Is Feminism the New F Word? From Resistant to Responsive by Lola Solis

“That’s not lady like,” my grandma scolded me as I sat without crossing my legs at seven years old.

“Do you expect boys to respect you dressed like that?” my fifth grade teacher asked regarding my outfit of skirt and knee high socks.

“You’re showing too much skin,” my dad stated when at sixteen I wore a demure blouse to a birthday dinner. 

“You’re just asking for it with that dress,” I overheard a group of men saying as I walked into the bar on my eighteenth birthday.

 

These comments repeat themselves in my head like a broken record. As a young girl, I grew up hearing these statements so often it that became imprinted into my mind. Living in Allen, Texas, was like living in an inescapable bubble where my actions hardly ever went unnoticed, especially if they strayed from typical Texas conservatism. I remember walking into my high school office during my senior year to check in and receiving looks of absolute disgust at my brand new Rosie the Riveter tattoo from the Caucasian secretaries at the front desk. They looked at me like I was some animal, and I couldn’t help but laugh to myself at their dismay. Purposefully, I lifted up my dress past mid thigh so they could get a complete look at it. Horror struck their faces as I danced away. I made sure they knew I was proud to be a feminist. In spite of Rosie the Riveter being the heroic image of the 40’s that allowed women to work, the secretaries remain politicized by their own sex and unable to realize the historical importance of her being the transformational image of American iconography.

 

Some women can escape social conformity and become conscious of the incredibly sexist, patriarchal society we live in. Others are trapped and are incapable of realizing their true identity because they are the product of someone else’s identity formation. I fortunately have been able to remove myself from the worldwide view of women that objectifies and degrades us. Through years of breaking barriers that prevented me from formulating my own thoughts, identity, and beliefs, I’m able now to shape my own experience and to empower women as they have empowered me. Why is it that some women are able to see their political potential and others only see envy?

 

Ever since Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique used the identifiers feminist, feminism and feminists, these words have gained negative connotations. When I began to voice my opinions and argue back to conservative views that inherently put down women, I and many others who wished to combat the patriarchy obtained a sort of nickname; we were called the FemiNazis. I didn’t get tough by allowing a petty nickname to stop me from fighting for women, but the fact that people are comparing us to murderers who assisted in a genocide against Jews is unfathomable. Why are people so afraid of equality? Is this because we only earn roughly 75 cents to a dollar for doing the same job that a man does? Why so mute if not to suggest that silence equals acquiescence? Are they so reluctant to not see their enlightened self interest ought to have them representing equal pay as workers? I am haunted day and night by the resistance to delivering equal status for all. While women have been objectified for centuries, and men have always been the ones to issue power, I can somewhat understand the resistance to changing what some people may call normality. Just because it is tradition doesn’t make it just. For example, slavery was an American (peculiar) institution until 1865. I do not seek to diminish the road to freedom that African Americans were on, but sometimes I wonder about the American grain. Do we want women as property or do we want women as persons? I am sick and exhausted of this war against women and I will not stop until it is over.  Breaking social and economic gender barriers is not a job that can be accomplished overnight, nor can it be done alone.

 

I never really understood the power of voicing my opinions and standing up for my beliefs until this past year when old friends from high school contacted me to let me know how much I inspired them. One student wrote: “I respect you embracing how you are different from others from how you dress to your interests…I love that you are firm on your beliefs. I love how you strive really hard for the social equality of women as well as overall feminism. I love that you are trying so hard to make social change and make you voice be heard” (Small, par. 2).

 

Although one often hears about activists like Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and their leadership in civil rights, one never really believes that one has the power of doing the same. This is the mindset that is hindering society from moving towards gender equality. As smart and capable as I know I am to lead a movement, I need help from fellow individuals who experience the same passion and drive for justice as me. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King states, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” (Par. 11). By demanding that we break gender norms and fight back anti-feminist comments, we are following King’s nonviolent path to social change. What we need to bring to light is how absurd it is to be so terrified of our sex. Does a women scare us so much, that we feel as though we must do everything in our power to keep us from becoming equal to us? Like King asks his readers to imagine what we are supposed to tell our colored children about Jim Crow, I wonder what do American mothers tell their daughters. As Gloria Anzaldua puts it, do they tell them to tame their wild tongues? The tongue is to feminism as the non violent sit-in is to the Civil Right’s movement. 

