Women of Faith Conference

Here is a scene from my life:

My mother had plans to go to a Women of Faith convention in Chicago with four friends from her hometown about a year ago. One of the people who was supposed to go had to cancel at the last minute due to a family emergency, so I went in her stead. Believe me, that is the only way I would ever have allowed that kind of money to be spent on me. Anyway, this a glimpse of the world I saw there.

(FYI, I grew up in a very conservative church. I do not know how conservative the rest of the women at the conference were, but I am just relating my experiences)

First of all, the actual convention should not have been named Women of Faith. A better name would have been “Suburban Housewives of America.” The stuff that they talked about was raising kids, dealing with a working husband, looking good, and taking care of a house. I think that it was unfair to claim that they were representing all women, or that those things are what faith is about. I was expecting philosophy and theology the deals with a woman’s place in the world. I was expecting feminism, but that is not what I got. Instead, it was celebrating the traditional role of women. I guess that there is nothing wrong with that. If women choose that lifestyle, if they like it and it brings them joy, who am I to tell them differently? However, I did not really relate becuase I am neither currently a housewife, nor do I intend to be.

The actual presentations bothered me because of the excessive use of rhetoric. The presentations were filled with subtle flattery. It was like seeing a motivational speaker. There were pity pleas to make people feel better about what they were not going through. There were cries for charity to make people feel better about their morality. There were testimonies from people who have come to realize that the Women of Faith were right after all. There were stories that housewives would be able to relate to, celebrating suberban women as opposed to suberban men or suburban children, forgetting that there is life outside of suburbia. Unless, of course, the glimpse of the outside worlds was a pity plea, telling people of the obsticals they overcame to become like the people at the convention.

There were advertisements throughout the entire thing, selling things using moral convictions: books that will make you a better person, bible carrying cases, christian music CD’s, christian tee-shirts and clothing. I knew that the tickets themselves were expensive, but this just seemed like profiteering, especially considering the type of advertizing that they were using.

Another thing that I hated was the ways in which they tried to make the conference interactive. Everything we did, raising our hands in prayer, singing, standing, it was all done in order to make people feel a part of the group. It had little to no purpose to illustrate a point. It was just rhetoric. The phony group activities, the profiteering, the flattery… I was put on edge by the lack of logic throughout the entire thing.

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Another part of my experience was my interactions with the people I went with. I would not go so far as to say that they were my mother’s friends because the main reason she was going was to be with her childhood best friend, Viki, who organized our party’s trip. (Viki and the two other people whom she invited were all housewives. I would not be surprised if my mom was the only one at the whole convention who worked.) Anyway, getting to the point.: Viki’s two friends, whom I will call Karen and her daughter Sarah, were extreamly offensive.

Sarah was recently married to a patent lawyer and was very rich. I get the impression that she grew up rich too, but do not know for sure. Anyway, her firstborn baby son was at home with a runny nose, and she could think of nothing else. Dinner, lunch, drive-time, any time she opened her mouth, she was talking about the most recent wonder about Jason, her worry about his nose, or the quality of babysitters. Everything in her life revolved around this kid. Alright, I have to admire a devotion to one’s work, but that was going a bit overboard. Personally, I think that she was obsessing about every tiny thing because she is a very smart woman who needed something to put her mind to. She thought that her only option was being a housewife, so she was going to be the best housewife that she could be. That means perfectionism, and she was just that.

Although Sarah was acting like the stereotypical trophy-wife, that was not offended me. It was one particular conversation during lunch. They were talking about the quality of urologists, and Karen said that she hated all female urologists because they thought so much of themselves. She said this with the full knowledge that Mom, another female doctor, was listening. Her logic was that if the woman could get through med school and residency, she looked down on all the women who did not. Although she limited her sweeping generalization to urology, not pediatrics, my mom’s specialty, I still think that it was meant to offend. She mentioned nothing to exclude pediatrics from her generalization, so it would not take much to apply her logic to that specialty as well.

