As part of a blog carnival headquartered at The Other Mother in celebration of Freedom to Marry Week, I’ll be posting about something old, something new, and so forth (according to the old wedding traditions) for the next five days.
Before she had to move into an assisted living facility, my grandmother gave me her engagement ring. Its thin golden band is severed, cut off from her finger at some point she never speaks of. I don’t remember her ever wearing it. Though the gift of it seems sweet and well-intentioned, I wonder what it actually meant to her. To hear her speak of it today, her marriage was more burden than joy.
My grandmother is an object lesson in the need for feminism, the need for women to fully own their own humanity, carve their own paths, make their own choices. As was the custom in her day, she was passed directly from her family’s household to that of my grandfather, having been forced to turn down acceptance to a prestigious university for financial reasons. She was raised to be a good girl, which meant to follow orders, to do what men told her to without question, and save sex for marriage. When a solvent man asked her to marry him, she did it, and that was it. “What else was I supposed to do?” she asks.
Never allowed a sense of her own aims, or any feeling that she might be entitled to a will of her own, she spent the next several decades keeping house for a man that never seemed to appreciate her efforts, a man she now speaks of with great resentment. During her marriage, she lacked not only access to reliable birth control, but also the ability to refuse the sex she didn’t want but saw merely as her duty. The four children that came in quick succession overwhelmed her; recently, she told my father that if she’d ever learned how to drive, he and his brothers would have been orphans. She said this not out of meanness, but as a measure of her misery. Had she been able to drive, I feel sure her sense of duty would have kept her where she was, where she felt culture-bound to stay. I don’t think that she’d have been able to define where she’d want to go, or anything she wanted for herself at that point–her sense of self had been given up too long before.
Her only experience of freedom or self-direction, such as it was, finally came after my grandfather died. Her sons grown, she was left to live, at last, on her own. Then, though she still relied on my father and uncles for even a trip to the grocery store, she at least felt some sense of control, of freedom from the subservience she’d been locked into so young. Years later, a minor stroke, a failing memory, and limited mobility would rob her of even this small freedom. Realizing that she could no longer take care of herself, she moved in with my parents, and when her medical issues proved to be more than they could handle, into assisted living.
From the conversations I’ve had with her, it seems that she was only rarely happy in her adult life, never feeling any sense of power or equality. Equality, in fact, is still a foreign concept to her; she remains puzzled by even something as small as the fact that my father and my husband do many (maybe most) of the household chores, which she still calls “women’s work.” The idea that she might have enjoyed help from my grandfather is literally unthinkable to her; to admit otherwise takes away the only sense of worth she had, which came from her housework.
I once asked what she might have chosen to be, if she could have chosen any career. She was stymied by the question, which no one had asked her before. “I guess I just never thought about it,” she finally said, “because I was just so busy doing what everyone else told me to do.”
Her ring is unwearable, since its cut has never been mended, so I keep it in a dish on my nightstand. Every night my own engagement and wedding rings nestle next to it, symbols of my own marriage, a choice I made freely and joyfully, knowing my options, having my own direction, following my own will. Thanks to the work of so many women (and men) before me, choices my grandmother never had are now mine to make. And for that, I am thankful.
