Love and Work

“If I died tomorrow,” my mother used to say, “your father would mourn for the rest of his life. But if they took away his violin, he’d be dead within a week.” She didn’t say this bitterly, or with animosity towards the violin with which my father earned his living, or the piano on which he composed whenever he had a free minute. She knew that as a woman she had no rivals. “With my music and you, I will be the happiest man on the planet,” he wrote while he was courting her. But my mother was right when she said that he wouldn’t be able to live without music. 

In the family mythology, my father was considered 1. a saint, and 2. a happy man. The saint part I heard mostly from his mother, who would sigh and look towards heaven whenever she said his name. But both sides of the family were united in their admiration for how hard he worked and never complained nor lost his temper. Here again, my mother had a more nuanced view of the man she loved: “Yes, your father is very good. But he’s not a saint. Mostly he just doesn’t care enough to get involved in things that don’t have to do with music.” 

This led directly to part 2 of the family myth, that my father was extremely happy. How many times did I hear my mother say to him, with a rueful smile, as she struggled with some domestic issue, “As long as you have your violin, nothing bothers you…” One of the things that did not bother my father, but did bother my mother, was his relative lack of ambition or, put another way, his contentment with the way things were. 

“Tonight we’re doing Parsifal, with Solti, who is a genius. I can’t wait!” he would say as he was getting into his tailcoat. Never mind that he would have to make his way home on foot because the streetcars would have stopped running by the time the performance ended. Never mind that the next day there were classes to teach at the conservatory, plus symphony rehearsal, plus private students, plus another opera at night. All that mattered was that he would be playing four hours of Wagner under a superb conductor. 

My mother worried about how long he could keep up this pace. If only, she thought, he were more aggressive, would put himself forward, would use his connections, he wouldn’t have to work so hard and would get more recognition. But recognition, which he fully enjoyed whenever it came his way, was far down the list of my father’s concerns. What he really cared about was playing and composing as best he could, all day, every day. 

When we were living in Quito, Isaac Stern came to give a recital. At the end, as my father exulted over Stern’s gorgeous tone and his fabulous technique, my mother asked him if he didn’t find Stern’s virtuosity discouraging. “Discouraging!” my father said, “why would I think that? On the contrary, it makes me want to play all the more.” 

All those years of watching my father find solace in the daily practice of his art imbued me with a sense of the connection between work—good work, that is--and happiness. My father, even my childish eyes could see, had both love and work. My mother had love, but lacked real work. I knew without a doubt that, despite his monstrous workload, my father was the happier of the two. 

I wanted to be happy like my father, but I was not a man. I was consigned by fate to my mother’s domain, where love and its attendant concerns— rearing children, looking nice, thinking and talking about feelings—held sway. Later, as an adolescent, I remember coming home from school, wanting nothing more than to go into my room, close the door, and write in my diary, and seeing how desperate my mother was for me to sit down and confide in her. “So that’s what happens when you depend too much on people to make you happy,” I said to myself. 

I have known few people with as deep a passion for their art as my father had. The gods did not bestow an equivalent gift on me. But when I sit down to write I call up the image of my father at the piano, and I try to enter into my work as humbly and wholeheartedly as he did, and on good days I get a taste of the joy that sustained him.

My father and I. Fall, 1960

 

Guys on Monuments

Walk through almost any public park, and you’ll find yourself staring up at the hooves of rearing stone or bronze horses, mounted by guys brandishing swords or guns.  Sometimes, instead of on horses, the guys sit on thrones, holding scepters, or on chairs, grasping rolled-up parchments. Sometimes they stand looking up at the heavens, with their feet well apart and their chest stuck out, like a rooster about to crow.

Some monuments do feature women, but most often as allegorical figures, blindfolded and holding up scales, winged to celebrate a victory, or lighting the way to freedom. And, whereas the men are dressed in regular clothes, or at least in togas that fall in dignified folds, the female statues usually sport clinging draperies.

There are, of course, some monuments to real women, mostly queens--Isabella, Victoria, Catherine the Great--but they are few and far between. You can also find statues of women in Catholic churches. They are honored for their patience, obedience or, in the case of the virgin martyrs—Lucy, Agnes, Agatha, Eulalia et al.--for having died horrific deaths for their faith.

But back to the guys on monuments. Whether monarchs, generals, writers, or philosophers, how many of them believed that women were full human beings, their equals in every respect? How many observed the same standards of sexual behavior that they expected of their women? How many spared their wives the ordeal of too-frequent childbearing? How many gave their daughters the same education as their sons, and paid their housemaids the same salary as their footmen?

Yes, I know. They were “men of their times,” and it’s unfair to expect a nineteenth-century general to be a feminist. But lately, being “of their times” with regard to people of color has not kept Columbus, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee on their plinths.

So I’m thinking, what would happen to the planet’s parks, plazas, piazzas, agoras, and government buildings if women decided that it was time to take down the statues of men who believed themselves the superior sex? There would be a lot of empty columns and pedestals. And when the rubble was cleared away, what would go in their place?

Perhaps we could put up some statues of actual women--the writers, artists, thinkers, and social reformers that history has ignored. I would keep those heart-breaking monuments to the unknown soldier--the innocent, likely unwilling cannon fodder of past wars. But alongside them I would like to see monuments to the anonymous women who have died in childbirth, the flotsam and jetsam of our species’ drive for survival.

Still, I’m not fond of following in the old pattern of statuary that exalts the one above the many. I would like to see those newly cleared spaces made into gardens, and not just decorative parterres and flower beds, but fruit orchards, berry patches, and vegetable plots. Tended by the citizenry for the citizenry, these would celebrate community and honor humanity far better than a marble statue of a guy on a horse.

But I am not a total iconoclast. The most beautiful or historically relevant of the old statues could be housed in museums to be visited by school children who, in the utopian future I am envisaging, would stare at them wide-eyed, and ask their teachers to explain why they were all statues of men.

Litany

As a musician, my father was seldom home in the evenings, but on his nights off he often led us in saying the Rosary. My mother, her two sisters, and I would sit in the dining room while he walked up and down, beads in hand. The Rosary consists of five Our Fathers and fifty Hail Marys. How long does it take to say all those prayers? If you’re a kid, half your life.

“Why do I have to say those same words over and over?” I ask my mother.

“You’re supposed to meditate on the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary,” she says.

“But it’s boring!”

“Shhh. Your father’s about to begin.”

