The accidental feminists

I was born on a Monday while my father was playing golf. He always prided himself on telling me that. My dad was a salesman, self-made and willful. My mother was a resourceful underground industrial and domestic economist. I can still see the two of you dancing with Que Sera Sera across the linoleum floor of our newly built suburban home. They danced through the moon landings, Camelot, free love and the breaking of the genetic code. From my staircase view between the balusters, I witnessed the heel turn of the gender gap and the ’embrace and influence’ of a cultural revolution.

“What do you want to be when you grow up Patricia?” It was the $ 64,000 question from my childhood. I always had the urge to reply ‘How the hell would I know, I’m six?’ But I held back and smiled the way girls were expected to do. I remember marveling at this curious notion that I could “be” whatever I wanted to be. How was that possible? I couldn’t control what I ate or wore, not even what time I went to bed. My mother and I were in a persistent fight over puffed sleeves, floral overalls, and patent leather shoes. How could I dictate my future?

Now I realize that being asked this question in the late 1960s put me at the forefront of social change. In 1968, there were 28.7 million women in the workforce, and the majority were secretaries, stenographers, and typists. Most of the office workers, waitresses, domestic staff, and cooks were also women. But young women were entering the corporate workforce in droves. They were earning college degrees and enrolling in graduate school at the fastest pace in history, and their expectations for the future were changing. Suddenly, women were able to live out their careers in business and management like never before.

So I was a child in a moment of dramatic transformation perfectly captured in the little talk of mothers having lunch at Macy’s or online at the bakery. Unfortunately, my father did not treat me differently from my brothers. A small business owner, he saw no gender lines. The women ran her office and my mother ran her books. I remember telling myself over and over again that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I wanted to. His other famous speech was “finding a hole in life.” This was important to him. You may not always get what you want, and you may not always want what you get, but my father felt it was critical that you stake your claim on the world and commit to it.

This notion of self-determination was reiterated by my Irish grandfather whom I remember sitting on the beach at the Warren Hotel in Spring Lake, New Jersey with a “highball” declaring that this was the largest country in the world. He didn’t know or care that the drinks the hotel staff brought him cost my father money. And for his part, my father perpetuated this notion of America as the land of plenty and never told “Pop” that the drinks weren’t free.

My mother was a housewife. All the mothers of my friends were housewives. They were wonderful women, but I couldn’t imagine building a home and bearing children like us. So, I dreamed of being a diamond dealer like my father’s friend Red Haberman, or selling Boar’s Head meats like Neal Darragh, his other friend, who had the best black and red truck I’d ever seen, with a head of giant wild boar painted on the side.

I had a brief ‘I want to be a stewardess’ moment that my American grandmother made me promise I would never express again. “Tell me you want to be the pilot!” He said with his eyes wide open and his hands firmly squeezing my shoulders. The prospect of becoming a business tycoon, an international spy, and even an astronaut also came to mind. There seemed to be absolutely no reason why he couldn’t go where no girl had gone before.

And then there was the year she wanted to be a nun. Outside of the vow of poverty, the dress, the veil, and the robe, I felt like I could do that. The idea of ​​sitting around neat wooden tables and eating Entenmann’s coffee cake was tremendously appealing. The nuns at my elementary school painted a peaceful and promising picture of humanity. It was so different from the infuriating playground at St. Margaret’s School, where I was routinely ostracized for not liking the Bay City Rollers. “Look, I told you it was a freak,” Diane Kavanagh declared as she walked away with her parochial school folds swaying on her knees. I didn’t have time for a foreign band in funny pants and knee-high socks. He had to find out what he wanted to be.

My cognitive and intellectual development was forged on rainy summer afternoons during the Candyland ™ and Kerplunk ™ marathon sessions sitting Indian-style on the garage floor. And as I rode my banana bike up and down Sandra Lane, a quiet street tucked into a small cul-de-sac in the suburbs of New York, I found myself at the socio-political crossroads of America. I was ‘The Mod Squad’ and sugar free soda. I was Five Easy Pieces, 60 Minutes, Fleetwood Mac, and Aretha Franklin. She was stubborn and defiant, tomboyish and nonconformist, and in every way a child of my time.

He was not aware of everything that was happening in the world at the time, but he knew that there was a terrible war going on. I remember my grandmother’s neighbor on Long Island and the ominous morning when three men with a folded flag came up the front steps. His eldest son had just gone to Vietnam. His name was John. It was small arms fire. She was 20 years old and I can still see her photo on the wall in her living room to the left of the china cabinet. I never looked at that house in the same way again. Years later, she still thought of John as she looked through the hedge. What did you want to be when you grew up?

The truth is that life takes us its own way. Robert Burns famous writing to a mouse:

The best schemes of mice and men.

Go often crooked,

And leave us nothing but pain and pain

For the promised joy!

You are still blessed, compared to me!

The present only touches you.

The poem is a famous apology to a mouse whose nest the writer disturbs while plowing a field. Burns finally believes that the mouse has an easier life. Live in the present, while humans are a continuum of all things past. We are a derivative of our collective consciousness, intentional or not. The mouse never had to suffer during the days before the pocket calculator and the smartphone. He did not fight with shoulder pads and disco. He was oblivious to The Cold War, Jonestown, Charles Manson, and The Son of Sam. And, amid the tumult and chaos of the countryside, the mouse was never asked what it wanted to be.

Now I risk sounding like my six-year-old self by asking my grandmother what it was like before cars existed. When he arrived in New York from Ireland, he wasn’t sifting through Car Fax for the best deal on a Tesla or waiting for a freshly-sucked Uber ride to pension. She was just trying to glide smoothly into the domestic life of a Greenhorn. She was grateful not to be noticed and relieved not to stand out. At nineteen, I was still deciding my college major, while she was on a transatlantic steamboat, hoping the world would be brighter on the other side.

When I look at human existence through their eyes and the sheer weight of those transformative choices we often make when our backs are to the wall, I realize that they are the ones that matter the most. My grandmother, my mother, my aunts, and all the women in my younger life did not have the luxury of endless gender-neutral options and aspirations. They were the pragmatic humanists and accidental feminists who believed that “what will be, will be” while methodically clearing away the conventions, restrictions, limitations and clutter of the past. From the female mystique to the girl with the tattooed dragon … that’s how the days of our lives were. We’ve come a long way, baby, haven’t we?