I just finished reading
The
Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, and can highly recommend it. Moyes wrote a
fictional novel about a group of women in Depression-era Kentucky who became
the Pack Horse librarians—traveling by horse to the rural mountainous areas of
Kentucky to deliver books, magazines, comic books and recipes to households
wanting to become more literate. The Pack Horse library project was part of the
Works Progress Administration (WPA) set into motion by Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt. These women braved bad weather, treacherous conditions, brutal men,
ignorant people, and despite these hindrances, pushed on, providing a
much-needed service. In the process, they became friends, and that is really
the book’s story. It is an empowering book for women, because it presents their
daily lives and struggles in ways that any woman could understand. It also
presents how the women deal with issues of race, abuse of women, unhappy
loveless marriages, patriarchal attitudes toward women, feminism,
self-identity, self-esteem, love, and friendship. It is impossible to read this
book without becoming involved in the lives of these women; you end up rooting
for them, admiring their intelligence, perseverance and cleverness when dealing
with the patriarchal attitudes and threats from some of the men living
alongside them in their small Kentucky town. You also feel their fears; the
threats of rape and violence if they don’t toe the line or do what some of the
more ignorant men in the book want them to do. Luckily, Moyes balances the
ignorant and often violent men with men who are the opposite—open to learning/changing
and empathic. The latter are the men who love these women and who support them,
in often non-conventional ways. It is impossible to read this book and not
reflect on the damage that patriarchal attitudes have done to relationships between
men and women, but also between men and their children (both male and female—many
of them cowed into submission to brutal fathers). It made me think about how what
my life could have been like at that time. Was it just a toss of the coin that
led to your being married to a good man or a bad one? Some of the parents didn’t
seem to care one way or another if a man was violent to his spouse; in the
book, it is not the husband who was abusive to his wife, but his own father---a
powerful man in the town and a truly nasty character that you end up wishing
would suffer or die or both. One might have expected that the town’s priest
would support the woman rather than her father-in-law, but no, it was her duty
to return to that house where she lived with her husband and his father. She does
not return after she is battered by her father-in-law, and that leads to all
sorts of problems for her and her fellow traveling librarians, one of whom is
also a target of this nasty man, because she lives her life on her terms, and
that is anathema to a man like him.
Those of you who know me, who read this blog, know that I am
no fan of patriarchal societies, families, religions, or workplaces. I cannot
now (and was never able to from the time I was a teenager), support policies
and laws that are unjust to, exclude or demean women. The one way to guarantee
that I will fight for something is for men I have no respect for tell me how
women should live, work, think, or otherwise exist. If you want to fire me up,
that is the sure-fire way to do it.
Firstly, it is important to mention that I respect a lot of
men. I have written many times in this blog about my bosses at my first job in
Manhattan and how much they supported and encouraged me in my scientific
career. I’ve talked about my father and what a good man he was; he never told
me directly that I could not do something in the society I was growing up in
because I was a woman. We rarely talked about the difficulties I might face
because I was a woman, but when we did I knew that was because he wished to
protect me from some of the crap he knew I would eventually face, especially in
the work world. So many times I wish he was still alive so that I could talk to
him about some of the things that I’ve experienced up through the years. One of
the last conversations I had with him shortly before he died was one where he
told me that he just wanted me to be happy, and that meant more to me than
anything else at that time. He did not say to me that I should follow the
written and unwritten rules in society for how women should live and behave, he
did not say to me that I should abide by the tenets of my religion when it came
to my personal life (nor did my mother). He did not push me to marry or to have
children or to do any of the traditional things that women were often expected
to do. He left those decisions up to me. He would never have forced me to marry
someone I did not love. He was no patriarch. Yes, he could be strict and
stubborn at times, but he was both a smart and empathic man. He felt others’
pain, responded to it by trying to alleviate it, often at times when he had his
own pain, especially as he got older. One of the nicest memories I have is when
he called me at work one day just to tell me he loved me. I was lucky to have
him as my father. A lot of men simply cannot hold a candle to him.
The men I don’t respect are the ones who want to run
roughshod over you, the ones who dominate you in all conversations with them,
who do not acknowledge that you have anything important to say, who bully women
verbally and psychologically, who never fail to remind you that nothing you do
is good enough for them (and of course they know exactly what you should do to
better yourself). You might think that they don’t exist in 2020, but they do. They
are the men who know best—ALWAYS. They know what is best for you, what you
SHOULD do, who become ill-tempered or directly angry when you don’t agree with
them or follow their 'advice'. They are the men who berate you for your opinions,
privately or in front of others (preferably in front of others so that they
look powerful and you are humiliated). They are the men who compete with you
instead of supporting you as mentors. They are the men who will offer support but
only when they are interested in you sexually. They are the men who make rude,
nasty, or sexually-tinged remarks, the ones who think they are being funny by
doing so. They are the powerful men who hold others down, women and men alike.
They are the ones who work behind the scenes to keep others down, freeze others
out, and destroy others’ careers if they challenge them in any way. They are
the ones who pull the strings; others should just dance to their tune like the
good puppets they think others are.
I want liberty and justice for all. I don’t want a continual
war between the sexes, but I don’t want women to surrender in all situations
just to keep the peace and to preserve relationships. Some marriages should
end, rightfully so, if women and children are treated badly/abused by their
husbands and fathers. There is no point in preserving such marriages, and no
reason for society to support abusive patriarchy at all costs. This type of
patriarchy destroys lives and costs society a lot—abused children need a lot of
support to get past the trauma of their early lives, so that they do not grow
up to perpetuate the pattern of abuse. Patriarchy may have served a purpose at
one time, although I’m not sure what that was. That was a time when men ruled
society and women and children were considered to be their property. In modern
Western societies, women and children are no longer the property of men, but
some of the subtle patriarchal attitudes remain in the workplace and in
personal life. Why are there still discussions and surveys about who does the
most housework in the home? If both husband and wife work full-time, they
should be sharing the chores equally. That brings me back to my father; after a
long day at work and the commute home from Manhattan to the suburbs, he had a
nap before dinner, and then his evenings were spent focused on us before we
went to bed. He made sure we did our homework, quizzed us for tomorrow’s tests,
and helped us with different subjects. By the time we went to bed, he had
perhaps an hour to read a good book before he ended up asleep in his chair.
That was my dad. He enjoyed spending time with his children; he wasn’t
constantly running off to pursue this or that hobby, and he didn’t complain about
that, nor did my mother. Many of my friends had fathers who behaved similarly;
they know their fathers loved them. So not all men who grew up in patriarchal
times behaved the way they were expected to behave; not all of them bought into
the hype that success meant sacrificing your family on the altar of money,
greed, arrogance and betrayal.