I stare at the bread crumbs from dinner that litter the yellow tiles under the table. The maid is waiting in her room for us to finish saying the Rosary so she can sweep and go to bed. I glance at my mother’s stockings, which she has rolled like donuts around her ankles to keep them from getting runs, and decide that when I’m allowed to wear stockings I will never roll them like that. I envy my father, who is allowed to walk while he prays, instead of having to sit still.

After the last Hail Mary is said, however, there is a reward: the Litany of the Virgin Mary, a list of fifty epithets of the Mother of God, which my father recites in Latin. After each name, we respond in chorus, ora pro nobis (pray for us).

Here is a sample:

Speculum iustitiae (Mirror of justice)

Sedes sapientiae (Seat of wisdom)

Causa nostrae laetitiae (Cause of our joy)

Rosa mystica (Mystical rose)

Turris eburnea (Tower of ivory)

Stella matutina (Morning star)

I don’t know why this list of names thrills me. Years later I realize that they have  something in common with Homeric epithets such as “white-armed Hera,” and “bright-eyed Athena.” At age nine, though, I have not yet heard of Homer, and I don’t know Latin. I can make out a few words, but even if I understood all of them I would find them puzzling: what is a tower of ivory, or a mirror of justice, and what do they have to do with the Virgin Mary?

But I love the rhythm of the Litany, my father with his raspy smoker’s voice pacing in synch with the names, and us responding ora pro nobis, ora pro nobis. On and on go the names, Mother of our Creator, Virgin most powerful….And this  extraordinary collection of praises is dedicated to a woman—one who as a teenager was visited by an angel, which was just the first of a series of amazing things that happened to her.

And now that She is in Heaven, sitting between God the Father and her Son, Jesus, with the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove hovering above her head, She looks down upon me kindly (Virgin most merciful) and with special understanding, because she was once a girl like me.

The presence of this quasi-divine Lady in the heaven of my childhood gives me something that the images of God the Father, with his white beard, and God the Son, with his brown beard, could never give me: a sense of identification with the divine feminine that puts me in the ancient lineage of females—Babylonian girls praying to Ishtar, Egyptian mothers praising Isis, Greek wives sacrificing to Hera—who, from time immemorial, have sought help and consolation from the Mother of us all.

Mantillas

 In Spain, when I was growing up in the 1950s, women wore mantillas to church. These were gorgeous embroidered affairs, white for unmarried girls and black for married women. Anchored by a hat pin, the mantilla was shaped like a rounded triangle, with the tip grazing the forehead and the two sides hanging down over the collar bones. Before the age of reason, which was held by the church to be seven, instead of mantillas little girls wore small round doilies on top of their head.

Some blame Saint Paul (“any woman who prays…with her head unveiled disgraces her head”), while others blame the early fathers of the church for making women wear veils in church. It is easy in retrospect to rage against Saint Paul and his cronies, who regarded head coverings as a mark of submission. At the time, however, we thought of the mantilla simply as a gender-related sign of respect: men had to uncover their heads, and we had to cover ours. Besides, with its scalloped edges framing the face, and the embroidered flowers and leaves both concealing and revealing the hair beneath, the mantilla made almost any woman look mysterious and alluring.

Nevertheless, we took the head-covering issue seriously. If a woman on her way back from the bakery wanted to stop for a quick visit to the Blessed Sacrament but had left her mantilla at home, she could throw a scarf or even a sweater over her head. Otherwise, she had to skip the visit altogether (God, we were told, understood these things, and would look kindly upon her intention).

Another ostensible reason for the mantilla was to prevent the men of the congregation from being distracted by the lust-inducing sight of female hair. I found this odd, but then you never knew about men. It was their fault after all that, in addition to the mantilla, women had to wear stockings in church, and sleeves long enough to cover their elbows. Still, even granted their penchant for getting aroused by seemingly harmless objects, I figured that if I had been a man I would have found the elaborate, semi-transparent mantilla way more intriguing than a pair of braids or a head of permed curls.

When I arrived at my Catholic high school in Alabama, I saw that girls, though well past the age of reason, wore not mantillas but “chapel veils,” exactly like the little doily that I had cast aside in favor of the more grownup style after my First Communion. And it wasn’t just high school girls who wore these, but also the adult women who filled the pews with their husbands and kids on Sundays. Some ladies wore padded Alice bands with little stiff, dotted veils pulled down coyly over their noses. Others, having dashed into church on the spur of the moment, simply covered their head with a Kleenex, and secured it with a bobby pin.

I interpreted this nonchalant attitude towards head coverings as a sign of American progressivism, which I was all for. But I continued to wear my no-nonsense Spanish mantilla because I thought it more flattering than the doilies. And if it momentarily distracted from his prayers some hapless boy my age, well, so much the better.

As the fifties gave way to the sixties, those tiny chapel veils, perched atop the teased and sprayed, helmet-like hairdos of the time, looked more absurd than ever. By the end of the decade, what with the surging feminist movement and the liberalization of the church after Vatican II, chapel veils and emergency Kleenexes went the way of stockings and garter belts. But the disappearance of head coverings signaled a deeper exodus. Like many of my generation, I put away my missal and my mantilla, and left the church forever. Or so I thought.

Boys in my Class

 For all my writing about the drama of starting high school without knowing English, you’d think that there would be some trace of that in the journal that I kept at the time. But if you read that journal, which I wrote in Spanish, you would never know that my English was anything less than perfect.

I did not write about my anguish when I had to diagram a sentence, or when the P.A.’s garbled announcements came on, or when I didn’t understand a test question. Nor did I write about my constant worry that my deficiencies would become apparent to my teachers, and I’d be cast into the outer darkness.

What did I write about in my journal? I wrote about boys.

Landing in Birmingham in late 1958, learning English, figuring out the school rules, trying to fit into a culture that was both alien and compelling—none of these challenges held a candle to the real shocker: there were boys in my class.

And not just in my class. The whole school was overrun with them--boys by the dozen, in the chapel, the stairwells, the gym. Boys in crew cuts, jostling each other in the halls, dropping books and slamming doors, stretching out their long legs under the desks. Boys with voices that switched unpredictably from bass to soprano. Boys who looked like men, and boys who looked like little kids.

Until 9^th grade, I‘d hardly ever spoken to a male my age. I was the only child on both sides of the family, and in my German nuns’ school the only man was an ancient Augustinian friar with a waist-long white beard who came once a week to hear our confessions. My school in Quito was also boy-free, with the exception of the ones from the Jesuit school who would follow our school bus on its rounds, shouting and gunning the engines of their motorcycles.

