How I became a feminist when I was eight

To hear my mother tell it, I was a tomboy from birth. From the time I mastered control of my limbs, I peeled off the pretty, but itchy, girly stuff she loved to dress me in. Once I could talk, I asked to wear pants. Other girls wanted tea sets and dolls. I wanted a microscope and (though I never got them) sea monkeys.

It wasn't that I was totally hopeless at the feminine thing. Given a comfortable outfit, I could rock it. I slept on curlers for many special occasions (as long as they were sponge curlers.) I was a hopeless nurturer of stray animals and helped my mother care for my younger siblings, so it's not like I didn't have the requisite nurturing skills.

It's just that the culture my mother had been raised in, and where we still lived, had fairly rigid gender roles. I was, early on, flunking an important female social task.

Doing something I didn't like and pretending that I did.

A glimpse into the future

Even though I was surrounded by the insistence that one day I would flatten my personality like a paper doll and become a Real Girl, I managed to become aware of what truly awaited me in the current adult world. It was because of my mother's Betty Crocker cookbook.

it was domestic... science!

This was probably a wedding present, from 1956, and was a lovely deluxe version with a three ring binder and tabbed cardboard dividers. It's not that this cookbook was filled with righteous rants that were far ahead of their time. It was sincerely devoted to the glories of living every girl's dream, the loving care and maintenance of a family and home.

It wound up at my maternal grandparents house one summer I spent there. It was a great way to acquire an eclectic education. Between the local library's "two books a week" rule and my voracious reading rate, I mowed through Reader's Digests reaching back to the 1920's, several leatherbound classics that would have otherwise been undisturbed in the parlor, and finally, likely from desperation, this cookbook.

It was quite wide-ranging compared to cookbooks of today. There were sections on how to pack cookies for the men overseas so they wouldn't break in transit, and suggestions for "good travelers." Recipes would reference each other for economy, so the egg yolks left over from an angel food cake could be used for Golden Drop cookies. Those cardboard dividers were covered with tips for organizing a lady's day, illustrated with line drawings of an ecstatic housewife in heels, a poofy dress, and perfect hair.

I know I went into it with an open mind, because I still remember the dawning horror as I would leaf through it methodically, looking for more clues which fit the pattern my brain was slowly assembling.

Telling the truth is a revolutionary act

Many of the recipes were Bake-Off winners, or contributed by members of ladies' groups, with their names. I thought this was a nice touch, but as I skipped around, looking for things that sounded tasty and marveling at the impeccably crafted photographs, I noticed that everyone was listed as their married name.

How did I know? Because they were all Mrs. Norman Bates and Mrs. Humphrey Bogart and Mrs. George Jones. None of them had their own names.

I actually sat down and skimmed for every name and I found one woman's name in the whole book. She was, poor thing, Miss Fay Wray. The only one.

Stephen King, being a man, would never write a scary novel based on this discovery, but my conclusion was just as frightening to me. Getting married meant losing your name, your identity, yourself!

This was a glimpse into a world of madness

But it was those cardboard dividers which really laid it out for me.

Happy poofy-skirt lady surrounded by cups and bowls and cooking utensils: Don't clutter your kitchen and fill up your counters. Part of the cooking process is keeping up with washing your working tools. Take time between cooking steps to wash as you go along.

Happy poofy-skirt lady with a mop: Schedule time-consuming tasks like waxing the floor for parts of the day when the baby is asleep.

A drawing of a squirrel in a tree with happy poofy-skirt lady grinning at it: Take some time from your busy day to go outside once in a while. You might see something to share with the family at dinner.

There were some inescapable conclusions coming right at me.

One is not a choice

This was the life my society was laying out for me? An endless round of the same chores over and over again with occasional breaks taken to look at a squirrel?

In my childish imaginings, it was taking away school, where I had skills which were admired, and making me a full-time Mother's Helper. Promoting me to the actual Mother did not make a bit of difference to me. I loved my little brothers and I didn't mind helping to care for them, but I had already noticed that when men came home from work their work was done. A housewife never came home from work.

I had already been taught this was the only thing women were supposed to do. That it was the only path to love and happiness. To spurn it would result in my being one of those "maiden ladies" I saw around our small town. The ones who lived in small dingy surroundings with small dingy jobs, the ones of whom my relatives whispered, "She never married."

I had not yet read Huckleberry Finn, so I was ignorant of the famous passage in which Huck decides to buck his culture's take on morality, and choose friendship instead. A choice which would result in him going to Hell. I didn't know I was struggling with a similar choice, and that I made a similar decision.

Okay then. I'll become an old maid.

What doctors see

My own doctor is an awesome guy who is willing to think outside the box. He still has some modern-doc-reflexes, but on the whole he is impressively open-minded.

This is a rare thing.

In ages past, doctors had fewer tools to reach for, and proper diagnosis became a professional goal and the focus of their training. Observation and deduction was the motto of the famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, because his creator, doctor/author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had been trained to diagnose disease with these same methods.

Only finding what we are looking for

Now, it's a matter of running tests in the hope of showing enough deviation from the norm for them to arrive at a diagnosis. Then they prescribe a drug which often does not address the problem so much as it masks the symptoms. But when the symptoms are suppressed, the patient stops complaining.

