Throwing off the burden of generations
One of the most difficult things to accept about myself is that I have an ability to communicate and write. People have told me "you write beautifully!" but it's been very hard to internalize this.
Why? Well, the first thing I always want to do is blame my Mother for her discouraging and disparaging remarks about my writing. Writing was never to be a career--it was, at best, only to be a hobby. If at all.
So, daily, I struggle to think clearly about what I want to write. I struggle to get out blog entries and start articles on this or that. I struggle to return phone calls (when I get them), struggle to send out query letters, and I struggle with the simple concept that what I'm doing is who I am and it's okay--and the right thing--to be doing for a living.
My struggle, though, has very deep roots. And it's not my struggle alone, but part of a family-long struggle of each talented woman in my mother's family to deal with her own artisitc abilities...
You see, I come from a family of artists, and musicians, and theater people. It's who we are. My godmother is an artist--has received awards for her work. She was even tapped with a partial scholarship to Parson's School of Design--but, like most of us, she was told she could not go, that there was not enough money in the family to complete the family portion of the scholarship, that it was Wartime and they feared for her safetly...
a bunch of lame excuses we always accepted because we always trusted...
There was, however, always money for weddings. Large, elaborate, ostentatious weddings. The cousin who left school at 16 to marry her Navy-man high school sweetheart and have babies was the one everyone adored and venerated.
Every cousin who married and had babies above everything else is venerated.
The rest of us are trash.
My mother was also a wonderful artist. Even though color-blind, she could draw beatifully, could crochet and sew and many other wonderful things. She'd been a milliner when she was young--but the shop closed and she couldn't go on to a shop in New York, where she would have had a very good career.
Only bad girls did those things. Only bad girls were artists or joined the Army, or did anything that could make them independent...
Another cousin married an architecht. Her son became an artist and is now a designer with a well-known theatrical troupe. She channeled her artistic abilities into sewing and designed her own clothing.
Another aunt was asked to join a vaudeville troupe. The family flipped out. It was forbidden. She was married off.
When I showed talents for performing and storytelling at a very young age, it was made clear to me that these were bad things. When I was small, I didn't know why these things were bad--just that I had "too much imagination" and was "too forward" and that this was not a good thing for a girl to be.
Later on, my Mother told me--Grandma (born in the 1870's) said that only prostitutes did these kinds of things. Only prostitutes were actresses and writers and artists. Not good girls. If we pursued these things we wouldn't be marriageable.
This has bothered me for years. What was it that equated being an artist or an actress or a writer, in my Grandmother's mind, with prostitution??
Studying religion has given me many gifts--of those gifts is a love of dusty libraries and the patience to do massive amounts of research. The ideas that education and the arts are associated with prostitution go way, way back in Italian culture--back to the days of Rome...
Did you know that the only women who were allowed to learn philosophy in ancient Rome (and ancient Greece) were prostitutes? That "good" women didn't associate with those kinds of men, and certainly didn't go to any functions where these dudes were laying around talking about this kind of stuff--and even if they did, they were best seen and not heard.
Did you know that many women who were early converts to Christianity did so in order to have the freedom to learn? Vows of chastity and virginity made it so that women could learn without becoming prostitutes. So if you think the Roman pagans were such great feminists, think again. Women converted to Christianity to get out of arranged Roman marriages (usually to much older men and for the purpose of supporting their widowed mothers) and they were forbidden educations. So, to become a Christian, and to take a vow of chastity, a girl would be not just thumbing her nose at Roman relgious/societal convention, but would also be free to learn without having to have sex with some stinky old dude. What a Novel Concept!
It wouldn't last too long however. Thanks for nothing, Constantine.
Did you know that the idea of educated prostitutes continued in Italy esp. for many centuries after Christianity became the official religion of Rome? Yes, it's true--women who were smart were often prostitutes, even in the Renaissance and beyond. Wives didn't need educations. Nuns could get educations if they wanted, but even Nuns were sometimes better left not educated. After awhile, even Nuns had to struggle for the right to be educated.
Ever hear ofArtemesia Gentileschi? Artemesia Gentileschi was a woman painter (1593-1653) who is considered one of the best of the Barouqe artists. She was trained by her father, but had a very difficult life because women just weren't painters. If they were painters, they must be prostitutes. She was raped--and the transcript of the 162 trial is still around.
Did you know that courtesans have been, for centuries, associated with acting and the theater? I'm always reminded of Emile Zola's Nana, which I read in high school study hall (because everything else was boring)--that was the first time I was introduced to the courtesan-as-theatrical person idea. Later, in other research, I found out about women like 19th-century's Cora Pearl, whose Father was a musician...but it goes beyond that. In the library I found many wonderful books that explained all this.