In my all-female schools, the smartest kid in the class was always a girl, as were the troublemaker, the shy one, and the mean one. When the teacher asked a question, whoever knew the answer raised her hand, without a second thought. If somebody made a mistake, no one hesitated before correcting her. The best mathematician, the fastest runner, and the daintiest embroiderer were all girls.

But now here I was in a class overflowing—they took up so much more space than girls—with boys. As with most aspects of life in America, I found them fascinating as well as terrifying. How was I supposed to behave around these odd beings? On the rare occasions when one of them addressed me my scant English would desert me, and I would stare and stammer until he turned and walked away.

I watched the other girls for hints of how to act. The more popular ones, the ones who got phone calls from boys and went out on real dates, seemed to smile and giggle a lot, and they didn’t speak up much in class.

The giggling and smiling disconcerted me. I hadn’t had any experience with boys, but I’d read a few 19^th century Spanish novels, in which the lady was always indifferent to the hero’s passion, which paradoxically made him desire her even more desperately. So imbued was I with this principle of female behavior, that whenever a boy showed the slightest interest in me--no matter that I would have given ten years of my life for a date or a mere phone call from him--I would instantly quash it with my severe looks.

My 19^th century tactics didn’t work with American boys, who were accustomed to positive, or at least intermittent, reinforcement from girls. My outmoded notions, combined with my general awkwardness, put them off, and they mostly ignored me except to make fun of my, to them, unpronounceable name.

But there was another factor behind my lack of success with the opposite sex that took me a long time to figure out. As a result of eight years of all-female education, I didn’t realize that certain ways of acting in class might repel my male classmates. Blithely unaware of the appropriate modes of feminine behavior, once my English improved, if I knew the answer to a question I never hesitated to raise my hand. Even worse, it didn’t occur to me to hold back from contradicting something a boy had just said. In those moments, I was more interested in impressing the teacher than in inspiring love.

So I spent those early years sitting at home by the silent phone, writing feverishly in my journal about which boy had said hi to me in the hallway, and which boy had kicked my desk in a meaningful way during Religion class. It is a wonder that I managed to learn anything—how to speak English, or how to write a term paper, or the five proofs of the existence of God—with boys all over the place.

Sadly, these days I periodically hear from former classmates that one or another of those boys has died. And when I learn of such a death, I mourn not the balding patriarch of a loving family, but the long-legged, mysteriously alluring teenager eternally barging through the school halls of my mind.

Only A Woman

When she was seven, the future Saint Teresa ran away with her brother to seek martyrdom among the Moors in Africa. An uncle found them outside the city walls of Avila and dragged them home. Later, as a Carmelite nun, she crisscrossed Spain on muleback, cleaning up corrupt convents, founding new ones, and doing battle against resistant clerics. And all the while she was writing masterpieces of literature that endure to this day, making friends with that other great mystic and writer, Saint John of the Cross, and having ecstatic visions of God.

Although she'd been dead for four centuries, Teresa's power radiated all the way through the chalk dust in our classrooms and the ink stains in our uniforms."She was a mystic, a writer, a reformer, a theologian, and a doctor of the Church," the teacher told us "even though she was ONLY A WOMAN!"

For us, Teresa was a no-nonsense saint, grown-up and bold, with none of the sickly prettiness of the little virgin martyrs (Lucy, Agnes, Margaret, Cecilia, etc.) whose main merit seemed to consist in their refusal to have sex. In the 1950s, a decade that revered domesticity, and in a culture where virginity, followed by marriage and motherhood, were practically the only options for women, Saint Teresa showed us a different picture of how to be a woman: brave, intelligent, determined, a leader of women and men.

If Teresa of Avila had been the only model held up for our admiration, all would have been well. But in counterpoint to the bold image of the saint we were offered a list of tamer, more "feminine" virtues: we were urged to be patient and humble, and to always think of others before ourselves. Unquestioning obedience was at the top of the list, as was the strictest chastity. "When you go to bed at night," I remember one of my German nuns advising us, "do not let your hands wander all over your body." (Years later, my college roommate said I was the only person she knew who fell asleep with her arms straight at her side, like a corpse in a casket.)

But it was that trio--humility, selflessness, and obedience--that was the most effective at quashing our girlish spirits. How could we nine- and ten-year-olds reconcile those ego-stifling virtues with the drive and assertiveness that Saint Teresa must have possessed in order to achieve all that she did?
It was a dilemma that we were too young to solve, and it caused us much confusion and uncertainty.

It was not altogether bad to have our vision of the indomitable aspects of Saint Teresa's character tempered with the milder virtues. But I shudder to imagine what life would have been like for us girls without the image of the great Saint fighting for justice, writing books, founding convents and monasteries. Years before we heard of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem we had Saint Teresa of Avila, in her sandals and brown habit, riding her mule in all weathers, showing us what a woman could be.

Furies

There is rage in the air these days, the rage of women. Young women, old women, tall/short/fat/thin/gorgeous/ordinary-looking women are telling their stories and shaking their fists and demanding justice. And because in this culture sweetness and passivity have always been expected of women, their rage when it emerges is doubly scary--kind of like having your pet bunny turn and bare its teeth at you.

The Greeks knew about female fury. Their mythology is full of over-the-top angry women like Medea and Clytemnestra. They even had goddesses who specialized in rage and vengeance, the Furies. Three of them, because one wasn't enough.

Outside of Greek mythology there haven't been many models for female anger, so we're making it up as we go along, from pussy hats and marches to pointing fingers at sexual harassers. And the latter are toppling like nine-pins, "good" guys along with bad.

Et tu Garrison, Al, John C.? But this is not a time to play favorites.

Remember Trump’s reaction to the accusations against Roy Moore, "He says it didn't happen. You have to listen to him, also"? Until practically yesterday, that was the response that any woman complaining of harassment would have expected to hear. Now, for the first time in human history, the victims are being listened to. They’ve even been named “Persons of the Year” by Time.

It is a kind of miracle, but will it last?

After rampaging through Ancient Greece, the Furies faded into the mists of time. And if we aren’t careful, so will the labors of today’s Furies, those who marched and protested and risked everything to speak out. The only way to ensure that this achievement isn’t lost is to put masses of women in positions of power, in the boardroom and the village council, the courts and the Congress.

Fortunately (thank Gaia, Artemis, Isis, Astarte, Sophia, and the Blessed Virgin Mary), masses of women these days are running for office, or planning to. All we have to do is elect them.

What Were They Thinking?

