Two Rooms of My Own

During World War II, my friend’s mother was studying history at a small Lutheran college in Columbus, Ohio.  She was summoned to an advisor’s office when the war ended and told she must change her major.  The men were coming home soon, and they’d be needing those history teaching jobs so they could coach high school sports.  Rather than study something else that didn’t interest her, she dropped out of college and got married.  Not until her youngest child—my friend—went to college 30 years later did she return and finish her degree.

The end of the men’s war heralded the start of a women’s war.

When my two sisters enrolled in that same college in the mid-1960s, they were offered a choice of two majors:  education or nursing.  They chose education.  One of my sisters taught elementary school until she retired; the other wandered off into other fields for which she was probably always better suited.

My sisters are only nine and ten years older than I am, but we might as well have come from different generations.  A seismic shift between their coming-of-age and mine changed almost everything about our lives.  Though it had a long incubation—50 years from gaining the vote to gaining traction in our daily lives—the Women’s Movement seemed to spring suddenly out of nowhere, erasing old borders and planting new flags of possibility everywhere.

For us who were girls then, it was like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the black-and-white screen transforms into dizzying technicolor.  Our world would never look the same again.  This was both exciting and terrifying.  If we could not walk where our mothers and sisters had, where was the path?  Where paths did not exist, how were we to blaze them? 

It felt like unprecedented emancipation that created a sense of obligation never to follow in anyone else’s footsteps.  When I went to college, the only two majors I refused to consider were teaching or nursing.  With those off the table, I was free to pursue my own interests and goals—the sky was the limit!--but to do anything traditional seemed a betrayal of the Movement’s great promise. 

We knew what we were not supposed to be or do, but were less sure what we should strive for.  Much had been given to us, but much was also taken away.  We had no role models and no safety nets.  Our confusion wasn’t limited to college majors or future professions.  It seeped into every facet of our lives:  We were encouraged to be free-spirited, risk-taking, self-directed, sexually liberated bon vivants.  We were destined to have—as Virginia Woolf had prescribed decades earlier—money and rooms of our own to which no one else held a key. 

But what about all the other rooms in our lives, the rooms we share with others?  Every relationship, every act seemed to require negotiation with partners who were just as unsettled by the sudden change of rules.  Who would make dinner, who would be served, who would wash the dishes after?  Was it now counter-revolutionary to stitch a quilt or knit a sweater or adopt a man’s last name or give birth?  For many of us, it’s been a long process of coming home to the traditions we enjoy--those that feed our souls--and resisting judgments that may well have been figments of our imagination all along.

In my house there are two rooms where I appear domesticated:  my kitchen and my sewing room.  I say “my kitchen” not because I am the only one who cooks in it (I’m not) but because I designed it to reflect my taste and my sense of utility and purpose.  It is both beautiful and practical, and there I create dishes that are delicious to the eye, the nose, and the tongue--food that nourishes the bodies and souls of people I love.  It is the same in my sewing room.  I know where my tools are, I am surrounded by colors and textures, I lose all sense of time in the process of creating warmth and comfort for other people.   These are the rooms in which I play.

In all the other rooms and in the world at large, I am a force to be reckoned with, a voice for change, a loyal member of the sisterhood, a way-maker—to the greatest extent possible—for the next wave of young feminists.  My daughters live a completely different story.  Like people born into a religious sect, my daughters were born into feminism.  They never considered any path closed to them or believed their destiny was tied to their anatomy.  Whatever they chose to do was, by definition, something girls do.  They were surrounded by role models for any future they could envision.

Recently a friend’s little girl needed to see a doctor, but her regular pediatrician was away.  When a male doctor walked into the exam room, the child burst into surprised laughter.  “OMG!” she said, “A boy doctor!”  She had never imagined that possibility.

Proof that Virginia Woolf was right all along: “Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”