That's a medical term, you know: "The patient complained of ..." I don't know when the medical profession's goals shifted from curing to the patient stopped complaining, but it was not progress. Because now, when the patient keeps complaining, the overwhelming tendency of doctors is to decide the patient is not physically ill, they are mentally ill. And should be taking a psychiatric drug.

There's all the difference in the world between actually having a mental health problem, and only having your medical personnel decide for you that you have a mental health problem. People absolutely should get help with any medical issue they have.

Getting help for a medical issue we don't have is a prescription for disaster.

Yet, this is exactly the position of women who go to their doctors for help with issues that doctors don't know how to help with. But they don't say that. They look at lab results and pronounce them "normal" and tell the person there isn't anything wrong with them. The woman goes away feeling dismissed and frustrated, and the more she tries to get help, the more she gets seen as A Problem.

It's not entirely the fault of the doctor; he or she is simply doing what they have been trained to do... and so often, they don't do any more than that. This is what keeps them from seeing their middle-aged woman patient as a person with a real problem who is trying to get real solutions. Because the woman's hormone dysfunction problem is not one they are trained to see.

Adjusting their lenses

When a woman's problem falls into an area that wasn't covered in their training and doesn't show up on the usual lab tests, it's like the doctor's brain (that overly busy and highly trained and not-encouraged-to-be-creative organ that it is) shifts gears. They actually look at the patient in a different way, as in the study, below, where people were distracted while evaluating what a person was saying. If they could not follow what the person was talking about, they fell back on emotional cues:

But those who were kept mentally busy came to a very different conclusion about this woman’s personality. Regardless of what situation she was in, they concluded that she was indeed an “anxious person.” For these people, acting anxious equaled being anxious.
Mixed Signals: Why People Misunderstand Each Other

As a woman journeys from doctor to doctor, vainly trying to get someone to take their symptoms seriously, they inevitably come across as somewhat less than calm, cool, and reasonable. Often, the hormone dysfunction itself prevents someone from easily keeping their grip.

this is the same woman, seen through different lenses
comparison by rpavich

Quickly exhausted, fuzzy-headed under stress, and often at the end of their rope already, it becomes even more challenging to get across a complicated concept that doesn't even have a name except "menopause," and that is a label that is shrugged away as "not much of a problem."

Time itself is now how the cautious doctor prefers to handle their mid-life women patients, with the disaster of previous Hormone Replacement Therapy protocols echoing in their minds.

As I discovered when I tried to get cortisol, it's easier to get what that chemistry teacher was cooking in that camper in the desert. Doctors don't want to give women hormones that aren't birth control. And forget any hormonal help after the age of thirty five. At all. Ever.

Thyroid insufficiency is one of the least treated illnesses out there. And it's so easy to fix!

Ignoring the No-Hormone Disaster

In fact, it was this very medical mindset that catapulted me into menopause -- abruptly and disastrously. My endometriosis had been making my life difficult during my teens, but upon getting birth control pills, it miraculously stopped the pain and monthly difficulties. I was happy taking birth control for years, until I got into my late thirties. And the medical profession took them away.

"What about my endometriosis?" I kept asking. And they kept dismissing me, telling me that I would be in menopause soon. Sure enough, that is just what happened. I got a terribly painful cystic ovary that had to be removed with surgery and then I was dumped into menopause like falling off a cliff.

It was something like being tied to the railroad tracks, and hearing the whistle in the distance, and everyone around me all agree the train's coming but they don't think they need to untie me.

It's now a bit difficult for me to to be calm and reasonable with doctors when I think they are screwing up.

Because I've seen the train that hit me.

Human sacrifice in modern times

Yes, in this case the "human sacrifice" I'm referring to is symbolic. But it's a sacrifice all the same.

In her book, Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice, Stephanie Golden outlines the famous fairy tale of how a mermaid fell in love with a human. She gives up her voice and her immortality for legs and the chance for life with him.

In all of the mythology of fairy tales, there isn't a male version. As the author explores, in depth, sacrifice is a female trait.

Unwitting, not unwilling

In the "siren song" myth, she has all the power. It's a myth.

It's not framed that way, of course. Women are praised for giving things up for love.

It is considered both a part of their nature and a willing expression of their devotion.

What kind of mother are you to not do your utmost for your baby?

What kind of wife are you to not let your career get put on hold for pregnancy or your husband's prospects?

What kind of daughter are you to not do anything asked of you by your aging parents?

What kind of employee are you to not agree to take on that extra work the boss needs right away?

The deceptive ease of saying "no"

The classic response is to claim that women could just say "No" to these things. No one is making them do this!

It's not a literal gunpoint situation. But in a way their life is at stake. Of course they can say "No." And buck a lifetime of social programming that says if we do, we'll be considered a selfish, uncaring, woman not worthy of love.

In the many many times I have posed this question, I have never had a woman respond with "Just say No!" Because women know it's not that simple. It is men who say such things, because they have their own social programming; the one that says, A man does whatever he wants to do.