If you were a plump middle-aged person with a comb-over, wouldn't you think twice about disrobing in front of a colleague, a job applicant, or an impressionable teenager? The photos of sexual harassers that decorate the news these days show that none of these men is physically attractive. If Michelangelo's David is a 10, Harvey Weinstein et al., on a good day, score a 2.

These guys must, at some point, have stood in front of a mirror, but apparently they didn't let what they saw hold them back.You have to admire their confidence, their optimism, their touching certainty that they would be adored, no matter how they looked or what they did. In fact many of them, in self defense, claim that the encounters were consensual, for what woman could fail to be enraptured by the sight of their nakedness?

Perhaps this blissful self-assurance was the fault of an overly fond  mother, who thought that whatever her little boy did was a sign of genius. But there I go, blaming the  woman.

One possible explanation is that these gruesome Peter Pans lack a trait that even some higher animals possess: theory of mind, the ability to put oneself in the other's place and imagine what she is thinking. Enveloped in a rosy fog of infant narcissism, they literally cannot see the woman in front of them. The root of the disrobing and the groping and the sexual jokes and insults is the inability, or the refusal, to see the desired object as not just a scaffolding for T&A, but as a fellow human, with ideas, tastes, and especially distastes, of her own.

But there is an even darker possibility: that these men do see the women they harass as real persons, but ones to be degraded and humiliated, precisely because they are female.

I go back and forth between these two explanations. If the first is correct, a good set of laws and penalties plus education might bring about a culture shift. But what if the second explanation is the right one? In the face of such hatred, what response can we even begin to imagine?

Temples of the Holy Ghost/Occasions of Sin

In the 1960's, long before bra straps became a fashion statement, we girls used to sew little tabs on the inside shoulder seams of our dresses to keep bra straps out of sight. To hide our incipient cleavage we used a dickey--a triangular piece of cloth that snapped into the center of a too-revealing neckline. At prom time in our Catholic high school, we were warned that if we showed up in a gown with spaghetti straps (or, God forbid, strapless), we would be sent back home. Our bodies were Temples of the Holy Ghost, but unless we were ever watchful, they could also be Occasions of Sin. 

1962 Senior Prom. Note the sin-avoiding straps on my dress.

 It was a difficult message for our hormone-marinated brains to disentangle because those same bodies, as our mothers, aunts, grandmothers and the entire culture never ceased to remind us, were our passport to the main if not the only source of personal fulfillment for women: marriage and motherhood.

Beauty and modesty were supposed to coexist in an eternally precarious equilibrium. Neglect your looks for a single day and you risked passing unnoticed by the Brylcreem-anointed boy who might have been your ticket to happiness. Disregard modesty and who knew what might happen? We certainly didn't, because it was never spelled out--nobody said the words pregnancy, or venereal disease, or rape as they might apply to us. But the consequences of immodesty were all the more alarming for being unspoken.

It was drilled into us that we had to make the most of whatever portion of beauty Providence had bestowed on us. Hair was supremely important. It had to balloon off the scalp to give us the wide-eyed, neotenic look that made us seem vulnerable and attractive. This required nightly work with brush rollers--I used to sleep with twenty-seven of them digging into my scalp--many cans of spray, and prayers for dry, windless weather.

Our skin gave us fits, being liable to erupt in pimples when we least wanted it to, despite copious applications of Clearasil. But breasts constituted the ultimate dilemma. From the movies--Sophia Loren! Marilyn Monroe! Jayne Mansfield!--we figured that they were a major asset, a helpful tool in luring the father of our future children. Yet because they also had the potential to provoke unbridled lust, they needed to be completely covered, although they could be hinted at by the artful positioning of darts in our bodices.

Legs were less of a liability, though we worried that our nylons would develop runs, a disgrace comparable to having our slip show. Until the blessed invention of pantyhose, stockings were held up by garter belts, an item that has since acquired fetishistic status but that I remember mostly as giving me severe pain in the lower back.

Sacred vessels on the one hand, agents of disgrace on the other, our bodies came to feel like two-edged swords, or UXBs that might go off unpredictably. It is a miracle that we managed to learn anything in school, worried as we were that the "rats" might be showing under the upper layers of our hair, or that the middle button on our uniform blouse might have popped open.

And yet we did learn, despite all the distractions, and ours became the first generation to aspire to having both meaningful work and a guy. And when the pill, the pantyhose, and the second wave of feminism burst simultaneously on the scene a few years later, we put away our dickeys, our garter belts and sometimes even our bras, and believed, at least for a while, that we could have it all.

My Medical Me-Too Story

A long time ago, in a city far, far away, I am having my first consult with an allergist--thinning hair, glasses, white coat. Fiftyish, like me. The treatment room is small, and my chair is next to his desk. He is taking my medical history and with each question his chair rolls a little closer to me. "Are your symptoms worse in the spring or in the fall?" he asks. I am about to answer when I feel something pushing against my knee. I look down: it is his knee.

I look up and his eyes hold mine for just a second. I move my knee away. "In the fall," I say.

"And have you had much exposure to molds?"

When the history is complete, it is time for the physical. I am sitting on the edge of the examination table and he approaches, tongue depressor in hand. "Say aah!" he says, and as he peers into my throat I feel the pressure of his pelvis against my knees.

Why am I still in this room with this creep, you ask? Because the part of my brain that is capable of observing reality, drawing conclusions, and taking action has shut down completely. It has been replaced by an oddly reassuring voice that says, "He is a doctor. You are a patient. Therefore, this cannot be happening." Zombie-like, I get through the rest of the visit, suppressing the desire to run screaming out of the office, or to kick him in the...shins.

He prescribes a series of allergy shots that, fortunately, are administered by his nurses, so in the following months I don't see much more of him.

One day, long after my treatment is over, I am sitting in the metro next to a woman I know from work. She has curly red hair,  and she giggles a lot. She's always struck me as a little flighty and flaky, and I suspect that, as the French say, she did not invent the mouse trap.

As we chat, she sneezes a couple of times, blows her nose. "Sorry," she says, "it's my allergies. I can't find a good doctor. I went to Dr.__ [and she names my knee-pressing guy], but I couldn't stand him."

"Really? How so?"

"Well," she says, putting away her tissue and flushing with anger, "you won't believe this, but the first time I went to see him, he kept pushing his knee against mine!"

"Wow! That's terrible. What did you do?"

"What do you think?" she says, clenching her little fist. "I did what any intelligent person would do: grabbed my purse and slammed the door in his face. And on the way out I told the receptionist that if she charged me for the visit I would report him to the AMA!"

