Category: women

  • waiting for…


    At the WACK exhibit there was a video showing of Faith reading this poem. She rocked back and forth as she recited each line. It was incredibly moving.

    As she read I realized that I have waited for almost all of these things and some I am still waiting for. Do you think this ‘waiting’ is simply part of the human condition or is it an experience that is peculiar to women? What, if anything, do you feel that you are “waiting for”?

    Waiting
    A Poem by Faith Wilding

    Waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . .
    Waiting for someone to come in
    Waiting for someone to hold me
    Waiting for someone to feed me
    Waiting for someone to change my diaper
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting to scrawl, to walk, waiting to talk
    Waiting to be cuddled
    Waiting for someone to take me outside
    Waiting for someone to play with me
    Waiting for someone to take me outside
    Waiting for someone to read to me, dress me, tie my shoes
    Waiting for Mommy to brush my hair
    Waiting for her to curl my hair
    Waiting to wear my frilly dress
    Waiting to be a pretty girl
    Waiting to grow up
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting for my breasts to develop
    Waiting to wear a bra
    Waiting to menstruate
    Waiting to read forbidden books
    Waiting to stop being clumsy
    Waiting to have a good figure
    Waiting for my first date
    Waiting to have a boyfriend
    Waiting to go to a party, to be asked to dance, to dance close
    Waiting to be beautiful
    Waiting for the secret
    Waiting for life to begin
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting to be somebody
    Waiting to wear makeup
    Waiting for my pimples to go away
    Waiting to wear lipstick, to wear high heels and stockings
    Waiting to get dressed up, to shave my legs
    Waiting to be pretty
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting for him to notice me, to call me
    Waiting for him to ask me out
    Waiting for him to pay attention to me
    Waiting for him to fall in love with me
    Waiting for him to kiss me, touch me, touch my breasts
    Waiting for him to pass my house
    Waiting for him to tell me I’m beautiful
    Waiting for him to ask me to go steady
    Waiting to neck, to make out, waiting to go all the way
    Waiting to smoke, to drink, to stay out late
    Waiting to be a woman
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting for my great love
    Waiting for the perfect man
    Waiting for Mr. Right
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting to get married
    Waiting for my wedding day
    Waiting for my wedding night
    Waiting for sex
    Waiting for him to make the first move
    Waiting for him to excite me
    Waiting for him to give me pleasure
    Waiting for him to give me an orgasm
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting for him to come home, to fill my time
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting for my baby to come
    Waiting for my belly to swell
    Waiting for my breasts to fill with milk
    Waiting to feel my baby move
    Waiting for my legs to stop swelling
    Waiting for the first contractions
    Waiting for the contractions to end
    Waiting for the head to emerge
    Waiting for the first scream, the afterbirth
    Waiting to hold my baby
    Waiting for my baby to suck my milk
    Waiting for my baby to stop crying
    Waiting for my baby to sleep through the night
    Waiting for my breasts to dry up
    Waiting to get my figure back, for the stretch marks to go away
    Waiting for some time to myself
    Waiting to be beautiful again
    Waiting for my child to go to school
    Waiting for life to begin again
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting for my children to come home from school
    Waiting for them to grow up, to leave home
    Waiting to be myself
    Waiting for excitement
    Waiting for him to tell me something interesting, to ask me how I feel
    Waiting for him to stop being crabby, reach for my hand, kiss me good morning
    Waiting for fulfillment
    Waiting for the children to marry
    Waiting for something to happen
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting to lose weight
    Waiting for the first gray hair
    Waiting for menopause
    Waiting to grow wise
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly
    Waiting for my flesh to sag
    Waiting for my breasts to shrivel up
    Waiting for a visit from my children, for letters
    Waiting for my friends to die
    Waiting for my husband to die
    Waiting . . .

    Waiting to get sick
    Waiting for things to get better
    Waiting for winter to end
    Waiting for the mirror to tell me that I’m old
    Waiting for a good bowel movement
    Waiting for the pain to go away
    Waiting for the struggle to end
    Waiting for release
    Waiting for morning
    Waiting for the end of the day
    Waiting for sleep
    Waiting . . .

    “Waiting” was performed at Womanhouse in Los Angeles sponsored by the Feminist Art Program, California Institute of the Arts.

  • friends


    dora-chan, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    Went to the WACK feminist art exhibit this afternoon with friends, including four of the X2 bloggers and some AROOM participants. So fun! As we toured the exhibit that showcased feminist art from the 1970s and 80s I couldn’t help but think of our collective sisterhood that’s grown out of our affinity for the work started by the feminist foremothers of Exponent II in the 80s. The early X2’ers, like the WACK women, had a growing consciousness of oppression based on sex and gender. They organized themselves and produced books and a newspaper. They wrote poetry, fiction, and personal essays, created art, and aimed to change the world.

