Jen Thorpe

By Jen Thorpe

It’s Sunday. I go to a mall to get some art supplies. It’s an ordinary mall, outdated even, with strange linoleum flooring and an assortment of second-hand stores and haberdasheries  It’s the type of mall your gran goes to for wool, or other assorted items needed when growing older.

So imagine my surprise when I walk past a new framers and see the worst poster I have ever seen. It’s A3 size and pale pink: the sort of pink you see on little girls birthday cards, or pregnancy cards. It’s amongst a host of other coloured posters all with sayings made up by the framers’ staff. The font is serif, bold and large. The content of this particular poster is so shocking that I scream ‘WHAT!’ very loudly, causing my boyfriend Mike to come spinning back to see what has happened to me, concern etched on his face.

“Keep calm and slap that bitch hard” is what the poster says.

I don’t even give Mike a chance to comment on it himself. He’s shaking his head and following me, as propelled by rage and shaking with it, I go to the door of the framers and bang on the door. It takes a few times for them to hear me because they’re drilling and building what I presume are the shelves where all the marvellous frames will go.

A middle-aged, dark haired, white sweaty man comes to the door smiling. He thinks I’m about to ask when they’re opening, his eyes are filled with information just waiting to come out for potential customers. I don’t give him the chance.

“I’m incredibly offended by your poster. It is ridiculous that you would ever think something like that was funny. We live in South Africa for heavens sake – we have such high levels of violence against women I can’t even begin to understand why you thought this was OK. I mean, come on, every eight minutes a woman is murdered by her intimate partner. What were you thinking…”

He interrupts me, his smile is gone and in its place is a rather stern frown.

“I’ll take it down. You’re the first person to say anything.”

I walk away, still shaking, unable to really focus on art supplies and trying to choose a pen unsuccesfully. When I walk back, the poster has been taken down. I go back to say thank you, he says “It’s a pleasure.”

Tammy Sutherns

By Tammy Sutherns

American poet and feminist Adrienne Rich has been gone for over a year now, following her death at the age of 82 in March 2012. We should not forget what her work meant, however.

Born in 1929, Rich was always a poet and a writer. She was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize by W.H Auden himself in her graduation year in 1951 for A Change of World and published a second volume of poetry, The Diamond Cutters in 1955. Her talent is undisputed.

What is interesting about Rich is how her poetry and the changes in its content over the years reflected her own personal struggles as well as what was happening in the world at the time. She was married in her early twenties to a Harvard University economist named Alfred H. Conrad and had three sons before the age of 30. During this time her poetry was described by Randall Jarrell as, “The poet [behind these poems] cannot help seeming to us a sort of princess in a fairy tale.” In a time of female suppression, when women were merely the perfect domestic goddesses with no careers, finances or rights, it is no surprise that Rich’s poetry took on fairy tale proportions. However, her unease as a woman and a wife in this type of society is already implied. In Living in Sin she writes:

Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
Sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
Declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
Rubbed at his beard, when out for cigarettes,
While she, jeered by the minor demons,
Pulled back to the sheets and made the bed and found
A towel to dust the table-top,
And let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
Though not so wholly but throughout the night
She woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
Like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

These first attempts at trying to understand feminism became increasingly confrontational over the next few decades with Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law and Leaflets exploring issues like a women’s role in society, the Vietnam War, and racism.
By 1997, Rich had completely established an identity as a feminist and an activist poet when she refused the National Medal of Arts and said,

“I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. [Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”

One of Rich’s most famous collections is Diving into the Wreck, which she wrote during a time of women’s liberation, war and the civil rights movement. It was also during a time when she was struggling with her own sexuality and had separated from her husband. The poems are angry and beautiful and earned her the National Book Award in 1974.
In 1976 Rich and novelist and editor Michelle Cliff began a relationship, which would become lifelong. Her poetry began to explore lesbianism with Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution where she wrote,

“The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.”

Rich’s development as a woman and the way she used poetry to explore these developments, eventually resulting in work that celebrated and came to terms with lesbian sexuality and a new found freedom in a difficult society, is a story of success.

Why it is important to remember Rich is because of how her poems and her words will never die. Her art exists for an eternity as a tribute and a beautiful example of how one woman went from a ‘50s wife to a feminist and an activist who had fully come to terms with her own sexuality. She is an example of how art can change the world and is a reminder of why we should continue to write about the issues currently destroying our own society like lack of education, rape, violence, abuse, unemployment and environmental pillage.

Do not put down the pen.

Tanya Pretorius

by Tanya Pretorius

IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE MAN

The love story of Pat and Tiffany is not clichéd, the dialogue is great, the acting is clear, the characters are quirky and real-ly flawed, but… (sigh)

Bechdel Test. You might snort at the mention of the Bechdel Test. It’s really less of a test and more of mental note that helps put you in the right, *cough*, feminist, frame of mind. It goes like this: 1. Are there two named female characters? 2. Do they speak to each other? 3. Do they speak to each other about something other than a man. This test establishes whether the action is about the man or about the woman. And it’s always about the man. I’ve got a mere 31 Bechdel-passers on my list so far – http://www.imdb.com/list/Z_tgoKChVPY/.

Feminist role models. I take my role models where I can get them. Tiffany (yes, that’s her name) is a 3D-character. She doesn’t do the girl-giggling thing. She’s slutty and sloppy and dirty and likes that about herself. She can talk dirty. She’ll indulge Pat’s lesbian fantasies and like it. She doesn’t choose her sex partners by gender. Tiffany doesn’t quite know what she wants from Pat and seems to take anything she can get – she starts off wanting sex, then wants to be friends, then agrees to dinner. She’s grown – she used to get used, now she knows how to check in and be sure she’s getting something back. She doesn’t give a fuck about football, but ‘does her homework’ on football well enough to know when games were played, who played who and what the scores were. Ominous. I’d be nervous if she ‘does her homework’ on me. Pat says Tiffany has poor social skills because she’s direct. All these things add up to a real girl who doesn’t toe the good-girl stereotype. I like her.