 

Many men and women have claimed that my wild tongue is intimidating and “unattractive,” but underneath what they are saying is the acknowledgement that I can be articulate. I am strong, independent, and verbal about issues affecting women and I will never give in to intimidation by men and counterproductive strategies by women. If we want to destroy the walls that separate us, then we must stand strong and continue to bring to light the issues that have been pushed aside and ignored by politicians for decades. 

“We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they’ve created, lie bleached…Chicanos will walk by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, preserving, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable. We…will remain” (Anzaldua pg. 85)

 

 

Despite the various negative connotations of the word feminist, I will never stop identifying as one. Although it takes many hits, feminism is actually an indication of progress. In Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, she states, “In national surveys 75 to 95 percent of women credit the feminist campaign with improving their lives, and a similar proportion say that the women's movement should keep pushing for change” (Faludi Par. 23). If women are benefiting from the feminist movement, why stop?

 

Works Cited

 

Anzaldua, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 

Web. 28 March 2016.

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]." Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]. Web. 28

March 2016.

Small, Jennifer. Text message to author. 8 November 2016.

 

Painting the Texas Hill Country: An Interview with DUSTY PENDLETON



KIRPAL GORDON:  As you enter your 41st year of working as a painter, do you have any thoughts on your career so far?

DUSTY PENDLETON:  First of all, I’ve never considered what I do or have as being a ‘career.’ This is in direct opposition to the idea of ‘careerism’ in the arts wherein a certain amount of time and energy is spent on self-promotion and hype in order to get the works sold. My feelings have always run to the idea that if what I’m doing is legitimate, then it will be allowed to continue being done. If the work resonates, then someone will find it to be something that they'd wish to keep.  For many, that’s not possible but for some, it is and they buy it. Like Stieglitz said of the works in his gallery, “These works are for sale, but no, we do not sell art.”



KIRPAL GORDON:  How did you come to this way of thinking?

DUSTY PENDLETON: I’d read of Stieglitz while studying art history, but it wasn’t until arriving in NYC that I encountered how the system works there. That Grand Dame of the Artists Information Registry, that sort of clearing house for artists and gallery connections, put it to me as, “Who do you think you are? You've got to find a gallery, go to openings, attend the parties and maybe get your own solo show and then another gallery will notice how your works are doing and they will steal you away from the first gallery and so forth.” That's when I became aware of the dictum, ‘It’s not about the art, it’s about the artist.’ Plus, I found that no gallery would consider showing the 
figure, certainly not the nude. So, to get noticed, I’d have to be working within the parameters of what I called the style du jour. None of that made me want to be a part of the scene, so I didn’t.  It’s that simple.

KIRPAL GORDON: Has it been difficult to be outside the mainstream?

DUSTY PENDLETON: There have been times, certainly, when I could have been better  funded. However, Martha, my wife of 41 years, has always been supportive and kept the wolves at bay when needed. When times have been better, we’ve been able to move about to more interesting locales with lower overheads.  We’re in this together, you see.  Also, we both really enjoyed the foreign experiences, which seem quite exotic but were actually more a case of lower overhead expenses. To live for a year in Paris was less expensive than a year in NYC during the 70s and a year in England was less expensive than Paris in the 80s and so on. Plus, there was the added bonus of the respect that Europeans or Mexicans have for anyone in the arts and they aren’t so hide bound about accepting them into their community.



KIRPAL GORDON:  I notice that, since returning to Texas, you’ve become more of a landscape painter. Is that because Texas is more open to your landscapes than your figure work? I can’t imagine Texas as being a place where the nude is all right as subject matter.

DUSTY PENDLETON:  Texas, or ‘Takes-us’ as I call it, is still a mish mash of uptight and liberal but I did find that Austin was a great venue and nudes aren’t an issue there. However, the galleries suffered in this recession and all that carried my work are now defunct. The landscape here is beautiful but rapidly vanishing due to the booming population so what I’m doing is essentially fiction---painting what I remember it to have been. It’s also a place where the sun is merciless so the landscapes are best seen in the crepuscular light of twilight or early morning.  Everything that I do is accomplished in the studio and is of things remembered. This studio is also a reason to be here. The space is twice the size of any apartment that we ever had in Paris or 
anywhere else in Europe or Mexico and far and away less expensive. It may be that affordable space combined with on line communication will make artists aware that living and working NYC isn’t all that necessary and there are thousands of us out here in the hinterlands who are doing just fine.



KIRPAL GORDON:  How can interested viewers see your work?

DUSTY PENDLETON: If what they’ve seen on this blog piques an interest, they can go to http://www.pendletonart.com/ to see more works and my contact information.  We’ll work from there to see what can be arranged.