    An important legacy that we now carry on as Exponent bloggers and blogreaders.

    And while I recognize the significance of this legacy, I’m also just thrilled to have this bright and beautiful bunch of women to call my friends. :)

    So at the exhibit there were numerous provocative pieces of art. Many challenged gender stereotypes or highlighted the social violence directed towards women. My favorite art piece was a small closet-sized room where all of the walls were painted black. Suspended from the ceiling and from each of the walls was an irregularly woven web of white crocheted yarn. I stood in that room for quite awhile alone. Feeling the warmth and security of being wrapped in a cocoon. But also feeling the connectedness of each of the fibers that composed the web that surrounded me. That experience was, for me, symbolic of the relationships that I have with the world. Yes, there are many patterns and textures to my ties to the people around me–as there were in this particular art installation–but it’s the variety and strength of those relationships that make my life so meaningful, that give my days their joy and purpose.

  • Who’s Gonna Teach Us to Tango?: A Discussion of Claudia Bushman’s MormonStories Interview


    Mormon Stories # 058: Women and the LDS Church Part 4 — 19th and Early 20th Century Mormon Women

    Mormon Stories # 059: Women and the LDS Church Part 5 — 19th and Early 20th Century Mormon Women Part 2

    Claudia Bushman shares more of her insights in this two-part series detailing the lives and experiences of Mormon women in the 19th and early 20th century. Dr. Bushman speaks of ten women who have taken the time to record their life experiences, and as she paraphrases and quotes from each woman’s story, Claudia adds contextual details to show why these stories are all significant. Here’s a list of the featured women:

    Part I

    1) Lucy Mack Smith, whose story gives great insight into the early life of the church and of the prophet Joseph Smith. Lucy, Joseph’s mother, mixes significant historical happenings with the mundane and comical experiences of daily life. Claudia notes that those who want to read Lucy’s words should seek out a copy of Lavina Fielding Anderson’s most recent edition, Lucy’s Book, as previous editions were often heavily edited to purge out some elements of the story (she adds that the editing was sometimes done in such a way that it vilified Emma, Joseph’s first wife, and Lucy because they chose not to travel West with the Saints).
    2) Emma Smith’s blessing just after Joseph went to Carthage Jail, which can be found reprinted in Mormon Enigma. Claudia explains that when Joseph was leaving for Carthage, Emma asked for a blessing at his hand. He suggested that she write out her own blessing and he would sign it when he returned home. Joseph was killed by a mob while in the Jail, so the blessing was never signed. But it does offer great insight into the feelings of Emma towards her husband.
    3) Charlotte Hafen, a Gentile wrote in 1843 about attending a party at Sidney Rigdon’s house in Nauvoo. We discover that this 9-hour long party included the tying of 5 quilts, an extensive meal, singing songs, and an original dance that started with marching and ended with kissing(!).
    4) Mary Isabella Horne writing about the challenges of living in the Salt Lake Valley during the early years—living in a sod house and having to carry an umbrella indoors because of the mud coming down from the ceiling.
    5) Ellis Reynolds Shipp: plural wife, mother of several children, and medical doctor. She went to medical school in the East despite a lack of enthusiasm about this career path from her husband. Ellis became pregnant while home for the summer after her first year in med school and returned to school anyways, giving birth just after her exams. Claudia speaks about the many Mormon career women in the Utah period, adding that there were more women doctors in the Utah region than anywhere else in the US.

    Part II

    6) Elizabeth Caine (wife of a friend of the Mormons, Thomas Caine), writes as she travels by wagon from Salt Lake to St George and describes the homes that she visits along the way. She found polygamy repulsive, especially when she saw on older man “going down the generations to his grandchildren’s time to seek a new partner…while she who shared the joys and sorrows of his youth looks on, old and grey.”
    7) Claudia’s grandmother, Elizabeth Shupe Gordon (1866-1896) gives an inspiring account of her conversion to the church, speaking of burning “electric thrills” that she felt each time she read from the Book of Mormon.
    8) Alice Louise Reynolds: Prof of English & Religion at BYU. She was such a friend to everyone that a group of women decided to organize an Alice Louise Reynolds Club, and there were 15 chapters of this club in the 50s. Never married, she spent her sabbaticals teaching at other universities and traveling. Amy Brown Lyman became her biographer, bio was published by ALR Clubs.
    9) The Newberry-award winning author Virginia Sorensen.[Note: she mentions Sorensen elsewhere in the podcast and doesn’t discuss her much at this point]. Those who want to learn more about Mormon life in the early 20th century would enjoy reading Where Nothing is Long Ago, a collection of short stories by Sorensen.
    10) Historian Juanita Brooks was this very powerful intellectual who lived a fairly traditional life. Claudia retells a humorous incident from Juanita’s childhood and then discusses her work as a historian: she would always kept the ironing board up and had a basket of dampened clothes near her desk and when someone came by she’d start ironing so they’d never know that she was really writing [note: this reminds me of the stories I’ve read of Jane Austen hiding her writing under her needlework]. Brooks would travel on overnight buses to do research in Salt Lake or at the Huntington Library.

