POST #3
If you haven’t seen the series MAD MEN on AMC you should. It’s pretty fantastic and on top of everything else, it’s really showing what it was like for women in1960 (set in New York). It brilliantly exposes the very narrow and constricting options that we had just 50 years ago (in many of our own lifetimes). I feel the suffocation just watching this show and the culture that existed at that time when women had started entering the workforce. Our options were pretty limited – the perfect, happy, pristine housewife or the working girl with tight skirts and loose morals, all too willing to play the game of cat and mouse with the men. Just think of those Doris Day movies and what she was trying to uphold in the face of this new work culture. It makes me think, what would I have chosen? Just the thought makes me hyper-ventilate…neither thank you very much!!! But that just seems to be where we all were – men AND women – and it makes me even MORE appreciative of where we have come in these last 50 years, and of what women had to wade through and push against to get us all here.
It has got me thinking also about what women will say in 50 years about us…where are we compromised and where do we need to push that will seem constricting to them?
As a new SHE-FORCE, we would want to be interested in that. We’d be a force of women working together in a new way; we would take on all the old artifacts that we still have in us that we decide we just don’t want around anymore: competition, manipulation, need for affirmation, having our emotions play too large a part in how we see what’s REAL, etc.
What is most exciting is that there isn’t really a structure “out there” that is preventing us for creating the kind of relationships we want to have with each other. Are things perfect? No. But there aren’t the kind of rigid and very anti-female protocols, ways of thinking, and even laws out there that there once were – in 1960 for sure. The next frontier is wide open…we just have to decide, consciously, what we want to create and then grab the tool belts and start building. Our foresisters fought very, very hard to pave the way for us to have social, economic, and legal freedoms that women had NEVER had before, anywhere. So what are WE going to do with those freedoms? Certainly they’re not just so we can become Pussycat Dolls. Sexual freedom is just one dimension but it certainly is not the gold medal. I think what they fought so hard for and sacrificed so much for was so that we…all of us reading this right now…could come together, think, and then make the world we want to live in and what we want it to mean to be women.
If we did that together, on all fronts, THAT would indeed be a SHE-FORCE.