Mom refused to be offended. She made excuse after excuse on Karen’s behalf, but I am still not convinced. I think that Karen grew up with the knowledge that women are housewives, and the idea that they could be anything else is offensive to her, so she dislikes any example to the contrary. Maybe it is because she would have like to be something else, but accepted the limitations placed on her, and wants to place those limitations of everyone else to even the playing field. Maybe it is because she likes to be on top of the world, and does not like the idea that anyone could do anything that she could not. Maybe she is just reacting to the feminist movement telling her that her way of life was degrading. I do not know, but she still insulted my mother, and I am still offended, even though this incident took place a year ago.

So, I suppose that this conference did not make a good impression on me. It was a group of people with whom I could not identify, a style of speaking that did not speak to me, and ideas that offended me. I will stick to acadamia and leave the Suberban Housewives of America to their own ends.

Feminism

On the day that I realized that I was a feminist, I had opened a church door for a man. I thought that I was just being polite, but he had no idea how to react. He could not, of course, walk through the door opened by a woman. Instead he stood there, looking at me, horrified. He looked at the handle, his hands itching to take it so that he would be in his rightful position, holding the door as I walked through it, but the handle was too firmly in my grasp. He looked at me, at the door, and back at me, pleading with me to solve this horrible paradox. I could not expect him to commit the sin of walking through a door held by a woman. I had effectively blocked the door by trying to open it for him. I put him out of his misery and walked through it.

This was the first time that I experienced open sexism. I cannot hold it against this man that he was religiously polite and respectful to women. However, it made me realize that my fundamentalist church is different from school. At school, I get kind of annoyed by feminists, trying to eradicate the discrimination that is not there, finding bias in the entomology of words and then refusing to use them, guilting everyone with a Y chromosome because of the sins of history and far-off countries. I never realized that sexism could actually affect me.

I started paying more attention. I had never realized that my mother, the first female doctor in my denomination, had faced anything but friendliness. I started hearing conversations and implications that she had stepped out of her place. They were rare, granted, but they were there, most of the time coming out of the mouths of other women. I actually listened during the mother's day sermon, and the minister's extravagant praise of the housewife. It reminded me of the praise given to a three-year-old's finger painting. I listened at the weddings, where they made the wife's vows include submission to her husband. I hated it. So many people at my church honestly believe that the "fairer sex" is the weaker sex.

I set out to prove them wrong. I did not have heated debates; I just provided myself as a counterexample to their over-generalized rules. I went to school and got A's. I succeeded in math and science. I argued philosophy and religion, refusing to sit back and watch. I played sports, and I scored goals. I smashed my own bugs. I searched for thrills. Nobody will call me weak. I have done everything I can to force people to put away their prejudices.

Although feminists annoy me, I am one. I am not going to "follow my destiny" as a housewife. I am not going to be defined by my breasts. Instead, I will break every stereotype that I can, and I will be free to do anything.

Writing a Book

I think that I should write a book about the stuff that I have learned in life. In thinking about this, I have decided some attributes that my book will have.
First of all, there will be only one. At least, I will only plan one at a time. It frustrates me to no end when an author, who was originally very good, just keeps writing, even though they have nothing more to say. They churn out book after book, each one of which would be good by itself, but, if someone reads all of them, they realize that they could have just read the same book seven times. Now, don’t get me wrong, even I can re-read the same book several times, but only if it is very good. However, I think that the real masterpieces are the ones that have the ability to be spread out over an epic series, but have been condensed into a single book, or maybe a trilogy. In following with this effort of not wasting my reader’s time, I plan to produce a single book.
Secondly, the book will be fiction. I have toyed with the idea of writing a non-fiction book, an autobiography, but I think that this effort would be too difficult. My life is far from simple, and I think that I would have to do too much explaining of circumstances and not enough getting to the point in order to adequately stick to the truth. Therefore, I will not stick to the truth. The main character will not be me, and her experiences will not be my own. However, there will be definite parallels.
Finally, and this will be the hard part, I am going to have to make it subtle. I cannot beat people against the head with some of my themes because that would neither convince them nor would it cause good reactions. Zut.
Anyway, now I have to figure out what themes I am going to put in this book. I have a couple ideas already, but do not know how to translate them into a coherent fictional storyline. I guess that this blog will be my brainstorm for this theoretical book.