My Mother Says...(continued)

They wanted me to sew! my mother says, but all I wanted to do was read novels.  I hid them under my mattress, and I read them at night.

Didn't your parents see the light in your room?

No, because I didn't turn it on.  I used to kneel by the window, with the book propped on the sill, and read by the street light.  I read many novels that way, and that is why I went to law school.

Because of the novels?

Because of the novels.  I read about lawyers defending poor people against injustice, and I decided I wanted to be like them.  So I went to the University of Valencia to learn to be a lawyer.  Valencia was only a four-hour drive away, but in those days--before the Civil War--it was like going to America.

I still cannot believe that my mother let me go.  I was seventeen, and girls from my village did not leave home except to be married.  But as I've told you, my mother was different.  She was not afraid of what people would say, and even though like most girls of her generation she had no more than a grammar-school education, she was smart.

My mother's mother, my mother says, referring to her grandmother, died young, and left four children behind.  Her husband worried that a new wife would make the children unhappy, so he never married again.  Instead, my mother, who was the oldest girl--about twelve when her mother died--took care of the family.  At one point, when she was about fourteen, she did go away to school, but she cried because she was homesick, and her brothers and sisters cried because they missed her, so finally her father hitched up the wagon and went to fetch her home.

When she was eighteen, a spirited, pretty girl, she met my father, who was from a different village and  had just finished veterinary school in Zaragoza.  This seemed very exotic to her, plus he was handsome, so she married him.  When they came back from the honeymoon to their new house, they found her little brother and sisters already installed there.

 My father was a wonderful veterinarian, very progressive, and the peasants trusted him and loved him.  But he was terrible with money.  He couldn't bear to ask people for what they owed him.  In addition to his practice, my parents owned quite a bit of land which was farmed by sharecroppers, so we should have been well off.  But everybody, the peasants whose mules he cured and the sharecroppers who farmed his land, found it easy to get around Senyor Boque.  They were very good at finding excuses--a child was sick, the harvest had been poor--and he always said "Fine, fine.  Don't worry about it."

I'll explain later how this soft-heartedness of my father's may have saved us all in the worst days of the Civil War, my mother continues, but in the meantime there he was, with a wife and four children and a couple of maids to take care of, and perennially short of cash.  And that is when my mother--remember, she had very little education--decided to take things into her own hands.

She became his administrator, secretary and accountant, keeping track of visits paid and medications administered, payments received and monies owed.  When people didn't pay, she told him not to treat their animals, but, my mother says, softening her voice, he used to sneak out and take care of them anyway. 

She was fair but tough on the sharecroppers, too.  On the day when the wheat was put into sacks and weighed, she was there, making sure everything was fair and square...while my father took off  on a on a pretense to look at the fields, but really so he could avoid any disagreements that might arise.

And so, because of her work and determination, we began to have more money.  But she paid the price.  Everybody in the village said that Senyor Boque was a saint.  "La Senyora Boque, on the other hand...."  Still, she did what she had to do.

(To be continued)

Francis, It's Not Funny

"Question:  How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer:  That's not funny!"

Remember the days when we girls were expected to swallow demeaning jokes with a smile, or be accused of lacking a sense of humor?  Remember when being told we were pretty was supposed to make up for being treated as inferior beings?

Now it seems that those days are still with us, at least where Pope Francis is concerned.  In a recent interview, when asked for his opinion on the place of women in the Church, he answers:  "Women are the most beautiful thing God has made.  The Church is a woman.  Church is a feminine word..."

(Why thank you, Francis.  So glad you like our looks.) 

Then he repeats his frequent assertion that "we need a theology of woman."  I wonder who will make up that theology?  Surely not a gaggle of male clerics claiming a special relationship to the Holy Spirit...

When the interviewer asks whether Francis doesn't see "a certain underlying misogyny" in the Church's attitude towards women, the Pope gets nervous and...he makes a joke!  He pretends to justify this misogyny by saying, "The fact is that woman was taken from a rib," then laughs heartily.  And the women of the world are supposed to laugh along with him, or be accused of lacking a sense of humor. 

The journalist, who knows better than to even mention the ordination of women, then asks if he might some day place a woman in an administrative position in the Vatican.  And Francis, still nervous, makes another joke, saying that often priests end up under the authority of their housekeeper.  Ah yes, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world;  the hand that washes the priest's underwear rules the parish.

All this is so familiar, and so sad, not to mention enraging.  Where has Francis been for the last forty years?  How can he be so patronizing, and so naive?  Even more troubling, he presents himself as a champion of the poor and of the environment (he's writing an encyclical on the environment right now) while continuing to condemn artificial contraception as sinful.

My hopes for this pope plummeted when, soon after his election, I read the following quote opposing  Cristina Fernandez Kirchner's victorious bid for the presidency of Argentina:  ”women are naturally helpless to exercise political positions....The natural order and the facts show us that man is the being for politics by excellence; the Scriptures show us that the woman is always the support of the thoughtful man and doer, but nothing more than that.”  http://nbclatino.com/2013/03/14/pope-francis-and-argentinas-kirchner-have-battled-in-past


Nothing more than that--such hope-crushing words for women.  But at least we can take comfort in our beauty.

(You can see the English version of the full interview here.)

Swimsuit Shopping at T.J. Maxx

My last swimsuit had sat unworn in a drawer for a couple of decades, and when I put it on last week I found that the elastic had lost its snap.  So on Sunday afternoon I went to find a new suit in that Vatican of fashion, T.J. Maxx.

I was wandering from rack to rack in a trance, avoiding the swimsuit section and looking around at my fellow shoppers, when I noticed several young women wearing the hijab.  Their hair, neck, ears and upper torso draped in cloth, all you could see were their big dark eyes and olive complexions.  Near each woman hovered a man, also young, often in charge of one or two small children.

The other young female shoppers had complexions that aimed towards olive but veered in the direction of orange, telling of self-tanning lotions or, worse, tanning booths.  Some wore transparent camisoles over bras, and shorts cut so high that the pocket liners stuck out over their burnt-sienna thighs.  Others were in long nightgown-like dresses with decolletages rivaling those of the
Napoleonic era.  None of them was accompanied by a man.

Reluctantly approaching the swimsuit rack, I imagined their boyfriends, at home watching the World Cup and drinking beer.  Unlike the male companions of the hijab wearers, they wouldn't be caught dead shopping for clothes on a weekend afternoon.

