Women’s Bodies – and a sneak peek (at a book)

The Women’s Alliance at my college asked me to give a talk on “women’s bodies,” and this is what I shared with students. 

“Here’s the thing. Every quality of our lives – everything that we are and everything that we will be and do – is going to play out in our bodies. In the Western World, there is a classic philosophical split – codified for us by Rene Descartes – between our bodies and our minds, or our bodies and our spirits, but as a point of concrete experience, all of who we are is in our bodies.

Our thoughts, our ideas, our wild flights of imagination, our creative impulses: these are our brains, that twisted mass of spongy gray neurons and blood. And our feelings, our emotions, our impulses, our drives and our desires play out not only in our brains but in that second brain, our gut. And our lived sensual experience – what we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, intuit – are in the organs of our senses (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) but also in our limbs, our muscles, our tendons, our bones, our arteries and veins, literally every cell in us.

As human beings, we are our bodies.

And if we are also women, then we occupy the special zone of women’s bodies.

I have lived as a woman for sixty-two years. And I thought that maybe I could paint one picture of what that looks like, and in doing this, give you a glimpse of a time before you existed, a time you cannot know as your own. Because I am a novelist, I will end by reading the imagined experience of a woman in one of my stories, but mostly, I will share my own experience – at least up to the age you are now.

You should know that I am a feminist.
A proud feminist.
It’s a beautiful word.

I learned to use this word to describe myself when I was seven or eight years old. It was the late 1960’s, at the start of the second wave of American feminism, and I had an older sister committed to bringing back and then passing the Equal Rights Amendment. Congress sent the ERA to the states for ratification when I was ten, and it passed in the state I lived in when I was eleven, and for the three or four years leading up to this event, I was an ardent, pint-sized feminist. I marched with my sister in demonstrations downtown, and we womaned an ice cream stand at ERA picnics, in support.

I had good reason to be a feminist.

I had a smart and educated mother, who had paid her college tuition by being the university’s piano accompanist, and who had gotten an advanced degree in laboratory technology. Her mother had come to the US as a child, speaking no English, but somehow made it to teaching college at age sixteen, and then to teaching students a head taller than she was at age eighteen. Although she was forced to quit once she got married (it was against district rules to continue), she returned to teaching during World War II, and eventually became a beloved school principal. My father’s mother had a severely misaligned spine – they called it a hunchback then – and she was not allowed to go to school as a child. But her husband died young and she raised my father on her own. So while she was considered too disabled to attend school, she was not too disabled to work two jobs – one as a full-time bookkeeper in a gambling hall and one as a stenographer.

I also had some reason not to be a feminist.

I was raised in a religious home, attended exclusively religious schools, and was part of a close-knit church community that influenced every aspect of how we lived. And although my mother held a part-time job, our family was organized into a conventional division of labor. My dad went to work every day, my mom took care of the home and the family. And within that family, I was the child expected to maintain this tradition.

I am one of six, three boys, three girls. My oldest sister was a superstar. People said she would be the first woman president. My second sister was a math whiz. My parents thought she would become an engineer, maybe even an astronaut. And I was told I would be a mommy. Even the neighbors sometimes called “here’s our little mommy” when I passed by.

All six of us had chores, the girls inside the house and the boys outside it, and since I came in the middle of the boys, and my sisters eventually graduated to jobs outside the home, I became frustrated at having to do all the bathrooms and the kitchen, the dusting and the floors, while the three boys shared just the lawn and garden. But our chores were gendered and this was not up for debate. Having more to do than the boys was not a question of fairness, but simply of the way life happened to have turned out.

From the time I was very young, my mom would also show me how to help her in the kitchen or with her sewing or the laundry. I was pleased to be able to do these grown-up things young, and I accepted that I was the one who learned them because I would be the mommy.

To grow up in the heyday of 20th century American feminism, in a religious family with a conventional structure, was to get a PhD in mixed messages.

The messages to my three brothers were much clearer. They would have good jobs so they could support a family. They should work hard so that they could assume this responsibility.

But to be a smart strong girl in a line of smart strong traditional women?

Much more confusing.

Our theme today is not, however, women and work.
Our theme is women’s bodies.
And here are some of the things I remember about being a woman in a body when I was your age, when I was young, when the world was not as it is now, and yet in many ways it was.

I knew myself as a feminist, so when I was in college, I volunteered in the campus Women’s Center and organized Take Back the Night marches and joined in all the rallies for Gay Rights, which was not yet categorized into the LGBTQ movement. My actual job, the one that paid the expenses left after my scholarship, was at the New Haven Project for Battered Women – one of the first shelters for domestic violence in the country. I was a pretty naïve young person, but I ran groups for women processing violence, and took women to emergency clinics and courtrooms and closed hearings – and all of these activities, all the people I met, all the ideas I heard discussed, all the actions I witnessed, I took with me back home – where I said very little about them.