I don't know all that much about my Italian family other than that they came for Palermo, Sicily, and that we supposedly had no relatives living locally--a few in New York, but no one locally. Which, upon my Mother's death, I learned was a crock. We had lots of relatives right in the town in which we lived.
But I have no idea who any of them are. And they have no idea who I am either.
My Mother's family had too many secrets--and all of those secrets link back to a strange supression of women's artistic talents because of a centuries-old link of those talents with prostitution...
Sheesh. I have to dig myself out from under a whole lot of ossified generational crap in order to be able to be Me--fully and without apology.
Because I can't stand being anyone otherwise.
No wonder my head hurts, I get paralyzing writer's block, and I want to cry sometimes. Sometimes the shovelfuls of crap I'm digging out from under are just way too heavy...
I think I'm crying for generations of women in my family who were pressured not to express their talents, who were probably herded into loveless marriages in order to be "good" women...
And I know I cry for my Mom...who suffered for years before, only in old age, she allowed herself to draw and paint and express who she really was (with no support from my Father--who has his own very warped ideas about "good" women.)
But I'm not crying for myself. I've made some choices over the past year that, while difficult to implement at times, will yield a much more satisfying life than if I simply keep trying to contort and conform myself into someone I'm not.
Yeah, it's hard and it sucks and at times it feels like it's not enough and that I'm a bit too late to the Ball and my dress doesn't fit right...
but what the heck.
Still, it's been an amazing thing to go back and to research all of the old attitudes about women and art/theater/writing/education to find the links that have created chains that still bind up some of our talents, even when we live in a time and place where those cultural understandings aren't supposed to have any effect on us. But culture doesn't exist in a particular place nor isolated in a textbook and isn't easily exorcised by assimilation. Culture is passed on in traditions within families as much as it exists in all the little purchasable trappings we see around us daily. Only the rebellious and the strong are the ones who can break free of old cultural ways that limit human potential....
Some folks nowadays feel that other cultures shouldn't fully assimilate--that we should "celebrate diversity"....
Yet if we continue to celebrate diversity in the smarmy, condescending, guilty white-bread manner in which we do, could we, perhaps, be denying the world some of the greatest artists, or writers, or performers, or philosophers, of out time?
Think about it.
Why? Well, the first thing I always want to do is blame my Mother for her discouraging and disparaging remarks about my writing. Writing was never to be a career--it was, at best, only to be a hobby. If at all.
So, daily, I struggle to think clearly about what I want to write. I struggle to get out blog entries and start articles on this or that. I struggle to return phone calls (when I get them), struggle to send out query letters, and I struggle with the simple concept that what I'm doing is who I am and it's okay--and the right thing--to be doing for a living.
My struggle, though, has very deep roots. And it's not my struggle alone, but part of a family-long struggle of each talented woman in my mother's family to deal with her own artisitc abilities...
You see, I come from a family of artists, and musicians, and theater people. It's who we are. My godmother is an artist--has received awards for her work. She was even tapped with a partial scholarship to Parson's School of Design--but, like most of us, she was told she could not go, that there was not enough money in the family to complete the family portion of the scholarship, that it was Wartime and they feared for her safetly...
a bunch of lame excuses we always accepted because we always trusted...
There was, however, always money for weddings. Large, elaborate, ostentatious weddings. The cousin who left school at 16 to marry her Navy-man high school sweetheart and have babies was the one everyone adored and venerated.
Every cousin who married and had babies above everything else is venerated.
The rest of us are trash.
My mother was also a wonderful artist. Even though color-blind, she could draw beatifully, could crochet and sew and many other wonderful things. She'd been a milliner when she was young--but the shop closed and she couldn't go on to a shop in New York, where she would have had a very good career.
Only bad girls did those things. Only bad girls were artists or joined the Army, or did anything that could make them independent...
Another cousin married an architecht. Her son became an artist and is now a designer with a well-known theatrical troupe. She channeled her artistic abilities into sewing and designed her own clothing.
Another aunt was asked to join a vaudeville troupe. The family flipped out. It was forbidden. She was married off.
When I showed talents for performing and storytelling at a very young age, it was made clear to me that these were bad things. When I was small, I didn't know why these things were bad--just that I had "too much imagination" and was "too forward" and that this was not a good thing for a girl to be.
Later on, my Mother told me--Grandma (born in the 1870's) said that only prostitutes did these kinds of things. Only prostitutes were actresses and writers and artists. Not good girls. If we pursued these things we wouldn't be marriageable.