I come from a long line of covered women.  My maiden name, Benejam, harks to a time in medieval Spain when Arabs and Jews intermingled to such an extent that it's impossible to say which lineage my family belongs to.   But one thing is certain:  whether with wigs, veils, or hats, my great-great-great grandmothers all shunned the male gaze.

Even in my childhood, five centuries after the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, threw both Arabs and Jews out of Spain, girls and women could not enter a church unless we had some scrap of lace or cloth with which to cover our heads.  And I remember sitting through many a sermon in which the priest railed against women whose sleeves failed to cover their elbows.

But forget Spain.  Think Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s.  Prom-time is approaching in my Catholic high school, and we girls are told in no uncertain terms that strapless gowns, and even gowns with spaghetti straps, are an "occasion of sin," and unacceptable.  Somehow, we still managed to look  pretty in our Jackie-wannabe shiny gowns and puffy hair styles, our chests modestly under wraps. 

Pulling one swimsuit after another off the rack, surrounded by eastern and western notions of what women should wear and be, I gazed at the young mothers in hijabs with their patient husbands, and at the almost-naked American-born girls shopping alone.  I had always thought of the hijab, the burka and the chador as instruments of female subjection.  Yet here were the hijab-wearers, rifling idly through the dress racks, enjoying themselves while their men kept track of the kids.

I concluded that it was a case of the universal shopping imperative at work, so that if a certain culture dictates that women cannot leave the house alone, then men have to give up their afternoons in front of the TV to take them shopping, and mind the babies.  Sometimes things work out in unexpected ways.

After squeezing into and out of a couple dozen swimsuits, I found one with nice wide straps, paid for it, and drove home.

A Time To Cook--or Not

For everything, as we know, there is a season:  a time to plant, a time to reap;  a time to laugh, a time to weep.  A time to cook...and a time to refrain from cooking.

My time to cook began in the Summer of Love of 1967.  Now, as of our move to Wake Robin a month ago, the time to refrain from cooking has arrived.  And not a moment too soon.

I got married just before feminism made its second pass through the American consciousness, when it was not considered particularly attractive for young ladies to be in graduate school, which I was.  Cooking, on the other hand, we were told was a feminine adornment and essential to the health of a marriage, so I strove to broaden my repertory, which prior to the wedding had been limited to boiling eggs.

It wasn't easy to produce a salad, meat, two veg and dessert seven days a week on our grad student income, and things got more complicated when our daughters began to eat solid foods.  Now, in addition to finances, I had three people's tastes to consider, plus I was starting to become aware, along with the rest of America, of the effects of diet on health.

At around this time I fell under the spell of The Mother Earth News, and became persuaded that the only way to keep my family from an early grave was to put on the table food that I had personally grown:  broccoli from my garden, apples from my trees, eggs from my hens, milk from my goats, and bread baked with my own two hands (though the flour came from the store).

This had a lot of charm, but it was a ton of work.  Once they'd eaten their first home-grown omelette and drunk their first miraculous glasses of goat's milk, home-grown food became the norm and my family gradually ceased to exclaim about the wonderfulness of my efforts.  And, children being what they are, the girls turned up their snub little noses at my hard-won broccoli, and pined for McDonald's.

Nevertheless, I persevered.  I still got pleasure from the garden and the goats, but cooking became a chore.  I've known people, all of them male, who say they come home from a day's work and look forward to making a creative dinner--they say it relaxes them.  I was not born to be one of these people.  I was born to marry one.
But I hadn't.  My husband declared himself willing to help, but on his terms:  TV dinners, soups by Campbell's, and green beans from the garden of the Jolly Green Giant.  Convinced that on such a diet we'd all be dead within the year, I shooed him out of the kitchen, gritted my teeth, and cooked on.

Years passed.  We moved from country to city to country again.  The city interludes were less arduous, because at least I wasn't producing the food, but I still had to shop for it.   I knew, as I opened my eyes every morning, that unless I caved and we ordered pizza, before I went to my rest that night I was going to have to do something about dinner. 

And for almost fifty years, I did.

Now that's behind me.  Our monthly fees include lunch or dinner, in the informal cafe or the  formalish (this being Vermont) dining room.  The food is, almost without exception, lovely, and of astounding variety.  I eat more vegetables here than I ever did before. Wake Robin is an important presence in the local farm-to-table movement, so the food is pretty much guilt-free.

Is there nothing I miss of my own cooking?  Certainly:  garlic sauteed in olive oil;  salads consisting entirely of arugula;  bread with, again, olive oil.  But our cottage kitchen is the most modern I've ever had, and its cupboards contain my old cast iron pans and well-worn wooden spoons.  There's a bottle of olive oil in the pantry, and a paper bag with the remains of last summer's garlic crop.  There's no reason I can't whip up a little Mediterranean dish anytime I really feel the urge.  I've even given some hazy consideration to getting deeply into bread making again.  And maybe I will--in the winter perhaps...

But for now, every day I rejoice in the knowledge that the season to refrain from cooking has arrived.

All That Hair

"When you were born," my mother used to tell me, "you had so much hair that as soon as the midwife cleaned you up she put a bow in it.  It was so long," she went on, "that it covered the tops of your ears, which was a good thing, because they had hair growing on them too."

Fortunately the ear hair soon fell off, but the rest of it hung on and provided the refrain of my childhood.   "Just look at it," my four aunts and my grandmothers would sigh, commiserating with my mother, "what on earth can you do with all that hair?"  Even the fishwives and the vegetable vendors in the market would exclaim over it, with the mixture of horror and grudging admiration usually reserved for natural disasters.

As a little kid I wore my hair short, scraped back off my forehead and fastened with a bow.  My mother, who in another century would have made a fine phrenologist, believed that a large forehead was a sign of intelligence, so until I left home for graduate school I astounded the world with my broad and rather bumpy forehead.

In preparation for entering first grade, however,  my mother let my hair grow long enough to be tamed into braids.  Every morning, to tease out the knots that had formed during the night, she would insert the comb next to my scalp and tug firmly downward, then proceed to the next tangle while I protested sleepily.  The actual braiding took considerable effort, due again to the volume she was dealing with--think of braiding hawsers.  The result was a pair of thick, short, stiff braids that would come undone at the slightest provocation.

In the Amazon, with a marmoset on my shoulder, my right braid coming undone as usual.  There is another one just like it behind my left ear. 

I longed to wear my hair the way the older girls wore it, in a single braid draped fashionably over one shoulder.  But no matter how hard I tried, I never could force my hair into one braid.  Nor could I wear it in a pony tail, since they didn't make bands wide enough to hold it.