Of course, that gets them into trouble, too. It's just not the same trouble.

When I say, "Women are expected to sacrifice," it has a starkness that prompts denial in the listener, be they man or woman. But if I phrase it as, "A mother should do everything for her baby," it's approving nods all around.

Because if we want to do it, it's not a sacrifice! Which is the very trap women fall into with their eyes wide open. Love is a very powerful emotion, and in Western culture, one that women are allowed to feel, freely and openly.

But how they can express it turns out to be full of fences.

Sacrifice and stress

At its most extreme, as in the patriarchal Quiverfull movement, women are allowed some autonomy in the domestic sphere only. She can run a home-based business, but only under the permission and "headship" of her husband, father, or other male guardian. She is responsible for child raising, but with male children being encouraged to reinforce her subservient position when still quite young. It is a highly stressful situation of low control and high responsibility.

With such a stark example, it's easy to dismiss lesser forms of coercion. Especially since 21st century fathers are far more likely to share household chores and childcare, with increasing marital satisfaction as a result.

Over all, the evidence shows that the shifts within marriages — men taking on more housework and women earning more outside the home — have had a positive effect, contributing to lower divorce rates and happier unions.

But for women who are dealing with menopause now, that probably wasn't the case. Our teen years roughly coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism. The controversial fact that "women were people" clashed, sometimes roughly, with the kinds of prevailing attitudes that were so shocking when depicted on Mad Men. When I was a child, women were not allowed their own credit cards, to keep their job if they were pregnant, get a no-fault divorce, or call sexual harassment what it was.

I had to flee 1,200 miles to settle in a place that encouraged more egalitarian marriage structures. I had to make that a priority and be willing to uproot myself to find better soil for my ambitions. I was also a computer professional from the time there were computers in common office use, and so I avoided more traditional views of women in more established professions. And it still wasn't easy.

Prior to women's liberation, a woman was supposed to willingly put herself last every day in order to take care of her husband and family. Love is what drove them to do so. And it is genuine love.

I'm just not sure about the "willing" part. Because the women who signed up for this in their teens and very early adulthood didn't realize what was truly being asked of them.

The short straw

Not every woman reaches her mid-years with a sense of being cheated, just as 25% of women seem to sail through their menopause with no symptoms. Yet that leaves a very large number of women who confide the un-discussed dilemma of any woman who devoted her entire self to her family:

Now that the kids are growing up, they don't have time for me any more. And now that the kids aren't around, my husband acts like I don't have any purpose in the family, and he resents giving me any money that isn't for groceries. I don't have any job skills, I never had any time to get into a hobby, and now I just keep house for room and board?

I really liked my job, and I wanted to see what I could do. But my husband had to move to help his career, and it paid more, and so I worked part-time, and mommy tracks, and didn't keep up with my schooling. I'm twenty years out of date and he seems to resent that I'm not making nearly as much as he is. All that cleaning and cooking and child care is in the past and now it just doesn't matter?

My girls want to get married and have babies with me taking care of them while they work, and I see the whole thing starting all over again. How can I tell my daughters that they will just come home to another work shift if they don't marry with better expectations than I did? How can I tell my family that it's time for me to have my own life? I don't even know what that is.

Even acknowledging such feelings cuts sharply against the grain of how much love a woman can genuinely feel for her family. With the best intentions in the world, she devoted herself to them, creating the happy, independent, lives they now enjoy.

So it hurts very deeply to discover they don't seem to understand what she did for them. They can be alternately clueless and defensive. Didn't she want to do it?

What she wanted was to love and care for her family. But if the only way to do that is to become everyone's servant, without any outlets for her own ambitions and interests... how many women sign up for that, knowingly?

When the deal is put out there this truthfully... not many.

Women are retreating from marriage as they go into the workplace. That's partly because, for a woman, being both employed and married is tough in Asia. Women there are the primary caregivers for husbands, children and, often, for ageing parents; and even when in full-time employment, they are expected to continue to play this role. This is true elsewhere in the world, but the burden that Asian women carry is particularly heavy. Japanese women, who typically work 40 hours a week in the office, then do, on average, another 30 hours of housework. Their husbands, on average, do three hours. And Asian women who give up work to look after children find it hard to return when the offspring are grown. Not surprisingly, Asian women have an unusually pessimistic view of marriage. According to a survey carried out this year, many fewer Japanese women felt positive about their marriage than did Japanese men, or American women or men.

Unless one was there, in the late 20th century, it might be difficult to understand how women were denigrated for showing an interest in feminism and equal rights. My own circumstances pushed me out to the cutting edge.

Women without clear talents in open professions, women who had trouble finding any liberated men to date, women whose relatives and hometowns and religions were extremely negative about stepping outside of their domestic role; such women felt that if they wanted a good marriage and a happy family, they had to do so in a "traditional way."

They thought they were choosing the old order, where they were supposed to be revered for devoting themselves to family and motherhood, only to discover that by the time they hit mid-life, new expectations were in operation. These women are supposed to act as though their lives are their own responsibility now.

A whole generation of women got ground up in a giant culture shift. That wasn't supposed to be the deal.