Thwarted.
That’s the word that best describes how I felt growing up as a girl on a farm in rural Utah.
My feelings of frustration began when I was about eight — an age when I didn’t have the knowledge to understand what I was experiencing or the vocabulary to describe it. I just put my experiences under the broad banner that life was unfair for girls.
I was very athletic, competitive, and smart. I felt stunted by the restrictions based on my gender — restrictions that had nothing to do with ability or merit.
I grew up before women lawyers developed theories of sex equality and sexual harassment, shifted the law, and radically altered sports, education and the work world for girls and women.
Because I was a girl:
I wasn’t allowed to wear a real uniform and play little league baseball in the town’s elaborate ballpark; I wasn’t allowed to play soccer or football; I wasn’t allowed to be a boy scout, earn merit badges, or go to far away scout camps and Disneyland; I wasn’t allowed to have a BB gun or motorcycle; I wasn’t allowed to pass the sacrament at church or get the priesthood; I wasn’t allowed to drive the forklift at the cherry factory; I wasn’t allowed to work at the town library; I wasn’t allowed to take wood and metal shop class; teachers tried to track me out of math and science; I was required to take home economics and learn how to cook.
In rural Utah, there wasn’t even an attempt to provide equal programs for girls.
Because I was a girl:
I wasn’t supposed to have a unique identity, be an individual who had exciting adventures in the world, fully develop my talents in all areas or have a professional career.
Because I was a girl:
I was supposed to be a stay-at-home mother and support and obey the Brethren who would preside over and protect me.
I was supposed to learn how to sew, knit, can fruit and take care of babies. My personal interests and particular talents didn’t matter. I was female and therefore I was supposed to do female things.
When I was in high school, I was humiliated by sexual harassment at school and my factory job by men in positions of power. But I didn’t even have a name to call what I was experiencing. I just knew that it felt horrible and wrong.
Although each slight and act of sex discrimination may seem minor, the weight of it crushed my spirit and self esteem. Because I was a girl, I felt like a second class citizen.
I quietly seethed about sex discrimination but felt voiceless and powerless.
Looking back I can see that I felt sex discrimination acutely because my specific personality and interests were directly at odds with the female standard.
In Utah where very, very, very old gender standards were the gospel, legal equality for women was a threat. When I was in high school, Utah’s mother church successfully campaigned to thwart the Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution.
The ERA’s supposedly scary text simply says: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
As a state, Utah was against legal equality for women. The women’s rights movement bypassed Utah.
As a girl, I couldn’t see how I could get beyond my environment.
I didn’t know that I could get over the mountains and go to college somewhere that supported women’s independence and the full range of possible accomplishments.
I compounded the restrictive gender messages of my youth by following my boyfriend and attending the mother church’s university. There I was surrounded by people who wholeheartedly embraced the old gender ideology that says that anatomy is destiny and a woman must be a mother and stay in the home. Careers were not considered appropriate for mothers. Most of my twenty odd college roommates majored in elementary education and never intended to work.
I quietly seethed but I tried to fit in. I quietly seethed but I tried to do “the right thing.”
I was going to follow “God’s true plan” and support my husband. I would work until I had children. I was going to be a suburban mom with a van. I was going to do what I was supposed to do.
I never intended to work. I assumed my husband would fully support my future family. I assumed I would never have to worry about money or be financially responsible.
My assumptions greatly limited what I did in college. I picked a major that would allow me to work part-time if necessary and support my husband’s career. My degree supported my back-up-plan. I’d only need it in case of my husband’s death. Divorce wasn’t even a consideration. I believed we were going to be married for eternity.
I didn’t think it mattered whether potential jobs aligned with my major were a good fit for me, had decent pay or offered chances for advancement. It didn’t matter that related jobs were boring and completely unsuited to my core self. I didn’t allow myself to take myself into consideration. I listened to what other people told me I should do.
I really wanted to go to medical school. Instead, I did what I thought was the “right thing” to do. I got married the day after I graduated from college and supported my husband while he finished school.
My crisis came several years later when I couldn’t have children, my husband wouldn’t adopt, and I was in a dead end job that I hated.
If you’re a woman who can’t have children in a culture that believes that a woman’s divine calling and only role is to be a stay-at-home-mother, who are you?
I had an identify crisis. I felt stuck and worthless.
I finally had to stop and examine my life and beliefs. I had to decide who I wanted to be.
I had to create my own identity.
I read hundreds of books about women, gender, motherhood, psychology and philosophy.
One of my major epiphanies came when I read scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhh’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn explains that “paradigms” are rigid boxes of thoughts that limit how we see and experience the world.
These “thought boxes” are made of cultural meanings, assumptions, rules, values and standards and are shared with groups in our communities. We think through our thought boxes and create our worlds. Thought boxes are made of words and define truth in language. Thought boxes are full of thoughts and rules that limit our vision, interpretations and actions.
I realized that I had built many intersecting thought boxes. I had a female thought box, a religious thought box, a family thought box and work thought box. I had created my thought boxes from my immersion in my communities and I incorporated them in my mind without question.
In my crisis, I started to identify and scrutinize my thought boxes. I started to look at my assumptions, rules, standards and values. I started to examine language and understand its role in creating my reality. I got cognitively unstuck. I cracked my thought boxes.
I had a personal revolution that allowed me to see how my unexamined beliefs were limiting me. I started becoming mindful and monitored my thoughts.
I started to think critically about my thoughts.
I asked myself whether each limiting belief was true — for me.
I examined the evidence allegedly supporting the belief. I looked for the roots of the thought. I challenged my thinking. I challenged the so called universal “Truths” of my thought boxes.
I gained the power to examine my thoughts and choose which ones I wanted to believe and which ones I wanted to discard.
I realized that my beliefs about women’s roles, money, the world and my place in it were limiting me. My beliefs were keeping my stuck and unhappy.
I realized that I had the power to define my own truth. I had the power to define success.
I had the right to ask myself what I really wanted in life.
I had the right to listen to my own intuition and follow my own compass.
I went to law school and studied women’s history. I learned how my foremothers campaigned unceasingly for equality and radically changed women’s lives for the better.
I discovered that the sermons I had heard in my youth about women’s divine roles, duties and separate domestic sphere had been used for centuries to stop women from attending school, voting, owning property, having custody of their children and defining their own identities. What I was told was God’s unique plan for women that had been revealed to Mormon prophets was the same old rhetoric that has been used by men with their own agendas to limit women’s power and activity in the larger sphere of the world for thousands of years.
I learned from the leading legal scholar on sex equality, Professor Catharine MacKinnon. Her work enlightened me about equality arguments and how some people argue that subordination of women is equality because women are different. When I heard this argument while I was growing up in Utah I thought it was idiotic but Professor MacKinnon explained how it was based on Aristotle’s logic. Good old Aristotle who thought women were inferior to men, less than human and should be limited to the home where they should be subordinate and controlled by their superior husbands.
Professor MacKinnon is a pioneer who has eloquently explained that sex equality isn’t about sameness and difference. Sex equality is about subordination and domination. Power and powerlessness. Women shouldn’t have to be the same as men to get what men get simply because they are men.
I stopped giving away my personal power and started defining my own beliefs. I changed the trajectory of my life and the life of my daughter.
I don’t feel thwarted anymore. I feel empowered and positive that women can change the world.
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