On special occasions I was allowed to wear my hair loose, which I thought made me look beautiful.  I loved not feeling the weight of the braids with each head movement, and I wanted to wear it that way all the time, but my mother demurred, because of the knot issue.  "Besides," she said, "when you wear it loose you look like a lion."

Managing my hair continued to be a problem through my adolescence, but I was saved by the arrival of the bubble style popularized by Jackie Kennedy.  Unlike my friends, who had to tease and spray their hair to make it stand up, I barely had to touch mine.  Then in the late sixties, when everybody started wearing their hair loose and long, I all but gave myself a crew cut.

Over the following decades my hair gradually simmered down.  I was surprised when I could run a brush through it, as opposed to needing a sturdy wide-toothed comb.  I was shocked when I managed  to fasten my pony tail with a single large barrette.  Now I treasure every strand that still clings to my scalp.

But thinking of all the thinning and braiding and fastening that went on for all those years, I wonder what would have happened if I had put my foot down and worn my long hair loose and wild, sticking out in all directions and making me look, and perhaps act, like a lion?

Nuns, Absolved

Get into conversation with a lapsed Catholic like me, and before long we're rolling up our psychological sleeves and showing off our scars, the result of wounds inflicted by nuns.  They scared us half to death, those nuns, we complain.  They killed our joie de vivre and injected guilt into our young souls.  We spent our childhood trembling in the shadow of their long habits.

I have, over the years, done my share of scar-showing and nun-blaming.  But now that I haven't been around veils and wimples for more than half a century, I'm having second thoughts about the nuns who taught me.

By the time I was eighteen, I had experienced nuns of three different orders and nationalities, in three different countries.  My first nuns, in Barcelona, came from Munich, having fled nazism in 1939 only to land in fascist Spain.  The school I attended in Ecuador was run by Mercedarian nuns from Spain.  And my high school teachers were Benedictine nuns in Birmingham, Alabama.

The German nuns were the scariest.  This may have been because their Spanish was sketchy.  When they got angry they lapsed into German, and nothing's more frightening  than being yelled at in a foreign language for failing to follow an order that you didn't understand in the first place. 

The Mercedarians were the most elegant.  They wore habits of creamy wool with contrasting black veils and belts.  But their thick-heeled, lace-up shoes looked mannish, I thought, and spoiled the effect.

By contrast with the German nuns, the American Benedictines were a piece of cake. They made jokes in class and actually praised us for just doing our homework, something the Germans wouldn't have dreamed of doing.  But by then fearing nuns was part of my nature, and I continued to tremble until I left Catholic education and went to college.

Why did so many of us spend our childhood afraid nuns?  Was it because we couldn't see their hair, ears or legs, or because they were so boldly in charge and so different from our lipsticked,  domesticated mothers?

True, they were somber and strict and they taught us some silly things, such as (this from my German nuns) the proper way to sleep at night:  flat on our backs, our arms straight along our sides "and not the hands going all over the body."  They were obsessed with punctuality, posture, and penmanship .

But they also dinned into us the necessity of being good.  They taught us the nightly examination of conscience, which meant going over the day with a fine-toothed comb, looking for sins venial and mortal and also for good actions.  In the case of the latter we learned to ask ourselves, "Did I give my allowance to charity only to impress my teacher, or because I truly wanted to help?"

At the beginning and end of every class, we would stand by our desks, lower our eyes, and say a prayer.  Although they didn't call it "centering," that is what it was, and it was a useful habit to develop early.

The nuns taught us discipline, and kept things in order.  My classmates and I may, during those years of strict obedience, have had some of our exuberance stymied, but we never had to worry about being bullied or, in our co-ed high school, being threatened by boys.  And I never, in twelve years of nun schooling, saw anybody's knuckles being rapped.

In the pre-feminist 1950s there weren't many role models for girls.  But we Catholic-school pupils had them, every day, and we learned that women in authority could be smart and fair but also petty and fallible--human, in short.

Whether they knew it or not, nuns were feminists by definition and history. The founder of the order of my German nuns was a 16th-century Yorkshire woman named Mary Ward.  She wanted to affirm the role of women in the Church and in society, and to tend to their spiritual, intellectual and psychological development.  Inspired by the Jesuits--the most intellectual of the male orders--she structured her order along parallel lines and left her nuns uncloistered, something highly unusual for the time.

I believe that our fear of nuns was partly dictated by an unconscious sexism, a rebellion against women who were so unapologetically in charge and who, at least within the confines of school and convent, did not have to obey, make themselves attractive to, or in any way propitiate men.

So I apologize to you, Mater Leonarda, Madre Mercedes, Sister Dominica, wherever you are, for having made you the topic of too many party stories.  Thank you for keeping me safe, for forcing me to perform in the face of fear, and for teaching me the habit of self reflection.  You were tough, and you were women, and we found--and still find--that combination hard to swallow.  But that wasn't your fault.

The Papal Bossa Nova

I wasn't particularly moved by the big crowds that cheered you in Rio, Francis, or by the babies you kissed--after all, John Paul II was as popular as a rock star and kissed plenty of third-world babies while telling their mothers that using condoms was a sin.

The dancing bishops did make me smile--they reminded me of those end-of-the-school-year shows put on by first-graders:  http://youmedia.fanpage.it/video/aa/UfUh9eSwJ9iQ7Zxv

But then came the extraordinary press conference on the plane back to Rome, when you said about gay priests, "If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?"

That statement is being deconstructed all over the planet.  Fundamentalists of all denominations will see it as an open door to the kind of relativism that leads souls straight to hell.  Liberals, on the other hand, claim that you didn't go far enough.  You didn't declare yourself in favor of gay marriage.  You didn't contradict your predecessor's decrees about the inherent sinfulness of homosexuality.

You didn't go far enough for me either.  But the humble tone of that "who am I to judge?" was so unexpected, so revolutionary, that it makes me think you might just manage to keep the Church from going down the tubes.

Then you went and said that John Paul II had once and for all closed the doors of the priesthood to women.

You softened that by saying that we do not yet have a deep theology of woman in the Church.  I'm not sure what that means, but it implies that the theology of woman would be different from the theology of man, and I am suspicious of that.  I know that men and women are different, but the emphasis on those differences, as opposed to the emphasis on their common humanity, has seldom worked to women's advantage.  And in the long history of the Church the almost exclusive focus on difference has been disastrous.
You also said that you seek a greater role for women in the Church.  But no matter what else you allow them, as long as women are barred from ordination they will continue to be second-class citizens.

