Reflections - cover2

Thoughts on being a Lady
Looking back, I can see that all of these admonitions had a common denominator – developing the element of self-control. They were
administered along with generous doses of Southern-fried Baptist theology. So to break any of these commandments, either maternal or
theological, was a defiance of both Mother and God – hell on earth and hell in the hereafter. I persevered, somehow. That I was not decoding the
same messages she was encoding escaped her attention until it was too late.
Because of this intense programming, I entered adolescence with a sense of my own worth as a person and the faint glimmerings of possibilities –
perhaps more than most girls of my generation. I was never addressed or treated as a child. I was never encouraged to mother dolls or have
friends my own age, nor did I have many toys – I could put all the toys I ever had in a medium sized trash basket. I did have books. I read a lot. I
was alone a lot. I listened to adult conversations. I observed, I noted, I thought.
However, it was at this point in my life that the messages took an abrupt turn. MAN had entered the picture. Admonitions began to deal not just
with me, but me in relation to men, love, and marriage. Now here we go.
“The most important thing a girl can do in life is to make a good marriage.”
“You can love a rich man just as easily as a poor man.”
“Love to a man is a thing apart, but to a woman ‘tis her entire existence.” – paraphrased from Robert Browning.
Society did its part, too, with heavy indoctrination from the Rock Hudson/Doris Day school of thought. Had his predilection for boys been known,
we might have been spared this indignity. Sunday School class, sexually segregated at the local Baptist Church (I feel reasonably sure this is done
so as to better teach a different set of values to each sex), began to put pointed emphasis on the travails of adulterous wives and the virtues of such
Biblical characters as Ruth and her “whither thou guest” routine. My God! Why didn’t someone mention the other Jewish heroines, like Judith
who seduced and then beheaded Holofernes in flagrante delicto in order to save her fellow countrymen? I was over forty before I heard that one in
an art history class.
I began to suspect darkly that my mother’s pride in my academic success was based on her belief that this would raise my stock in the marriage
market, rather than any ambition she might have for me to have a career of my own. The glimmerings of possibilities, on the point of bursting into
flame, began to sputter. Doubt, questions, confusion. Was I supposed to define myself only in relation to someone else? These new messages
somehow didn’t connect with those oft-repeated childhood exhortations to independence, self-assurance, distinction, achievement. It now seemed
that those things, as well as my mind, were valuable only in so far as they assured me of catching a man. It had become apparent that this was the
name of the game.
I sputtered along for twenty years; then one day the glimmer burst into flame. Well, the rest is history and has no pertinence to the discussion at
hand. But here I am at 44 with my consciousness raised, sometimes to a fever pitch, still struggling with the question of being a lady.
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