Unhealthy matches. The after-therapy, just-released-from-the-mental-hospital Pat deals with stress by becoming manic, Tiffany deals with stress using vodka and sex. Neither Tiffany nor Pat are employed. On which planet is this a healthy match? They establish what they have in common in one of the first conversations they have – the various medications they’ve been on. She chooses this man based on how damaged he is. This is not a good foundation on which to invite a man into your bed, which she promptly does. I still like her, sex is OK.

Sexism. The cynic in me rails against Them sneakily using such a fabulous girl to deliver this sexism to me, because it doesn’t matter how you dish this girl up, it’s still that same old sexist schtick – she’s a carer, a nurse who chooses a broken-wing man. She’s not an actor in her own world but a server in Their world. Retch.

Take-away. The various women in this film paint this picture for you of womanhood – women make lasagna (mother), cry wol…”harassing me!” (Tiffany), lie to you to manipulate you to get what they want (Tiffany), connive with each other behind your back (mother and Tiffany) and want so much stuff that you descend into debt buying the stuff (Tiffany’s sister).

The movie I wanted to see. Swop ‘em out. Don’t change ANYTHING, just make Tiffany Pat and Pat Tiffany. I read somewhere that Jodie Foster does this sometimes – she takes the role as written for a man. I kinda like that for this movie. A swop-out might even be a great addition to the Bechdel test. Imagine using it on Pretty Woman. Ha!

Anti-dote. I want to wrestle You’ve Got Mail to the top of Bechdel-passer list. Fainting? You’ve Got Mail is not perfectly feminist, I admit, but it’s got some redeeming features. Both Joe and Kathleen are in ballpark-healthy relationships when they meet. They are employed. They have whole lives outside the contact they have with each other. Their wings are not broken. They are both actor’s in their own lives. They develop a friendship via email, then extend the friendship to real life. They have a basis for investing love in each other because they have experiences together. Hulle deel ‘n sakkie sout saam. Give?

Athambile Masola

By Athambile Masola

As a teacher I have come to appreciate some of the challenges that teenagers have to face: teenage pregnancy, drug-use, sex education in relation to the myths they hear from friends! All these ills are often clumped under  the portmanteau word: peer-pressure. Beyond these challenges, access to quality education and opportunities that will ward off poverty also form part of the teenage-question. In truth, the list is endless.

What is also often included in the list of the many social ills that plague young people is the question of family structures. For many working class teens the prospect of being in a child-headed home is a real possibility or a home where the mother is the primary care-giver, raising a child (or children) alone. As someone who was raised by a mother who opted for divorce and a grandmother who raised six children alone, I am often uncomfortable when single-mothers are lumped into the list of social ills that I’ve listed above.

My purpose is not to glorify the experience of single mothers as I have no doubt that it is often (not always) circumstances beyond many women’s control that leads them to a place where they are left with the responsibility of raising children without the assumed extra help of the father or a father-figure. I have also been surprised by friends (who happen to be white) who have spoken about being single-mothers. The one shared how she opted to be a single-mother because she was financially independent enough to do so and another said she would opt to be a single-mother if she felt ready to have a child whether or not she’s in a relationship.

I’d like to question how it is that we continue to add single-mothers to the list of social ills. The truth is, the reality of being a single-mother and the extent of the hardships one faces are closely related to a woman’s social class. The reality of raising a child or children alone without the expected help of a father, is different for a middle class woman than for a working class woman. The middle-class woman has resources the poorer woman does not have and the poorer woman is often called in to be the child-minder for the wealthier woman who can afford to pay someone to help look after her child.

My other concern is that the focus on the poor, single-mother should rather shift to the harsh reality that renders the lives of poor women an eternal hardship. Poverty. Together with poverty, the obsession with the idea of the nuclear family means that women are a problem unless they conform to the social structure of family where there ought to be a father figure in the home. Where a man or father figure is absent in a home, we refer to this as a broken home (but if a man is in a position where he raises children alone, he is the hero).

If we consider the reality of many working class black families, the family unit has never been prioritised. Many working class women have never been “kept” women who stay at home and look after the children. They have mostly been working mothers who have been in exploitative working environments without the benefits to support child care (When my aunt had her first child in the 1970s she was working in a factory. She did not have maternity leave and she was back at work the day after she gave birth to my cousin). Fathers, brothers and uncles were migrant labourers who could not be in the home to help raise the children. And this form of family life in the black community still exists where work opportunities do not allow working class men and women to fully support their families either financially or with their physical presence.

The single-mother question often brings into light the question of what kind of children does a single-mother raise? The perception is often that single-mothers cannot raise boys who will become “real” men and their daughters will become women who are too independent with “daddy issues” and will therefore seek attention from men because they have never received attention from their fathers. These are negative perceptions about what it means to raise children as a single-mother.

We need to recognise that whether a woman chooses to be a single mother or not, she has the right to be given the space and the rights to raise her children in a society that does not damn her for not conforming to the heteronormative idea of what is means to be a mother. We all have taken-for-granted ideas about what it means to be a mother and a father without thinking about the role of the extended family as well as the role of more supportive networks that woman may have when they are single-mothers. These networks may be informal or formal but they must allow us to recognise that single-mothering is a legitimate form of parenting.