Writing this on All Hallows’ Eve because one of the things that terrifies me is our own conditioned acquiescence to patriarchal constructs of what femininity entails.
My mother on her first and recent visit to Leeds, in summing up her impressions of the city, expressed her disapproval at the sheer number of people seen smoking on the streets – “so many men, and even women?” Now, while smoking is an undeniably filthy habit irrespective of the perpetrator at the unlit end (seriously, please quit if you smoke), this comment set off a pinwheel cracker in my head. What do you mean ‘even women’?
To be fair, my mother – like many of her fellow sexagenarians – may not be the most woke of them all, but we are all struggling in our own ways to keep up with the times. Her reasoning was that women, on account of their inherent procreative responsibilities, ought to be less callous and more careful with their bodies. My counter reasoning – naturally – is that I didn’t ask to be born a woman, and I should not be held responsible for a life or lives I may never choose to bring into the world. Particularly a world where bad habits are considered unhealthy in men but depraved in women.
But who lay down these discriminatory yardsticks and why are so many women still on board with them? When it comes to questions we are not able to adequately answer, there’s another big one that has been doing the rounds lately. Why didn’t she speak up sooner, when it happened? Why now?
Could it be that the trend of women preferring to stay silent is much bigger? Silence, after all, is an expression of subservience, and subservience – to patriarchy, to society, to biology, to orthodoxy – is but femininity’s natural stance (if women were entitled to a stance). Eve, fashioned out of Adam’s ribs, always second to man.
Right?
No way!
We say no way. But we do it the same anyway.
I attended an employability talk recently, with more women than men among the participants. Smart young women with oodles of confidence and the world within their reach, amongst them a variety of nationalities, ethnicities, qualifications and experiences. Every once in a while, we – the audience – were asked a question, and each time we were, several hands shot up to volunteer answers. About our ideas. Experiences. Scenarios we had been asked to discuss in small groups.
Nobody really noticed what was amiss until the speaker halted the session and pointed it out. “This has got to stop,” he declared. “One hand here. Two more there. And all of them men.” We pretended to be mildly shocked, and glanced around the room, but of course he was right. “You have got to take your place, ladies. You have important things to say,” he urged. “Go on, speak out. Make yourself heard.”
Sure.
Sure, we spoke. When we had questions, say for instance, we first checked our notes, to see if they had already been voiced. We waited for others to finish asking their questions. We rehearsed in our heads to check if we sounded right. Often, we waited some more for the ‘any more questions’ prompt to be tossed around. Then we raised our hands, our eyes, our voices, and spoke. A subliminal struggle of stepping up that has become so ingrained in our psyche that we hardly register going through the routine even when we do. We lean over backwards and stretch ourselves thin as if on auto-pilot.
And yet when we didn’t step up or speak out, which – as pointed out – was often, nothing seemed amiss. Women not speaking out, not raising their hands, not taking a seat at the table, is not an anomaly, it is the status quo. We know this in our bones, like common knowledge handed down generations, like a gut instinct inherited along with procreative responsibilities. But we also know that bones can crack, and status quos can be challenged. The din of the patriarchy is louder than our raised voices, we know this too, because we have heard our mothers and grandmothers speak the language of their forefathers. But language can evolve, and even simple dialogues (what do you mean, even women?) can help turn the wheel just a tiny bit.
There is a power in words that brute force cannot match. Speaking up, making ourselves heard, inspiring dialogue, and believing that we have important things to say. These are the tiny doable things that that can build up to a crescendo if done long enough and that can build a bridge to the day when young women can remember hearing their mothers and grandmothers speak the language of their foremothers. Foremother, a word used so rarely that it even sounds strange.
It is upon us to change that. For us to start with our own words, to shape the language we inherited from our fathers and mothers. To seize the auto-pilot before we seize the day.