone else’s. I was reading your post about being carefree with your daughter, and I was closing my eyes only briefly while picturing the scene. Then I opened my eyes and I saw one daughter struggling with first grade math, my other daughter gliding along with third grade math, while the youngest howled in protest for some reason, while my teen bickered over something or another in the background. Carefree.
ReplyDeleteI have six kids, and the shopping trips when all come along are even now, migraine-inducing. Nick my 11 year old is a master at making the girls positively rage with anger. He teases them until they cry or make a scene or both.
Bra-burning is something that sounds so distant in time, its context so specific to the sixties and that environment that as a protest, I’m not even going to try to explain it, not even to my teen know-it-all. She sees the social landscape of 2009 and arches an eyebrow and asks, “…protesting…what?” when I have the Douglas book open to that chapter. Maybe it is that in today’s environment we don’t feel there’s much to change, or much to really complain about. Under that light then, Douglas sounds anachronistic and alarmist. Women are overrepresented in the health care and education areas of labor. They are underrepresented in just about every other field. Try to find a woman lawyer in this town, you’ll see that they’re kinda rare, even if they do make up about half the law school graduates. Try to find a woman in engineering, architecture or law enforcement and you’ll see a pattern emerging.