It was only later, in comparing the roles of women in her native Czech Republic, in Sweden, in France and finally the United States that she could embrace the need for feminism:
And that made us more powerful than men.” In the Swedish world, “the word ‘feminist’ felt antiquated there was no longer a use for it” after all, “Women could do anything men did, but they could also - when they chose to - bear children. She realized when she moved to Sweden as a child that suddenly “my power was suddenly equal to a boy’s”. Right after I wrote that sentence I happened to see this opinion piece by Paulina Porizkova on feminism. But, as an adult, I also live in Sweden, so I don’t find that men are quite as domineering, particularly when they have sought out my expertise in my own field. I am not sure how much of my own difficulty in asserting myself is rooted in age-old shyness (as opposed to my being female). Things have gotten better, but this war won’t end in my lifetime.” – Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit “ Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. It’s not just having the knowledge and eloquence to hold forth on a given subject, it’s as Rebecca Solnit posits, just being able to assert the right or space to say anything at all: The voice that is not just a cushion, a boomerang, a mirror for something a man says or does, but the voice that is not afraid of or concerned with how she is perceived. Finding a voiceįor a lot of women, finding their voice – the voice that represents them truly, not just the voice and content she uses as a conciliatory mediator, but the voice and content as the one who gets labeled as a bitch or troublemaker or a roadblock simply because she actually is the smartest one in the room, knows what she is doing and has thought through all the potential outcomes and problems. I feel a bit like I have been shaken awake and have no time to lose.īut a lot of sluggish meandering through literary contemplations on women, communication, relationships and marriage had to happen first. You still have options, choices.” Logically I know this but a combination of inertia and grief, and a soupçon of fear, has stopped me in my tracks. In the midst of all the infernal thinking, someone said to me, referring to more specific things than I thus applied it to, “There are still a number of points ahead of you at which your life branches off in multiple directions. It depends on you, where you are, what you are doing, what you want and all kinds of other factors. I don’t think any of this is as acute as we’re told, but it is also not universal. We are led, at least by the media, to believe that our choices become ever-more limited, and scarcity rears its terrifying head – in the workplace, in terms of potential relationship or sexual partners, even in our friendships. This article arrived at a moment when I was otherwise contemplating commitment and choice. While difficult to deal with when young, you are forced to find your self-worth outside of a man and man’s view of you at an earlier age.” For someone to whom men have never paid much attention, there is not much difference in how we are considered in middle age. Perhaps it is, as one dear friend commented when I shared this article, “I think middle age must come as much more of a shock to women who fit the current standards of beauty. In that sense I, perhaps wrongly, feel like I can see this clearly and objectively, but I doubt this is true. What is she up to? And what’s the point of her being up to anything?” It fell in my lap at the right time, seeing as how I’m sidled right up to middle age, and have always been a bit invisible anyway. She writes: “A middle-aged woman who’s not preoccupied with handling herself or taking care of someone else is a dangerous, erratic being. Today I read an article by Danish writer Dorthe Nors on the invisibility of middle-aged and older women. “It has taken me most of my 40 or so years as a conscious person to realize: I don’t owe anyone an explanation.” – Me
“The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women.” - D.
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