Cultural Memory

During one of the last conversations I had with my father, he announced to me that he had a new wife, and that she was a very good housekeeper. Whether he was speaking from a kind of twilight sleep state, or from a place of dementia, I didn't know. I just let it roll over me then, but it has obviously stuck in my mind.

The "new wife" (of more than forty years), told me once some forty years ago that "Jewish women don't clean their own houses." Go figure.

I don't clean very often (and we don't hire anyone to clean), but when I do I always seem to have the V'ahvta, a traditional prayer that would certainly have been recited by my female ancestors who went to synagogue, going through my head. The only time I ever recite it is when I am in a synagogue service or if I am cleaning or working in the yard. Maybe that's a cultural memory.

My father's statement (in his state) might have also been a cultural memory, a memory where the value of a wife for a man was her ability to keep house.

What strikes me as terribly sad is that such a memory would spring from, perhaps, the general state of a "woman's place" during my father's childhood in the 1930s. And that state of possibilities for women to be valued in professions other than as housekeepers and caregivers seems to be narrowing bit by bit as we peer into the darker corners of the immediate future.

Of course there are men who don't buy into this idea. There are men who value the work of women in every profession. There are men who know that for a woman to have achieved the status of a man in many professions means that she is superior in her knowledge and ability to a great many men. It is certainly often the case in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

I wish there were a name for the generation of women I grew up with. One name for the group of people born in the late 1950s and early 1960s is "Generation J," with the J standing for Jones, as in keeping up with the Joneses. But women had a different experience from men. The jump from being the "inferior sex" to a state of relative equality came in a kind of a burst. 

 Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school until I was in the fourth grade, which would have been 1969, and then we could only wear pants on "gym days." Title IX abolished dress codes in public schools in 1972, and we could wear whatever we wanted to school. Roe vs. Wade happened the next year, and suddenly we had sex education classes in school. We also had drug education classes which scared me away from ever trying hard drugs.

As a result of our new-found freedoms, my female classmates and I were under the impression that we could be equal to "the boys" in every arena. When I started elementary school girls could be teachers, nurses, or homemakers, and when I entered Junior High we could be and do anything. In my extremely liberal school system (in Newton, Massachusetts) girls were rewarded for being smart, and smart girls were expected to become professionals in any field they chose to study.

But now, at least in America, there are an alarmingly large number of young men (or men younger than me) who would not vote for a woman for president, even if the alternative were a convicted felon with declining cognitive function, and a desire to be a monarch in an oligarchy. And there are young men who voice the opinion that they should have a choice over what happens to a woman's body rather than the woman who lives in it.

The part of me that physically remembers the "V'ahvta" while I am cleaning also remembers the time when a motivating factor for a woman to get married was to be able to get away from a domineering mother (or father), regardless of whether she loved the man who asked her to marry her. I am reminded that it was not too many decades ago that "obey" was part of the traditional marriage ceremony.

We need to let the young women in our lives know that obeying in advance is something they should never do. And we need to let young men (of all ages) know it as well.