If the model for a particular way of being doesn’t fit there are limited options - one either acquiesces or rebels. Being more comfortable with confrontation than with submission I therefore rejected the ‘model for femininity’ that was offered. By the time I was 7 I was already resisting my mother’s attempts to make me into a little girl. I didn’t want to be a ‘girl’. My mother put me in the required clothing for my gender - dresses - which I still hate, and still don’t wear - and sent me off to school. But I took along a pair of my brother’s shorts and at recess, got changed in the toilets, went barefoot and headed out to the oval to play footy with the boys.
My mother was a lieutenant in the Girl Guides. I was a Brownie but it caused me nothing but frustration. While the Boy Scouts did really exciting things like going canoeing and camping, we earnt our badges doing stupid useless things like walking on tin cans with bits of string!! Huh? WTF…. I was much happier swimming, swinging from trees and scaling rocks. Ironically my mother supported me in my quest to do what the boys were doing when she could. She came from
As a young woman I refused to be put in a box. At the age of 15 I made the decision to never have children. At 21 to make sure I didn’t end up being a mother by default, I had a tubal ligation. I saw ‘motherhood’, I know now misguidedly, as the ultimate form of disempowerment. I saw how it allowed men to keep women in their place, how it kept them dependant, at home, while the male of the household reigned free (guess where I got this model from) Pregnant women were vulnerable and women with children have to sacrifice themselves, put up with being dominated and disempowered so that their kids can be safe, fed and housed. This is natural female behaviour, protective, nurturing, not driven by culture but by hormones and biology, by gender. There are archetypal behaviours I knew even I couldn’t escape - so I made sure instead that I wasn’t forced to become that type of woman and make unpalateable decisions as I had seen my mother do. Of course this was before the single parent benefit became available.
I grew up with my Grandmother’s words ringing in my ears: you can do whatever you want, whatever a man can do, you can do. I believed her. She was a fierce little woman, only 5 ft tall but, as the matriarch of the family, she loomed large. She had run the gauntlet past the German soldiers in Holland during WW 2, lying to them, trading for food and protecting her useless husband who, while hiding out for most of the war years, was just another mouth to feed when there wasn’t even enough to feed 2 small children (another male family figure who was incapable of fulfilling his responsibilities) My Grandmother was also part of the Resistance movement at the sewing machine factory where she worked, sabotaging German military equipment - if they had found out they would have shot her on the spot.
So I grew up with a choice of 2 quite different feminine models and it wasn’t difficult to reject one of them. I was branded a ‘tomboy’, not because I wanted to be a man, but just because I preferred doing a lot of the things they did. In myths and stories I always related more to the hero than the princess who had to wait around to be saved. No thanks, I don’t need anyone to save me….I’ll do it myself. But as always, taking a hard line on anything has its negative side and I am still trying to negotiate a more balanced feminine identity.
image: my small oil painting, 'The Tower', c. 1990