I had that PhD in mixed messages.

When I was young:
I was awkward in my sexuality.
I was thin and flat-chested, which seemed a terrible thing to be.
A well-meaning middle-aged man I worked with when I was seventeen told me not to worry about having a flat chest. He said it was not possible for a grown woman to have such a flat chest, so mine would eventually improve. First, I am here to tell you this is not true. And second, I have never in my life forgotten this conversation.

That I was thin did not keep me from being taught how to throw up my dinner on my first weekend in a college dorm. In those days, knowing how to throw up your lunch or an ice cream cone or the beer you drank at a party was considered a necessary life skill. For a woman.

We feared rape then.
We walked through parking lots with our car keys sticking out from our fingers. We strolled dark streets with a can of mace or a rock tucked in our pockets. We knew all about the dangers of a man appearing out of nowhere, a dark alley, a doorway, a staircase. Bus stops, train stations, park paths, city streets, convenience stores, movie houses, all-night restaurants: these places were risks.

At twenty-two, I moved to France. And when I learned that French women of my age did not often think about rape, did not particularly worry about walking at night, did not have a dozen planned strategies for escaping a rapist, I felt released. The glory of walking alone in the dark in a woman’s body. The freedom of it.

At twenty-eight, I became pregnant, a rather woman’s body thing to do.

I worked full-time to the day before my daughter was born. I wore dresses and panty hose – rolled down to my mid-thigh in the stifling heat of a Las Vegas August – and waddled from car to office building raising money for Opportunity Village.

We had an important meeting with the president of the Tropicana Hotel on the day before my child was born. I huffed in, sweaty and enormous and flushed, with that panty hose snapping crossly between my thighs, and the man did not listen to our carefully prepared pitch. Instead he said to me: “If you leave my office now, I’ll give Opportunity Village hundred thousand dollars.” I was glad to get the money, but he hadn’t given it quickly because he sympathized with my discomfort. He simply couldn’t bear to have such an enormously pregnant, sweaty woman’s body in his office.

When I had that baby here in Las Vegas, I didn’t know any other mothers who nursed. My mom insisted that I do so, and I am grateful to her for this, but it was a lonely experience. There was nowhere to nurse an infant if one was out, and no accommodations to make it possible for a working person like me. Also, it left passersby startled. People felt free to comment.

I was once at the Boulevard Mall with a hungry baby, and when I finally found an empty restroom, it was so dank and dirty, I could not bear to nurse my daughter there. So I defiantly sat down on a bench in the middle of the shops, pulled out a blanket to cover my baby and me, and huddled there. Within minutes, another woman joined me, and then a third. We were three nursing mothers with very young babies, and I knew they had only dared sit down because I was already there.

Women’s bodies.
They were naked everywhere in 1990’s Las Vegas. On billboards, on the roofs of taxis, on 100-foot neon signs.
But they were not pregnant. They did not nurse children.

This all seems such a long time ago.
It is so far from the life I live today.
But I have a message for you.
And that message is this:

Do not easily let anyone – any idea, any movement, any law, any social pressure, any physical standard – take your body from you.
We are our bodies.
Everything that we are is expressed in this body.
And if you hand it over lightly, if you give up your right to live in it, to be it, to feel it, you give up yourself. Your one life. Your very humanity. You become something less. And it is hard, hard, hard to get back to more.

Whatever your ideas are about being a woman in a woman’s body – about your sexuality, about abortion, about Botox and facelifts and lip injections, about clothing, about career – you have the right to those ideas, you have the right to live those ideas in your own body. No group of legislators, no judge, no court, no influencer, no camera, no historical representation of beauty, no famous actress, no partner, needs to tell you what your ideas should be or how you should live in your body or what your ethical responsibilities are.

Determining these things for ourselves is the very stuff of becoming human.
We must choose these values, these choices, these decisions, for ourselves.
We must not get involved in taking these choices away from anyone else.

That’s not a mixed message.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that we become our true selves in the choices that we make. The worst mistake is not to choose, because it is in choosing – in figuring out the complex options that surround us – in figuring out why certain things are desired of us, expected of us, demanded of us, and what our response will then be – that we become our full human selves.

I am going to end with a reading from my newest book, Perfect.