    The discussion ends with interviewer John Dehlin asking Claudia some general questions about women and religion. Some interesting points in this section occur when Claudia decries those that leave the church. She says,

    “Leaving the church is not any kind of an answer to a better life. That’s just like leaving something good for outer darkness. It’s just better to stick with the church and try and make something out of it.”

    Yet she also discusses how much the church has changed since she was younger, explaining that her grandchildren have told her that they’ve “never had a happy experience at church.” Claudia says that her childhood and teen years in the church were joyful and happy and that the “block” scheduling has destroyed much of the fun. “Who’s gonna teach us to tango now?” she asks as she reminisces about the tango dancing lesson she had annually in her ward.

    Claudia encourages women to make their own way in the church, organizing projects and special interest groups. She says that those who are miserable in the church should write about their disaffection, leaving their thoughts for future generations. As she says at the beginning of Part I:

    “It’s the people who write, who last. If any woman out there has any inclination to to remembered in the future, the next few generations, she’d just better get busy and write out her story, her experiences.”

    Some questions for those of you who listen to the podcast:

    1) Which the women she profiled were new to you? Which of their writings/stories did you find most compelling?

    2) How do you express your feelings about the church? Do you write them down? Do you expect or hope that someday someone (a Mormon historian, perhaps) will be using your words to tell about the condition of women in the church in the 21st century? Do you see blogs as an accurate recording of the lives of contemporary LDS women?

    3) If you could organize a special project or interest group in your ward, what would it be? Would you want to learn to tango? :)

    Note: the photo above is of Alice Louise Reynolds.

  • non, je ne regrette rien

    If “La Vie en Rose” is playing in a theater near you, I highly recommend that you watch it. It’s well-crafted, well-acted, and quite moving. A biopic about French singer Edith Piaf, it’s not hagiographic. She was certainly human: selfish, addicted to drugs and alcohol, etc. But she also experienced enormous tragedy: her only child dying, several traumatic relationships, a childhood spent in her grandmother’s brothel, singing on the streets to earn money for food & booze. Though the film doesn’t touch on her resistance work during WWII, that’s also an important element of her fame and fiery spirit.

    The film is non-chronological, which works well in this case as it contrasts her youthful disappointments, her meteoric rise to fame, and then her physical decline from chronic & terminal disease in her late 40s. For me, the overarching theme of the film was for Piaf to actually ‘live’ her music rather than just belting out pretty songs. By the end, when she is onstage in what will be a final heroic rendition of her song “Non, Je ne Regrette Rien”, you can see that she really owns the song. It is pure Edith Piaf, with all of her flaws, singing of the richness of her life. Here’s a quick youtube vid of her performing the song following these translated lyrics…

    Translated from the French
    No! No regrets
    No! I will have no regrets
    All the things
    That went wrong
    For at last I have learned to be strong

    No! No regrets
    No! I will have no regrets
    For the grief doesn’t last
    It is gone
    I’ve forgotten the past

    And the memories I had
    I no longer desire
    Both the good and the bad
    I have flung in a fire
    And I feel in my heart
    That the seed has been sown
    It is something quite new
    It’s like nothing I’ve known

    No! No regrets
    No! I will have no regrets
    All the things that went wrong
    For at last I have learned to be strong

    No! No regrets
    No! I will have no regrets
    For the seed that is new
    It’s the love that is growing for you

  • women in art

    This video about 500 years of women in art is gorgeous. You won’t regret watching it. Now I just wish there was a similar vid about 500 years of female artists.

  • FMH gets BUST-ed

    My husband John, commenting on the very positive article written about the blog Feminist Mormon Housewives in BUST magazine (fyi: BUST is a hip feminist magazine).

    What John doesn’t mention is that he was interviewed by the writer of the article (as were Caroline, Kaimi, and a few other friends), though only FMH bloggers and Margaret Toscano are quoted in the piece.

  • Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace

    The celebration of Mother’s Day originated with poet Julia Ward Howe, as a movement for women to fight the devastation of war and to show the way towards peace. Today’s sentimental-flowers-&-Hallmark-card bedecked event hardly measures up to the fiery rhetoric of the day’s founding mother…

    Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870

    Arise then…women of this day!
    Arise, all women who have hearts!
    Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
    Say firmly:
    “We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
    Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
    For caresses and applause.
    Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
    All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
    We, the women of one country,
    Will be too tender of those of another country
    To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

    From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
    Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
    The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
    Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
    Nor violence indicate possession.
    As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
    At the summons of war,
    Let women now leave all that may be left of home
    For a great and earnest day of counsel.
    Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
    Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
    Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
    Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
    But of God –
    In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
    That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
    May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
    And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
    To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
    The amicable settlement of international questions,
    The great and general interests of peace.

  • period piece

    I don’t know why, but this (and other) retro clips from puberty movies totally fascinate me. Perhaps one of the reasons why (at least of late) is that they actually give more practical information than did my daughter’s puberty talk (aka ‘Mother/Daughter Tea) at her school, and I’ve been wondering why sex ed seems to be becoming a taboo topic?

  • What happens when an iron bar comes up against an iron will

    “And she’s only using one hand…pull men, pull….”

  • what women really want…


    Is this, perhaps, what women really want?

    Me, I want it all–a clean kitchen, a hunky husband, and the thrill of curling up in clean sheets with said hunk every night. :)

  • Because I am hoarding muscle and bone density like the compulsive cat lady and her bits of string

    Friends: This quotation from a post by lymphopo keeps coming back to my mind as I consider my various healthy and unhealthy habits. Because I want to maximize the strength of my body and I want to be strong–both inside and out.

    I mentioned a few weeks ago that the gym where I used to work as a personal trainer asked to help out with teaching a weight loss class. Never mind the appallingly bad taste in having an emaciated cancer patient get up and instruct anybody about how to lose weight. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is, trying to reeducate these women who’ve been brainwashed into the whole conventional starvation diet combined with excessive cardio mentality. They are slowly killing themselves with their unhealthy eating habits. They turn in their food logs, and when I see things like “Breakfast: 1 slice of toast and a Coke,” I want to scream and tear out my pitiful little peach fuzz (fortunately it’s too short for me to get a good grip and pull). No no a thousand times NO!

    I try to tell them to stop thinking in terms of breaking their bodies down and literally destroying themselves, and start thinking in terms of building their bodies up. The way to be healthy and lean is to think good health, think excellent nourishment, think superb strength and beautiful muscle. But they refuse to listen. And I guarantee they will fail. I also guarantee that if they ever find themselves fighting for their lives, they’ll be at a severe disadvantage.

    My favorite inspirational quote of the decade comes from my all-time top role model and weight lifting guru over at Little Professor. She says:

    “My email inbox is full of women complaining about how strong they are getting, and how much they desperately want to be frail. I started weight training and now I am too big! Too strong! My shriveled sinews are suddenly plump and energized! My metabolism that I f*&ked up from years of ascetic rice cake rationing is suddenly zippy and industrious! I may not die a horrible death from a crumbled hip at 65! The horror!

    What the f*&k is wrong with young women that 200 years after the first wave of feminism they are still whittling away at their bodies, starving, plucking, shaving, stumbling around incapacitated? Where are the daughters of the mothers who screamed Keep your laws off our bodies 30 years ago and now buy tickets to the Vagina Monologues? Do they not understand that they desperately need to hoard muscle and bone density and overall wellbeing like an obsessive compulsive cat lady hanging on to National Geographics and bits of string?”

  • blogher

    Wow. My IWD post, “Is it because of all that armpit hair?” is featured on this blogher article about youtube feminism. Cool!

    More and more, I feel that feminism is returning. I know the term itself has baggage, and that there are numerous women who feel that the movement is too fractured with vying groups for it to have any focus or effect. But I’m hopeful that it can and that it will.

    As I predicted/prophesied at the Sunstone Symposium last summer, I believe that the Internet will be the biggest influence on the world of LDS feminism. By the same token, I believe the ‘Net will have huge impact on feminism at large–enough to initiate a new wave of activism and social change. When I see groups like Mojo Moms, Coalition of Women for Peace, Moms Rising, Women for Women, and similar organizations that are building a strong presence via the web, I am filled with hope.

    Yes, I know that there are problems with attempting to organize feminists. There are factions along lines of identity politics and issues with essentializing gender. But I think there are things that we can agree on, and we can move forward with the movement by finding common ground.