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The past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. —JAMES BALDWIN1
History is about choices and about how individuals make those choices within the structures and circumstances in which they find themselves.
We woke up that next day in a house overflowing both with presents and with stunned, disbelieving grief.
thought to myself, “At least I didn’t kill me.” I knew I had had no choice. I had had to fight with my mother in order to survive.
We were a family in which anything difficult or unpleasant was avoided and denied, rather than recognized or addressed.
I can remember my alcoholic New Jersey grandfather collapsing in his soup at dinner and simply being quietly removed from the room with no commentary or explanation to the bewildered and frightened grandchildren seated on either side of him at the table.
Miss Hall’s was hailed by Fortune magazine in 1932 as one of the nation’s ten best private girls’ schools.
In an increasingly serious world, these young women had never been asked or expected to be serious.
“Our world is going to change radically, I’m afraid, Cath. Our background, education, cultural interests and refinement are going to stand us of little use … The things we subconsciously looked forward to are being swept away.”10
determined to enlist young American women from privileged families to use their equestrian skills to serve as volunteer couriers, tending to the FNS horses and accompanying and assisting nurse-midwives on their rounds to remote cabins and villages to deliver babies.
Friedan describes “the aggressive energy” a woman “should be using in the world” that “becomes instead the terrible anger that she dare not turn against her husband, is ashamed of turning against her children, and finally turns against herself, until she feels as if she does not exist.”
I was not meant to become a woman, for that category carried dangerously sexual and sensual implications.
it was much more important that I be “well-adjusted.”18 I heard that to mean compliant.
Determined, opinionated, I was far more interested in animals and the outdoors than I was in dolls and clothes.
mother urged me to lower my voice, not to speak “like a fishwife”; to soften my insistence, not to be so bossy; to defer more to others. I was well aware of my deficiencies in the girl arena.
Girls were seen to be at risk and needed to be both constrained and protected.
She saw the world as a dangerous place for women, for their bodies and their reputations.
In 1950, only one in three white women over twenty-five had completed high school, and only one in twenty had completed college.20 Even if she had been more successful in school, it was unlikely she would have continued on to higher education.
As Hector so long ago explained to Andromache in the sixth book of the Iliad, it is the men “who must see to the fighting.” Men make war, and war makes men.
From that moment on, General Tyson later wrote, “life seemed without object” and “never the same to me again.”5
“the cultivation of a perfect gentlewoman, intellectually firm and having poise, simplicity and graciousness.”
I was scared of guns, scared of the responsibility they demanded, scared of the power they bestowed, a power of life and death I did not believe it was my part to claim.
chivalry, with its implicit acknowledgment of dependence, came at considerable cost to those it claimed to defend.
how did they affect us all as we grew up in a strange, foggy aftermath of war that no one explained or ever overtly discussed?
He got involved in founding a company to import Thai silk in partnership with an old family friend who almost certainly was a spy and ultimately disappeared mysteriously and permanently in Malaysia.
was not supposed to know or see, and yet now I did.
had no aspiration to be impossible. But I could see how the lives of so many around me had been deformed and diminished by the constraints of custom and conformity, as well as by the unjust social hierarchies that structured our world.
I hated being read to. I did not want another person between me and the power of the book; I wanted the rest of the world to disappear when I was reading. I wanted to read at my pace and on my terms. I wanted to be in control.
Nancy’s readers were empowered to imagine a different kind of womanhood before them, one in which they could be beautiful and admired while they dazzled the world with their accomplishments.
In Scout, I found another example of a child seeing clearly, a child who believed in her responsibility to the world, who wanted to defend the values she had been taught—even as she came to see them mostly honored in the breach.
“it is not often, I think, that one lives in such an atmosphere of learning and examining, conscious always of a sense of purpose.”22 Learning and examining, suffused with a sense of purpose: this, I recognized, was how I hoped to live the rest of my life.
talking, discussing, and exchanging perspectives in the hope of persuading and enlisting others was my favorite form of action, uniting as it did the realm of ideas, which I loved, with my fervent desire to help fix what I saw as a broken world.
Our education was designed to empower us, but to do so without ever requiring or encouraging us to think about our social or cultural place as females.
must open yourself up to the notion that you have a lot to learn, that what you do not know is close to infinite.
knew it didn’t matter to the world at large what I did; I had no illusions that whatever action I took or did not take would have a significant impact on the fate of the Voting Rights Bill. This was an issue between me and my conscience about what was necessary for me to live my life.
These were battles I had been fighting in some form since I was a toddler refusing to wear fancy pants.
We embraced “The End” because it was as scary as the world unfolding around us, which made it seem indispensable.
assumptions and circumstances exerted their power through time, often creating silences and blindnesses that undermined human possibility.
privilege, I had learned, is a complicated heritage.
