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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971
1971-06-04 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 4
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[photo] THOUGHTS ON ME Right now my class consciousness is an all-over-the-place feeling, a sort of burst of identification with working class female resentment. I think I've just been through an absolution of guilt that I didn't have to have. Like being officially acknowledged as working class -- to myself mostly -- and the most real thing was the pain of realizing I didn't have the choices, the privileges; I thought I had just avoided them -- but they weren't ever available. For a long time I assumed that I'd have the choices of a middle class lifestyle if I just got through college, just managed to stay in and live cheap until I could start making $7000 a year and see what it was like, and then I'd fuck that and be a freak and move back to the alley. Well, I got to be a freak and live on the alley all right but I missed the in-between part. I never got to go on that little spending spree. And now I know I never will. But all the time I was a freak I identified somehow with the middle-classness of that lifestyle -- the phony anti-materialism, the rejection of financial security, the valuing of sensuality, spiritualism and intellectualizing, and the guilt of being reminded that we couldn't go home to our parents and live in style if we wanted to. But I know I had more of the material things I wanted when I was on my own than when I was growing up. I didn't have much privilege to reject -- but I felt guilty anyway cause I thought I could make it in the straight world if I changed my lifestyle to get a job. I never stopped thinking about money. Maybe that's the key to it. My parents made me aware of it by the time I was seven at most. I knew money was important to think about because they asked me more questions about it than about what I did at school or who I played with or where I went or when I was going to be back or how I felt. Who what when where how -- why came when I got caught shoplifting. I was eleven. My mother asked me why, why. I didn't want to talk about it. I was pissed off. She threatened not to let me go to Girl Scout camp. But I went anyway and I think my aunt paid for it. That was a real middle class trip and there wasn't anyone into shoplifting there. So I taught everyone in my unit how to play poker for chips and bottle caps. And I gave up shoplifting for ten years. I guess I'm trying to sound tough. Just keep remembering that every sanction was an economic sanction. Except maybe tow other things about my parents that made me feel wierd. One was that they always freaked out about my wanting to stay up late at night. They never really explained it any more than that it wasn't right not to live on their schedule. The other thing was that I felt they really lost track of where I was at by the time I was eight or so. I envied the easy-going relationships most of my girlfriends had with their mothers. My friends woulds say how they'd really get mad sometimes but they knew their mothers loved them anyway. I didn't feel like that. I don't know how they felt about me or about each other except antagonistic. I got it figured with my father when I was fifteen and told him I hated him. He accepted it. By that time I didn't hate my mother. I felt sorry for her. There is a myth about growing up in a working class family, a myth to the tune of "All You Need Is Love." The myth says that working class parents are strict but loving, given to displaying emotions, close to family people, unusually strong moralizers. I guess I was feeling like that's how some of my friends' parents were, but mine weren't, so mine weren't in the same class. It wasn't material. My parents related to cultural things that I identified as middle class or upper-middle class -- classical art, classical or artsy music, "intellectual" books on history and religion. And they didn't care about cars or interior decorating or the latest in house appliances. Back to the myth -- one of my favorite songs says it too -- "I grew up in faded denims where love is a precious thing / You grew up in silk and satin where love is a game you play." My parents were uptight and cold. Middle class parents have no monopoly on making their kids feel unloved and isolated. So I felt little security on that score and on the economic score too. I was -- still am --feeling insecure; it's my basic paranoid feeling -- the theme of my nightmares and bum trips. Roxanne Dunbar's poem that we printed "never having been sure of anything..." that says it, but how to change it is a struggle. How to deal with that feeling when it absolutely paralyzes me or distracts me so much that I spin my wheels and speed around and make impossible demands on people. Sometimes I have had the money to distract myself with a new toy. I made a down payment on my first guitar when I was really depressed, and I loved that thing for at least five weeks; it was all I needed. Then I went into a drinking thing. And I went out with whatever men would buy me enough to get drunk on and sometimes I'd leave and sometimes they wouldn't let me and most times I'd get screwed and hate them and hate myself and want to get drunk. I did that for eight or ten months continuously. Now I have a sort of fear about drinking. It makes me feel too vulnerable. Thinking of booze and drugs reminds me of this "look how bad I'm being" syndrome which may be a class thing -- like acting tough, showing off in self-destructiveness. I've done that and been around people who were doing it but it's like I would be real pissed off at privileged people who did it and kind of in sympathy and going along with people who did it out of desperation, out of oppression. Like one night when I was lost in San Francisco I met a black woman who was a hooker and wanted junk -- I couldn't call that thrill-seeking, not in that scene. I know I'm rambling but all these things remind me. Desperation -- working class. Boredom -- middle class. Women have to deal with class in a way men don't. The whole social class mobility racket seems to apply only to white males. Maybe that's wrong. I don't know -- thinking about class in relation to women attached to men is something I just don't know 'cause it's so hypothetical to me. I never lived with a man who financially supported me (except my father). I think I'm feeling less schizophrenic about my class consciousness. THOUGHTS ON MIDDLE-CLASS GUILT Guilt reaction makes her focus on herself, her (already done) behavior. The defensive reaction to a confrontation includes and unacceptance of herself as she is: any white woman can be racist, any middle class woman can be class chauvinist. Unacceptance of herself--like the idealism of middle class: not dealing with reality but with what she wishes or would like to be. Being guilty for being middle class and not guilty for her class chauvinist action. Guilt is a protective reaction, makes her think of herself. Statement: Your chauvinist behavior/comment has hurt me. Reaction: I'm caught. I've failed to live up to my good self-image. I feel terrible. I want this person who has made me feel bad to listen to me and deal with my hurt. Result: The situation has been turned around to focus on the middle-class perspective. This happens in numerous situations; middle class experience is promoted as the norm, middle-class people are mostly more confident in articulating their feelings, etc. Working class women are sick of being made to feel responsible for class antagonism and being forced to relate to middle class guilt. Once we felt guilt for just being from a lower class. But feeling guilty for what you are is useless and destructive. Middle-class women were born there and will not understand lower class experience by becoming poor or stuff like that. Middle class women are responsible for their actions and statements, however; those can be dealt with. I don't like to suggest individual solutions but it seems to me that overcoming guilt is a head trip that each woman must struggle through. But just the absolution of middle-class guilt is not going to do anything to fill the needs of working class women..Maybe it will unparalyze some women to do necessary work which will relate to all of us. PAGE 4 VOL. 1, NO 16 AIN'T I
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[photo] THOUGHTS ON ME Right now my class consciousness is an all-over-the-place feeling, a sort of burst of identification with working class female resentment. I think I've just been through an absolution of guilt that I didn't have to have. Like being officially acknowledged as working class -- to myself mostly -- and the most real thing was the pain of realizing I didn't have the choices, the privileges; I thought I had just avoided them -- but they weren't ever available. For a long time I assumed that I'd have the choices of a middle class lifestyle if I just got through college, just managed to stay in and live cheap until I could start making $7000 a year and see what it was like, and then I'd fuck that and be a freak and move back to the alley. Well, I got to be a freak and live on the alley all right but I missed the in-between part. I never got to go on that little spending spree. And now I know I never will. But all the time I was a freak I identified somehow with the middle-classness of that lifestyle -- the phony anti-materialism, the rejection of financial security, the valuing of sensuality, spiritualism and intellectualizing, and the guilt of being reminded that we couldn't go home to our parents and live in style if we wanted to. But I know I had more of the material things I wanted when I was on my own than when I was growing up. I didn't have much privilege to reject -- but I felt guilty anyway cause I thought I could make it in the straight world if I changed my lifestyle to get a job. I never stopped thinking about money. Maybe that's the key to it. My parents made me aware of it by the time I was seven at most. I knew money was important to think about because they asked me more questions about it than about what I did at school or who I played with or where I went or when I was going to be back or how I felt. Who what when where how -- why came when I got caught shoplifting. I was eleven. My mother asked me why, why. I didn't want to talk about it. I was pissed off. She threatened not to let me go to Girl Scout camp. But I went anyway and I think my aunt paid for it. That was a real middle class trip and there wasn't anyone into shoplifting there. So I taught everyone in my unit how to play poker for chips and bottle caps. And I gave up shoplifting for ten years. I guess I'm trying to sound tough. Just keep remembering that every sanction was an economic sanction. Except maybe tow other things about my parents that made me feel wierd. One was that they always freaked out about my wanting to stay up late at night. They never really explained it any more than that it wasn't right not to live on their schedule. The