A Woman's Place
©1996 Georgia JonesWhere should a women's place be?
To borrow from an old joke: Anywhere she wants. It makes a good joke, a good line, but women have never courted the role. Women's history, even the history of feminism, shows a startling consistency in this. Women are almost universally reasonable about things like fairness and sharing. This is not the history of an eight-hundred pound gorilla.
If not anywhere she wants, then where?
For many women, more than we would like to think, a run down public housing development in the heart of a city which has experienced "white flight" and a degradation of all human services is a women's place. I heard a report by two young men who live in one such women's place: The Ida B. Wells public housing in Chicago, IL, where Eric Morse, a five year old boy, was dropped out of a fourteen story building in the fall of 1994.
The news stories that followed told about the sad parent, the destroyed lives, the child's death. About the indignation of public officials who blamed the welfare system and each other. But Lee Allen Jones and Lloyd Newman, who live in the neighborhood and reported for "All Things Considered" on NPR, captured the futility of this place when they described Eric's older brother running down fourteen floors expecting to catch Eric before he hit the pavement. It is easy to understand why anyone, especially a child of eight, might think that even the laws of physics would be suspended in a place like this. Yet, there was hope in each of the children these young men, barely more than children themselves, interviewed. Each child and each mother was hoping that they, or their children would be the child who was spared.
This apartment complex, this poverty is a women's place. A place where women are separated from the rest of society; left alone to struggle; raising children alone; separated from each other by the fear that one mother's mistake might somehow be transmitted to another's child in a fabric that is already torn and ready to shred. This is a women's place all too often, because women, all too often, are not given the option of choosing.
Ideally, a women's place is anywhere she makes it. A women's place is not just a location. Women can be found everywhere. Most societies are becoming open to the presence of women, and in the United States "men only" is as unpopular and unlikely as "whites only." Yet, the presence of women in schools, universities, offices, boardrooms, clubs, spas, churches... The presence of women in any of these places does not make them a women's place.
My children grew up in many women's places. The youngest learned to walk among the legs and torn jeans of a group of radical feminists who started the first women's news service in the world. Most of my feminist group thought I had no place spending my time with two boys and a husband, but that was a women's place, too, my household, my place.
A women's place begins to be defined as first a place of choice. A women's place is not a place to which women are sent, or relegated, or appropriated. A women's place is one where women go willingly, even with excitement. It has to be a place where each woman is comfortable, and still a place of joining, of women. A women's place is also a place of occupation: of gathering, sharing, doing, talking, thinking, creating in the company of other women.
Is a place occupied solely by women a women's place?
A woman is something more than biology and the imprint of our presence is more as well—Just as a male-defined society cannot be defined as the company of men; both are ways of being that involve mind and spirit more than body parts. How can we be separate from all our selves?
Gender, it would seem, is of little consequence or not the final definer of a place for women. But, there are so many of us, each with her own direction, her own idea of what a woman is, a feminist should be, or how a place should be defined. We are all women, but none of us is the same. We are all women and we are all unique.
If you take women's history for your example you will find struggle. Struggle, of course, because we have had to work and fight against the dominant society, but more than that I think. Women's history has been one of building, of growth, of constant change. How could it be otherwise if the unique in each individual is allowed to be? How can women be anything but strugglers, builders, when the uniqueness of our individual selves is patterned on our nature. Even when we sit and knit we are changing worlds of preconceptions inside out minds. We are creators and each is a universe unto herself. Perhaps the direction we need is cosmic!
Perhaps a women's place is somewhere where bodies circle and influence each other, where each is given space for its own orbit. It is a constant struggle, a journey not an arrival, to continue this cosmic dance where no one falls in line because there is no line, but each depends on the force of the others around her to help her on her way.
