When it sucks to be a feminist!
Self-sufficiency was one of the key goals of the women’s liberation movement. The idea was that if women were not financially or physically dependent on men, they would be at less risk to male violence and more able to live as authentic human beings. This made sense to me, and I worked to make myself self-sufficient and independent. In high school, I learned basic car repair and maintenance skills. My first car was a mid-70’s model brown Volkswagen Rabbit that gave me lots of learning opportunities. Things were always going wrong, and since I couldn’t afford the Volkswagen mechanic, I fixed the basic things myself. In addition to changing tires and oil, I replaced fuses and headlights and learned how to hotwire cars when the starter died. I expanded my repertoire to include home repair and maintenance when I got my first house, and have done everything from building shelves and painting to changing faucets and replacing locks.
Somehow the oil stains on my shirt and the shelves in my living room never managed to override my father’s voice telling me that I just couldn’t do those sorts of things (because I was a girl). It wasn’t until my first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival* that I managed to delete that message from my brain. I was sitting with friends at the late night show, and rain began pouring down from the sky. As I was watched the women hustling to move the equipment out of the rain, it was as if a lightning bolt hit my brain and I realized that the sound folks were women. More than that, the people who built the stage, hooked up the electricity, drove the tractors and did everything else for the festival were women**. This realization hit me like a lightning bolt. For the first time in my life I really understood at a gut level that women could do all those things that society labels as male jobs.
It’s been about a decade since that rainy August night, and I have to admit my enthusiasm for being able to do it all is waning. I helped a friend of mine move yesterday. Her boyfriend got called out of town for a family emergency, so it was basically just a friend of her boyfriend and me loading the truck. I’d like to tell you that it was very empowering hoisting the washing machine up and down stairs and maneuvering it around impossible angles. We had a dolly. We had brains. We were fine. But what I was really thinking is, “Screw empowerment! I would much rather be sitting on the sidewalk watching the boys do this. This is hard work.” I had similar thoughts as we moved the sofa bed.
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