other thing was that I felt they really lost track of where I was at by the time I was eight or so. I envied the easy-going relationships most of my girlfriends had with their mothers. My friends woulds say how they'd really get mad sometimes but they knew their mothers loved them anyway. I didn't feel like that. I don't know how they felt about me or about each other except antagonistic. I got it figured with my father when I was fifteen and told him I hated him. He accepted it. By that time I didn't hate my mother. I felt sorry for her. There is a myth about growing up in a working class family, a myth to the tune of "All You Need Is Love." The myth says that working class parents are strict but loving, given to displaying emotions, close to family people, unusually strong moralizers. I guess I was feeling like that's how some of my friends' parents were, but mine weren't, so mine weren't in the same class. It wasn't material. My parents related to cultural things that I identified as middle class or upper-middle class -- classical art, classical or artsy music, "intellectual" books on history and religion. And they didn't care about cars or interior decorating or the latest in house appliances. Back to the myth -- one of my favorite songs says it too -- "I grew up in faded denims where love is a precious thing / You grew up in silk and satin where love is a game you play." My parents were uptight and cold. Middle class parents have no monopoly on making their kids feel unloved and isolated. So I felt little security on that score and on the economic score too. I was -- still am --feeling insecure; it's my basic paranoid feeling -- the theme of my nightmares and bum trips. Roxanne Dunbar's poem that we printed "never having been sure of anything..." that says it, but how to change it is a struggle. How to deal with that feeling when it absolutely paralyzes me or distracts me so much that I spin my wheels and speed around and make impossible demands on people. Sometimes I have had the money to distract myself with a new toy. I made a down payment on my first guitar when I was really depressed, and I loved that thing for at least five weeks; it was all I needed. Then I went into a drinking thing. And I went out with whatever men would buy me enough to get drunk on and sometimes I'd leave and sometimes they wouldn't let me and most times I'd get screwed and hate them and hate myself and want to get drunk. I did that for eight or ten months continuously. Now I have a sort of fear about drinking. It makes me feel too vulnerable. Thinking of booze and drugs reminds me of this "look how bad I'm being" syndrome which may be a class thing -- like acting tough, showing off in self-destructiveness. I've done that and been around people who were doing it but it's like I would be real pissed off at privileged people who did it and kind of in sympathy and going along with people who did it out of desperation, out of oppression. Like one night when I was lost in San Francisco I met a black woman who was a hooker and wanted junk -- I couldn't call that thrill-seeking, not in that scene. I know I'm rambling but all these things remind me. Desperation -- working class. Boredom -- middle class. Women have to deal with class in a way men don't. The whole social class mobility racket seems to apply only to white males. Maybe that's wrong. I don't know -- thinking about class in relation to women attached to men is something I just don't know 'cause it's so hypothetical to me. I never lived with a man who financially supported me (except my father). I think I'm feeling less schizophrenic about my class consciousness. THOUGHTS ON MIDDLE-CLASS GUILT Guilt reaction makes her focus on herself, her (already done) behavior. The defensive reaction to a confrontation includes and unacceptance of herself as she is: any white woman can be racist, any middle class woman can be class chauvinist. Unacceptance of herself--like the idealism of middle class: not dealing with reality but with what she wishes or would like to be. Being guilty for being middle class and not guilty for her class chauvinist action. Guilt is a protective reaction, makes her think of herself. Statement: Your chauvinist behavior/comment has hurt me. Reaction: I'm caught. I've failed to live up to my good self-image. I feel terrible. I want this person who has made me feel bad to listen to me and deal with my hurt. Result: The situation has been turned around to focus on the middle-class perspective. This happens in numerous situations; middle class experience is promoted as the norm, middle-class people are mostly more confident in articulating their feelings, etc. Working class women are sick of being made to feel responsible for class antagonism and being forced to relate to middle class guilt. Once we felt guilt for just being from a lower class. But feeling guilty for what you are is useless and destructive. Middle-class women were born there and will not understand lower class experience by becoming poor or stuff like that. Middle class women are responsible for their actions and statements, however; those can be dealt with. I don't like to suggest individual solutions but it seems to me that overcoming guilt is a head trip that each woman must struggle through. But just the absolution of middle-class guilt is not going to do anything to fill the needs of working class women..Maybe it will unparalyze some women to do necessary work which will relate to all of us. PAGE 4 VOL. 1, NO 16 AIN'T I
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