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required reading
Nov. 1st, 2016 12:04 amHere in the Iowa countryside, it's rare to find friends who are liberal-minded and well-educated. Most of those people leave for more urban environs.
My friend L is such a person, and she's even more unusual in that she is not particularly forthcoming about the personal details of her life. Generally, close friends here reveal a great deal to one another. It's one way we entertain ourselves.
Our friendship developed because we found ourselves on the same side of some contentious environmental issues that were roiling the area, and also because I was dissatisfied with what seemed to me to be cursory dismissals of her by mutual acquaintances who found her "shrill" or "overbearing." To me, their objections seemed shallow. I felt that L had substance beyond what others gave her credit for.
We've now been friends for something like 15 years. She's 7 years my senior and has never been married. She grew up here, but went off to college in Boston. She earned several degrees, first studying mathematics. She also was a social worker in Chicago for a time. She also studied law and worked as an attorney. Until recently, she's never elaborated on any of this, and she never gave me the impression that she wanted to talk about it. Her father passed away and her mother became ill. L came back here to care for her mother at home. After her mother died, L remained on the home farm. She is a gifted, knowledgeable gardener, and her farmyard is a treasure trove of perennial flowers with color from early spring to frost. Fruit trees and other hardwoods complement the mix, and her vegetable garden, in conjunction with her root cellar, keeps her cupboards stocked all year.
She doesn't own a computer. She occasionally visits the local library to use one of the computers there. She has only used email for a couple of years.
We call each other to talk about local happenings, books, politics, history and ideas. Recently, when the news broke of Presidential candidate Donald Trump's recorded comments about how "stars" like him could "get away with anything" regarding the treatment of women, including "grab[bing] them by the pussy," I told L that the coverage had reminded me of some painful memories of being sexually harassed. I told her that I could recall five different episodes of personal sexual harassment -- assaults, really, though at the time, I had no language for these episodes -- at the hands of boys or men during my younger years, starting at about age 13, and ending in my 20s. I mentioned that one of the memories -- the earliest one -- was one I hadn't thought about for some 50 years. The Trump scandal brought it back to me. I hadn't forgotten it, but I had suppressed it for all that time.
L was quiet for a minute. Then she told me that there had been a period in her life when she suffered sexual discrimination on a daily basis, for months, in her thirties.
She said it had happened when she was a new assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, which, at the time, had only recently changed from an institution for men only, to a co-educational institution. She said that she joined with something like 70 other women in a lawsuit against the University, a sexual discrimination lawsuit. But, she told me, "We lost." And the result was that her career, as an academic, effectively ended.
Telling me this clearly upset her, and she said she didn't want to go into any detail, so I didn't press. But I went online to see if I could find out more information. This is the most telling document I found: http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1769&context=mff
The 21-page essay struck me because it almost seemed to have been written by an academic woman in her early thirties today, rather than by a woman in her mid-seventies writing about events that had happened to her more than 30 years earlier. It is confidently written, and vibrant, and there's a sort of 'take no prisoners' attitude. It was published in 2009. The detail with which the author recalls various, and cumulative, incidents and effects of the sexual discrimination she personally experienced -- it's comprehensive, jarring and, to me, a woman who navigated a college environment during these same years, horribly familiar at the same time.
I shared the essay with L. She called me this evening to talk about it. She said she knew the author at the time, although not well. She said the author, who had already published several scholarly papers by the time she arrived at UND (unlike L, who arrived later as a newly-minted Ph.D. with far fewer publications on her CV, and far less confidence in herself and how she ought to comport herself in this new environment) was regarded, on campus, as brassy and bold.
We're going to have to talk more. There's a lot to process. The essay made L cry, she told me.
We've reached one conclusion at this point, and that is that young women today need to know what women like this author, and L, went through. It is part of our history.
My friend L is such a person, and she's even more unusual in that she is not particularly forthcoming about the personal details of her life. Generally, close friends here reveal a great deal to one another. It's one way we entertain ourselves.
Our friendship developed because we found ourselves on the same side of some contentious environmental issues that were roiling the area, and also because I was dissatisfied with what seemed to me to be cursory dismissals of her by mutual acquaintances who found her "shrill" or "overbearing." To me, their objections seemed shallow. I felt that L had substance beyond what others gave her credit for.
We've now been friends for something like 15 years. She's 7 years my senior and has never been married. She grew up here, but went off to college in Boston. She earned several degrees, first studying mathematics. She also was a social worker in Chicago for a time. She also studied law and worked as an attorney. Until recently, she's never elaborated on any of this, and she never gave me the impression that she wanted to talk about it. Her father passed away and her mother became ill. L came back here to care for her mother at home. After her mother died, L remained on the home farm. She is a gifted, knowledgeable gardener, and her farmyard is a treasure trove of perennial flowers with color from early spring to frost. Fruit trees and other hardwoods complement the mix, and her vegetable garden, in conjunction with her root cellar, keeps her cupboards stocked all year.
She doesn't own a computer. She occasionally visits the local library to use one of the computers there. She has only used email for a couple of years.
We call each other to talk about local happenings, books, politics, history and ideas. Recently, when the news broke of Presidential candidate Donald Trump's recorded comments about how "stars" like him could "get away with anything" regarding the treatment of women, including "grab[bing] them by the pussy," I told L that the coverage had reminded me of some painful memories of being sexually harassed. I told her that I could recall five different episodes of personal sexual harassment -- assaults, really, though at the time, I had no language for these episodes -- at the hands of boys or men during my younger years, starting at about age 13, and ending in my 20s. I mentioned that one of the memories -- the earliest one -- was one I hadn't thought about for some 50 years. The Trump scandal brought it back to me. I hadn't forgotten it, but I had suppressed it for all that time.
L was quiet for a minute. Then she told me that there had been a period in her life when she suffered sexual discrimination on a daily basis, for months, in her thirties.
She said it had happened when she was a new assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, which, at the time, had only recently changed from an institution for men only, to a co-educational institution. She said that she joined with something like 70 other women in a lawsuit against the University, a sexual discrimination lawsuit. But, she told me, "We lost." And the result was that her career, as an academic, effectively ended.
Telling me this clearly upset her, and she said she didn't want to go into any detail, so I didn't press. But I went online to see if I could find out more information. This is the most telling document I found: http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1769&context=mff
The 21-page essay struck me because it almost seemed to have been written by an academic woman in her early thirties today, rather than by a woman in her mid-seventies writing about events that had happened to her more than 30 years earlier. It is confidently written, and vibrant, and there's a sort of 'take no prisoners' attitude. It was published in 2009. The detail with which the author recalls various, and cumulative, incidents and effects of the sexual discrimination she personally experienced -- it's comprehensive, jarring and, to me, a woman who navigated a college environment during these same years, horribly familiar at the same time.
I shared the essay with L. She called me this evening to talk about it. She said she knew the author at the time, although not well. She said the author, who had already published several scholarly papers by the time she arrived at UND (unlike L, who arrived later as a newly-minted Ph.D. with far fewer publications on her CV, and far less confidence in herself and how she ought to comport herself in this new environment) was regarded, on campus, as brassy and bold.
We're going to have to talk more. There's a lot to process. The essay made L cry, she told me.
We've reached one conclusion at this point, and that is that young women today need to know what women like this author, and L, went through. It is part of our history.