One step forward, two steps back--but this is no time for dancing, Francisco.   It's time to march directly towards what is right.

Sex And The Scientist

Note to the delicately nurtured:  this post is slightly R-rated.

A long-ago TV documentary on the sexual politics of a troop of baboons showed the dominant male, huge and ill-tempered, lording it over his unfortunate subjects.  He chased the other males, swatted the babies who dared approach him, and grabbed food from the females.  This, the investigating scientist intoned, was natural selection at work, Gaia's way of ensuring that the next generation would be endowed with the best possible set of genes.  In order to be able to spread his DNA as widely as possible, the alpha male had to be big, aggressive, and mean.

Did I mention that the scientist in charge was a man?

Then some years later another ethologist went out and studied baboon sexual politics, and found that many of the lower-ranking males were peace-loving, friendly types who would share their food with females and help them when they got into scrapes.  And when the females went into heat, it was the nice guys they sneaked off into the bushes with, while the alpha male was busy snarling and swatting and stomping around.

Did you guess that this researcher was a woman?

When E.O. Wilson's theory of sociobiology emerged in the 1970s, it seemed to confirm all the stereotypes about male and female sexuality.  If humans are only the gene's strategy  for reproducing itself, it makes sense that men, who theoretically can father infinite numbers of children, would desire infinite numbers of sexual partners.  Women, on the other hand, can produce only one child a year at most, so they are programmed for monogamy.

Despite my admiration for E.O. Wilson, I always found his theory, when applied to human sexuality, unsatisfactory.  It failed to explain, for instance, women's sexual stamina--a woman can have sex with five men in five minutes, but the equivalent is not true for a man. And the theory provided a handy, science-based excuse--"my genes made me do it"--for male infidelity.

Now the old notion that men are programmed for polygamy and women for monogamy is being looked at again.  And this time, some of the scientists doing the looking are women  (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/what-do-women-want-by-daniel-bergner.html?pagewanted=1).

One of these researchers, primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, thinks that women's anatomy might be specifically designed for sex with multiple partners within a single sexual episode --the slower pace at which a female reaches climax, for example, could be meant to ensure this, which in turn would maximize the chances of conception.  This would also, to my mind, guarantee her lots of help in the care and feeding of the resulting baby....

My point here is not to debunk the stereotypes of male and female sexuality, which most women have always suspected were false anyway.  My point is to celebrate the long-overdue entrance of women in these fields, so that a different view of the world is gradually emerging, one that reflects the perceptions and experiences of the other half of humanity.

As to where--in the male view, or the female view, or somewhere in between--the real, empirical, unequivocal truth lies...that, of course, we will never know.

Waiters Beware

When, ignoring her instructions to the contrary, he addressed her as "young lady" for the third time, she attacked him with a fork.

The Evil Passions Of Men

James Michener, in Iberia, published this list of rules for women, which he found posted in a church in rural Spain in 1943, the year my parents married.  I grew up in Barcelona, but spent summers in the countryside, and although some of these rules don't ring a bell, some do.

Women shall not appear on the streets of this village with dresses that are too tight in those places which provoke the evil passions of men.  Ah, those evil passions.  I heard about them as a child and for years wondered what they were.  "Never trust a man who has a nose on his face," my mother's mother used to admonish me when I reached puberty.  All this caused my girl friends and me to grow up thinking of ourselves as sticks of dynamite, liable to cause widespread damage any minute.


They must never wear dresses that are too short.  By the time the 1950s came around, this was fortunately no longer an issue, because mid-calf skirts were the thing.

They must be particularly careful not to wear dresses that are low-cut in front.  While I mostly chewed my nails or amused myself by staring at the row of hairlines in the pew in front of me during Sunday sermons, I do remember one priest thundering against women who decorated their decolletage with a cross.

It is shameful for women to walk in the streets with short sleeves.  My mother and my aunts certainly wore short sleeves in summer, and no men that I know of burst into flames at the sight of their upper arms.  But they could not appear in church without sleeves down to their elbows.  This widely observed rule caused many problems when Northern Europe discovered Spain as the ultimate vacation spot and the churches were invaded by hordes of scantily dressed, sunburned walkyries.

Every woman who appears in the streets must wear stockings.  That rule had gone by the wayside by the time I was born.  In summer my mother and aunts would drop into church (for a visit with the Blessed Sacrament) in bare legs and espadrilles, though they may have put on stockings for Sunday Mass.  No mention is made of the need, first dictated by Saint Paul, for women to cover their heads in church.  It was too deeply ingrained.  And by "cover" I don't imply little hats, or those eensy "chapel veils" that used to do the job in the U.S.  Women wore mantillas to church, which covered their head and neck and were gorgeously embroidered, semi-transparent, and often more beautiful and more inflaming than the hair they were intended to hide.

Women must not wear transparent or network cloth over those parts which decency requires to be covered.  Must be the same parts that inflamed the evil passions of men.

At the age of twelve girls must begin to wear dresses that reach to the knee, and stockings at all times.  This rule was no longer in operation by the time I came along.

Little boys must not appear in the streets with their upper legs bare. What is this doing on a list of proscriptions for women?  I remember my male contemporaries wearing really short pants until they turned fourteen or so.  I remember their upper legs turning bright red in winter.  Maybe that too inflamed the evil passions of men.


Girls must never walk in out-of-the-way places because to do so is both immoral and dangerous. Obviously the "immoral" part indicates a strong tendency to blame the potential victim.  However, despite my belief that ideally women as well as men should be free to go anywhere, anytime, I think that while we wait for this imperfect world to become perfect it's a good idea for men and women to be led by common sense, and play it safe.

No decent woman or girl is ever seen on a bicycle.  Oh, my rusty, brakeless bicycle on which I rode the dusty summer roads around my grandparents' farm with the smell of rosemary in my nostrils, hoping for a glimpse of a shepherd and his flock under the blazing sun!

No decent woman is ever seen wearing trousers.  I wore not only trousers but shorts in the summer, but I never saw my mother in pants until we went to Ecuador and she had to buy a pair of blue jeans for trudging around in the jungle.

What they call in the cities ‘modern dancing’ is strictly forbidden.  I suspect this referred to dances imported from America, such as the fox-trot, which even when done by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers don't hold a candle in sexiness or inflammatory potential to the most threadbare flamenco danced around a gipsy fire.

(Thanks to Dona artistseyestudio.com for reminding me of these rules.)