A Guide to Living a Slightly Unusual Life
By Pasionara
Dear Readers,
I recently finished a book that was a dramatization of the life of Mary
Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1796),
probably the first feminist book ever written. I was haunted by what I read.
Wollstonecraft's life was not an easy one. She was abused physically,
emotionally, and sexually as a child, and not given much love or affection by
anyone until she came to be an adult. She rejected eighteenth century notions
of man as woman's protector; her experiences as a child led her to believe,
rightly so, that this was a mockery. Certainly, she encouraged women to take
up their own thoughts, their own dreams, to be strong and rational and
independent. When she finally "buckled down" and married, she died shortly
thereafter. Although she was renowned the world over for her revolutionary
thoughts, she was never happy, and she died a melancholy and semi-suicidal
person. I suppose she never really got over swimming against society's
expectations.
Today, those women who choose to swim upstream against patriarchal culture still pay a price for it. The other day, I learned of the death of an amazing woman, my friend Libertad Hernandez Landa. Throughout her life, Libertad worked tirelessly to improve the situation of women and girls in her native Mexico. She was a professor of psychology, a voracious researcher, and a promoter of health education among poor women. She eventually won a post as the Women's Affairs Minister for her home state of Veracruz and became internationally known as a feminist and scholar.
Libertad was attending a UNESCO conference on women's rights in Mexico City last Thursday when she happened to get into the wrong taxi cab. Understand, riding in a taxi in Mexico is not the same as taking one here. In this country, drivers fear being robbed by their patrons. In Mexico it is the opposite. Gangs of men prey upon people who hail cabs in the street; the taxi driver has accomplices who jump into the cab some blocks after the victim has gotten in. At the very least, the victim is robbed; in many instances, far worse occurs.
Libertad boarded a taxi at about seven pm on Thursday night, bound for the airport where she was to meet her son. She never arrived there. Hours later, this great woman was found; she had been suffocated with a plastic bag, robbed, and dumped into the far corner of a parking lot many miles from where she had gotten into the cab. One can only imagine her terror during the last moments of her life.
It is not known at this time whether Libertad had been the victim of a random act of violence, or if she had been singled out for the attack because of her vocal feminist stance in a country renowned for its machismo.
The millennial woman is relatively free to pursue her own dreams, it is true. But we are still ultimately expected to marry, to have kids, and, inevitably, to submit to our husbands, all while being chased by cultural ideals of skeletal-as-beautiful. Moreover, we ride terrorism's wave daily, we must be afraid when we walk the streets, lest some man of superior physical strength decide that this is the day when he will rob or molest us, or worse. The world is still different for women and for men.
Some of us still dare to dream, however. I know many intellectual, talented women with no earthly foothold, and no interest, in walking the expected path. They do not dream that way. They may have cried over the fact that they do not dream that way, as if they felt their difference to be something over which to grieve. But their lives are the stuff of epics, and these stories are worth telling and retelling until someone listens. .
My life. Mi vida. Mine..
Why do we live in fear that we are not meeting the expectations of others? Think about it, women. Have not your greatest moments come when you did not give a flying fuck about what other people thought? Have not your worst moments come when you bowed to the will of someone who was not as smart or talented as you are? We are women of strength, knowledge, fortitude, talent, guts, brains, and heart. We have all that. We are 32 flavors and then some, all that and a bag of Tostitos.
I don't mean to be essentialist here…not all men are fiends and predators, and not all women are admirable and heroic. But many women hide their warm, brilliant lights under bowls, out of fear that their warmth might draw the attention of someone who could destroy them. I want us to be able to live another way; free of fear, free to live lavish, complete lives. I don't know if this can ever really be, but I want to believe it can be so. And apparently, so did Libertad and Mary.
Feel free to regale me with your wit. pasionara@aol.com.