This has bothered me for years. What was it that equated being an artist or an actress or a writer, in my Grandmother's mind, with prostitution??
Studying religion has given me many gifts--of those gifts is a love of dusty libraries and the patience to do massive amounts of research. The ideas that education and the arts are associated with prostitution go way, way back in Italian culture--back to the days of Rome...
Did you know that the only women who were allowed to learn philosophy in ancient Rome (and ancient Greece) were prostitutes? That "good" women didn't associate with those kinds of men, and certainly didn't go to any functions where these dudes were laying around talking about this kind of stuff--and even if they did, they were best seen and not heard.
Did you know that many women who were early converts to Christianity did so in order to have the freedom to learn? Vows of chastity and virginity made it so that women could learn without becoming prostitutes. So if you think the Roman pagans were such great feminists, think again. Women converted to Christianity to get out of arranged Roman marriages (usually to much older men and for the purpose of supporting their widowed mothers) and they were forbidden educations. So, to become a Christian, and to take a vow of chastity, a girl would be not just thumbing her nose at Roman relgious/societal convention, but would also be free to learn without having to have sex with some stinky old dude. What a Novel Concept!
It wouldn't last too long however. Thanks for nothing, Constantine.
Did you know that the idea of educated prostitutes continued in Italy esp. for many centuries after Christianity became the official religion of Rome? Yes, it's true--women who were smart were often prostitutes, even in the Renaissance and beyond. Wives didn't need educations. Nuns could get educations if they wanted, but even Nuns were sometimes better left not educated. After awhile, even Nuns had to struggle for the right to be educated.
Ever hear ofArtemesia Gentileschi? Artemesia Gentileschi was a woman painter (1593-1653) who is considered one of the best of the Barouqe artists. She was trained by her father, but had a very difficult life because women just weren't painters. If they were painters, they must be prostitutes. She was raped--and the transcript of the 162 trial is still around.
Did you know that courtesans have been, for centuries, associated with acting and the theater? I'm always reminded of Emile Zola's Nana, which I read in high school study hall (because everything else was boring)--that was the first time I was introduced to the courtesan-as-theatrical person idea. Later, in other research, I found out about women like 19th-century's Cora Pearl, whose Father was a musician...but it goes beyond that. In the library I found many wonderful books that explained all this.
I don't know all that much about my Italian family other than that they came for Palermo, Sicily, and that we supposedly had no relatives living locally--a few in New York, but no one locally. Which, upon my Mother's death, I learned was a crock. We had lots of relatives right in the town in which we lived.
But I have no idea who any of them are. And they have no idea who I am either.
My Mother's family had too many secrets--and all of those secrets link back to a strange supression of women's artistic talents because of a centuries-old link of those talents with prostitution...
Sheesh. I have to dig myself out from under a whole lot of ossified generational crap in order to be able to be Me--fully and without apology.
Because I can't stand being anyone otherwise.
No wonder my head hurts, I get paralyzing writer's block, and I want to cry sometimes. Sometimes the shovelfuls of crap I'm digging out from under are just way too heavy...
I think I'm crying for generations of women in my family who were pressured not to express their talents, who were probably herded into loveless marriages in order to be "good" women...
And I know I cry for my Mom...who suffered for years before, only in old age, she allowed herself to draw and paint and express who she really was (with no support from my Father--who has his own very warped ideas about "good" women.)
But I'm not crying for myself. I've made some choices over the past year that, while difficult to implement at times, will yield a much more satisfying life than if I simply keep trying to contort and conform myself into someone I'm not.
Yeah, it's hard and it sucks and at times it feels like it's not enough and that I'm a bit too late to the Ball and my dress doesn't fit right...
but what the heck.
Still, it's been an amazing thing to go back and to research all of the old attitudes about women and art/theater/writing/education to find the links that have created chains that still bind up some of our talents, even when we live in a time and place where those cultural understandings aren't supposed to have any effect on us. But culture doesn't exist in a particular place nor isolated in a textbook and isn't easily exorcised by assimilation. Culture is passed on in traditions within families as much as it exists in all the little purchasable trappings we see around us daily. Only the rebellious and the strong are the ones who can break free of old cultural ways that limit human potential....
Some folks nowadays feel that other cultures shouldn't fully assimilate--that we should "celebrate diversity"....
Yet if we continue to celebrate diversity in the smarmy, condescending, guilty white-bread manner in which we do, could we, perhaps, be denying the world some of the greatest artists, or writers, or performers, or philosophers, of out time?
Think about it.
Photos courtesy of Alice Ungar
posted by Tish Grier at 6:02 PM
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