Saturday, March 03, 2007

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.

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