I am not resigned ...

 

By JoAnne Young

 

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

 

This Gloria Steinem quote was taped to my desk at work for thirty-six years. It reminded me every morning of what I had to do that day as a reporter at the Journal Star. Seek the truth as a woman. Seek out women’s issues to report on. Seek out female leaders and sources to add to my  stories, because women frequently view things differently.

 

Gloria Steinem came on the scene when I was in high school and she solidified her position in my consciousness beginning in my college years. She helped to change my life and those of many in my generation. Because of her and others like her, I knew I could have a career, that I could fight to be a visible member of my community, state and country. I knew that women’s rights were within our grasp. That I should not fail, ever, to vote. 

 

In a fairly recent interview Gloria Steinman talked about how many of us who grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s had mothers who could not be fully be their own talented, autonomous independent selves. In some ways, she said, many of us are living out the unfulfilled lives of our mothers. 

 

My mother had been a registered nurse, like her mother, until she married and gave up her career to be a military wife and mother to two daughters. I’m sure I got my love of science and all things medical from her. As a little girl, I would sit on her bedroom floor and drag her American Journal of Nursing magazines from under the bed, flipping page by page. As I became a journalist, my interests turned to politics, medicine, hospitals, health and human services, prisons for the paper. I watched every medical show I could find, from Dr. Kildare to St. Elsewhere to Grey’s Anatomy to The Pitt, and now volunteer at Bryan West’s emergency triage area. 

 

As Steinem said, the sorrow is that our mothers should have been able to complete their own lives and continue with what they loved. Many just didn’t.

 

Steinem came to Lincoln several times to speak and lobby and rally women. In 1991 she spoke to 2,300 women and men at the Lied Center, telling them it was clear they had the makings of a revolution right here in Nebraska. 

 

It was true. Somewhere in that decade I remember going to Misle Chevrolet, a couple of children in tow, to look for a new used car big enough for two adults and three kids. We walked onto the lot and a young man greeted us. I told him what I was looking for. His first question to me was: Does your husband know you are here to buy a car? I looked at him for a few seconds, trying to gather my composure, turned, and I and the children got back in our car and left, never to return. 

 

Yes, things are better now. A woman is mayor of Lincoln, women’s sports are taking the country by storm, a woman sold me my new Subaru last year and another woman handled my one-year service check. 

 

Still, there are men in power today, and some women supporting them, who would drag us backward, out of the workplace and into the role of trad wives. You women must, they tell us, have more babies. Many babies. They want to take money out of funds for subsidized child care for working mothers and give it to stay-at-home moms. 

 

So this is no time, Gloria Steinem, for you to be taking leave of us. But I know you have fought the good fight and now it’s time for others to take up our cause. The problem is, there are a lot of good, important women we need who have also left us. That’s the way this works. Our bodies can take so much. They start looking for an exit, before we are ready, while we are still needed. 

 

These women leave a legacy, but is that enough for our granddaughters who never saw them in action. They can read their words, watch interviews, but they don’t have that comfort and encouragement knowing Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dolly Parton, Toni Morrison, Leola Bullock are in this world and we can ponder, what will they be up to next? 

 

There are those they may never remember, like physician and researcher Marthe Gautier,   because a male colleague took credit for her work in identifying the extra chromosome cause of Down syndrome. She had cultured the cells, prepared the slides, looked at them through the microscope, counted the chromosomes and shouted “Yes!” on her discovery. Dr. Jérôme Lejeuneautier offered to get pictures made of her slides, and then he proceeded to offer the findings at scientific meetings and journals as his own. 

 

“The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.” 

 

Keep these women in your thoughts, and in your words to your daughters and granddaughters. 

 

I offer these words, this Dirge Without Music, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a brilliant poet and feminist, who left us before I could ever feel her presence. 

 

“I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

 

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

 

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

 

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.”