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| Loving Woman Edvard Munch 1894 |
all that I am, I will not deny.....it's the core of me
I was one month shy of turning two when The Feminine Mystique first came out. I have never read Betty Friedan's classic call to arms and growing up in the tyranny of distant Australia, it was Melbourne's own Germaine Greer who I was most familiar with. Although I didn't come to an interest in reading any of her books until I was in my late 40s and, even now, I have yet to read one of her books all the way through.
I have lived for over 50 years. I was there. I don't need to really read about what I experienced although it helps to see myself a part of a greater cycle. It soothes the ancient hurts to know that it wasn't personal after all. There was no particular dislike of me, only my femininity. It still astonishes me though that in 20th Century Australia, I was met by attitudes that I had no idea were the subtext of my life. I, and my generation, were a little too young; born to be kept dumb.
Pluto in Virgo: the Bridge generation. Trolls beneath, scapegoats crossing. Aye, I can live with that imagery.....a beautiful bridge over an old old stream.
It was the 1970s glossy woman's magazine, Cleo, which provided bite-size morsels from the front-lines of the Women's Liberation Movement for my generation to puzzle over. Born in 1961, I was only 16 when feminism reached fever-pitch in Melbourne and I was too adolescent to know what the core issues were, yet I was the right age to absorb the ideas, that zeitgest which was being generated by those fierce women, who themselves had been surged forth by the fierce women before them. Those unknown and nameless pioneers, the women who blazed a path for their grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters to follow.
We all feel those pioneers. Their stories hum in our genes, their legacies of flesh and blood gaze back at us from every mirror, the contours of their lives dwell in the Void of ours.....waiting.
Anticipating joyfully our visitations; for our thoughts to alight on them like feathers from our dreams. Their eyes the eyes behind ours wondering at hemlines, clucking over 1001 tales of what we think their lives were really like.
How little we know.
How much they love us.
The notion of us...
We owe it to our ancestors to put right that which they did in-advisedly. We owe it to our ancestors to look back with kindness and compassion and say: Do not be afraid. I know you that you were not aware of that which you were doing. It is enough that I know what to do and that I remember you well, and in the remembering, all shall be well. All is well.
I am one of Betty Friedan's spiritual daughters.
We are all the children of Ceres,
Siblings to Persephone
Further Reading:
The Feminine Mystique’: ‘All that I am I will not deny’
Looking Back at a Domestic Cri de Coeur