This is a passage near the end of the book, and it is in the voice of the main character, an older woman who is thinking back to her own youth. The first few lines are the voice of that woman, and then she is going to slip back into a memory of her twelve-year-old self, and the voice will be that twelve-year-old girl. I think it will be obvious why I chose this passage for you:

“Sometimes, when it all starts to bother me, when I begin to feel the weight of these sixty-seven years, all those choices, all those feelings, I close my eyes and drift back. I drift away from this light, these sounds, the feel of the chair I am in. I fall, I spin, I let go. And when there is nothing left of the sensual world around me, I return to a single morning of my girlhood. I know I am there when the air feels suddenly cold, when I have the urge to curl deep into my bed, when I hear the faraway whistle of a shift change at the mine:

It is dark when I throw off the heavy clutch of blankets covering me. I do it fast before I can imagine how nice it will feel to snuggle into my pillow. My arms contract tight against my body when the cold air hits. I am up before I can think, wrapping myself in a torn terrycloth bathrobe and wiggling to get warm. I am quiet, so that I won’t wake my mother.

I have been thinking about this day for a week.

At school, where I have recently become so much taller than everyone else. Taller than the girls. Much taller than any of the boys.

On Monday, my mother insisted I wear one of the bras she bought me. It is all I can think of when I am sitting in class. How it chafes along my ribs. How the outline of the fabric can be seen beneath my shirt. How sooner or later a boy is going to pull on the strap and snap it into my skin. I have seen this happen to other girls. I have seen the look of surprise, the way it might hurt just a bit, the way one girl turns and laughs, another huffs.

I do not want this to happen to me.
I do not want a boy looking at my bra strap. Thinking about pulling it.
I am afraid this is going on all the time.

I slip into the kitchen quietly, and wrap two of my mother’s pasties in wax paper. I light the fire on the stove and I set the kettle on the burner. I have to watch it carefully, so I can take it off before it whistles. It will take a few minutes for the coffee to steep, but once it is ready, I can fill my thermos.

I get my knapsack, already packed with a folding knife and a small towel and a second pair of socks and my favorite hat. I pull on a heavy sweater over my jeans and struggle to get my arms into the old army jacket that is still too big for me. I sling my knapsack over my shoulder. I shut the door that heads to the house’s back stairs quietly, and I tip toe down.

It takes a while to get the door open and the bike outside, and by the time I am ready to walk my bike across the small patch of dirt and scrub that abuts our alley, I am sweating even though there is a thin layer of frost on the ground. I look nervously to the east. It is still dark but the black of the sky is turning silver in this direction. I have to hurry or I will miss what I want to see.

I pedal the bike as fast as I can down the rutted alley. The seat is too low for me now, and my knees pump upward toward my chin. Once I am on the paved road, I can go faster. There are almost no cars. The sky is a pale gray but the first rays of the sun are not yet peeking over the horizon. The air is fresh and clear and I am happy to be awake, to be outside, to feel my lungs contract, to grip the handlebars and rhythmically push my feet. I stand up and pedal because I am hurrying, because I want to get all the way outside of town, deep into the hills, to a spot where my mother and I sometimes hike, to a certain flat rock where I can sit and pull out my pasty and watch the sun rise as I eat it.

I cannot believe how strong I am.
How much I can do.
How I can think of a plan in my head, I can think of something I want, I can imagine this morning, and I can make it happen.

I will sit on my rock with hot coffee and a cold pasty. I will wait and I will listen. I will try to spot the birds I hear, and maybe I will know their names and maybe tonight I will have to ask my mom which one makes the crick crick crick sound. I will toss a bit of food to a squirrel and I will see deer or antelope. If I am lucky, a bobcat or a cougar.

I will not be afraid.

If I can do all of this when I am only twelve, then my whole life opens out, infinitely large and hopeful and enticing.
I am going to live it well.
I am going to have adventures.
I am going to laugh and I am going to fall in love and I am going to travel.
I will always have the sky.
I will always have the air and the birds and the blue peaks at my back.
I have my own strong self, my body and my mind and my heart.

It is so thrilling to be alive that it makes me laugh, out loud, riding my bike, racing the dawn, racing and winning.
I sit down and my legs pump furiously. The rushing air makes my eyes water. My cheeks are bright red.

My hair, uncombed, snarls behind.
My chest rises and falls.
I feel the cracked seat chafing my thighs.
I can’t stop grinning. I breathe in, deeper, deeper. I stretch my arms out long and straighten my back to sit up higher.

I look out at the world, emerging in the pale pre-dawn.

I belong to it and it belongs to me.
There is nothing that is not possible.
No story that cannot be made real.”

From Perfect by Laura McBride