Category Archives: Feminism

Where’s Poppa?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

October 15, 2004

Lorie and I walked to high school every morning for four years, but of all of the mornings we walked and talked, one morning stands out.  As usual, I knocked at her front door, and we walked together back toward the sidewalk.  This morning, however, she was noticeably quiet and serious.

“I guess I can finally tell everyone,” she started.  I began imagining all the possible announcements she could make to explain the pain in her voice and the hurt in her expression.  “My parents are getting divorced.”

Divorced?  Impossible! Neither of us knew anyone who lived in a home with a divorced parent.  In the 60s, divorce was frowned upon.  And it was rare. 

Leave it to another smaller child to describe with poignancy the arrival of divorce and single-parenting in modern American culture.  In Anne LaMott’s All New People, Nanny, a brave young girl, observes with remarkable clarity that suddenly she is living in “1963, the year the fifties ended, and the fathers in our town were leaving…. It was our collective great fear, that our fathers would leave us, start new families with younger and prettier children; we had seen it happen before.”

No-fault divorce.  Initially heralded in as an enlightened approach to deal with unhappy and hopeless marriages, divorce has overtaken the modern world.  The Internet gives easy access to websites calling out:  No Fault Divorce Made Easy.  In Arizona “rapidlaw.net” hustles the unhappy:  “Easy & Fast to Divorce. Great Prices – Start Here!”

Adults are free to come and go without recrimination, making and breaking bonds of “unconditional love.”  Yet, as we grownups speed out of our marriages and into happier waters, we leave pain and suffering in our wake.  David Poponoe in his book, Life Without Father, explains:

The decline of fatherhood is one of the most basic, unexpected and extraordinary trends of our time. Its dimensions can be captured in a single statistic: In just three decades, between 1960 and 1990, the percentage of children living apart from their biological fathers more than doubled, from 17 percent to 36 percent. By the turn of the century, nearly 50 percent of American children may be going to sleep each evening without being able to say good night to their dads.

No one predicted this trend; few researchers or government agencies have monitored it; and it is not widely discussed, even today. But the decline of fatherhood is a major force behind many of the most disturbing problems that plague American society: crime; premature sexuality and out-of-wedlock births to teenagers; deteriorating educational achievement; depression, substance abuse and alienation among adolescents; and the growing number of women and children in poverty.

Little did we expect in the 60s that no-fault divorce would be only the beginning.  Today, our willingness to abandon marital vows has evolved into an aversion to marital vows in the first place…and to a movement to redefine marriage to mean anything but.

While counselor Joann Condie doesn’t recommend women stay in abusive marriages, she warns that the pain of divorce is significant.  “It’s interesting to me as a marriage therapist,” she tells Citizenlink, “to find out that divorce is hurtful to the children even if they are adult children.”

Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, asks the obvious question.  “If the effects of family breakdown are indisputably calamitous, why are we so intent on accelerating the breakdown?  Whether it’s the refusal to treat two-parent families as normative in textbooks, an increasing problem, or the deconstruction of marriage inherent in the campaign for same-sex ‘marriage,’ the effect is the same.”  Marriages fracture…and children suffer.

Children suffer…yes.  And for so many children the common unhappiness flowing from the breakdown of marriage is the absence of their father…daddy…poppa.

Poppa?  A fortress of strength we all long to hug…he’s gone the way of a marriage abandoned, a temporary fortress built of sand.  The current debate over marriage is controlled by adults:  legislators, gay activists, psychologists, all of them championing their special path to adult happiness inside…and out…of traditional marriage.  But where are the voices of our children?

In all the debate about marriage, there is a tragic absence of attention to the most significant problem facing us today.  There is no greater question deserving our attention as we talk about marriage than the question coming from our children…where’s Poppa?

The Power of a Father

June 18, 2004:  Me Jane, You Tarzan

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Breaking the Silence

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

October 8, 2004

“I can’t take it.  This is too much to handle.”  As Kelly talked with the distraught woman on the phone, rescue workers were racing across the city to reach her before she could pull the trigger of the gun in her hand.  She had just had an abortion.

Kelly has seen it all in her twenty years of work counseling women who are considering abortion.  Her voice is gentle as she describes the women she has met…women who choose to come back to Kelly when they are hurting.

Why do women choose to talk with Kelly about their abortion pain?  She is an openly pro-life person.

When we break the silence about abortion, there is a lot to learn, not only about what abortion is, but about what it is has done to millions of women.  And these are the women who talk with Kelly, the women Gloria Feldt fails to acknowledge, both in her leadership of Planned Parenthood and in her editorials defending the new Planned Parenthood t-shirt campaign promoting America’s abortion-on-demand policies.

If Ms. Feldt is truly sincere about breaking the silence on abortion, she has a lot of explaining to do.  Women who have had an abortion and who wish to break the silence would welcome her support.

Silent No More is a national campaign giving voice to women who regret their abortions.  They wish to break the silence about abortion.  It hurts.  They hold press conferences and testify at legislative hearings.  Yet, they are treated with disdain by members of Planned Parenthood and the media.

There are others who have worked to break the silence about abortion.  In her book REAL Choices Frederica Mathewes-Green sought out the involvement of abortion providers to talk with women who had had abortions.  “I got either cold shoulders or cold feet. Usually there was no response at all.”

Mathewes-Green penned the famous quote embraced by both pro-life and pro-choice advocates.  “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche.  She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

Her research confirms testimony from Silent No More women.  They “uniformly talked about pressures in relationships; the abortion was done, each told us, either to please someone or to protect someone.”

If Ms. Feldt is truly sincere about breaking the silence on abortion, I invite her to join me in a call to the nation’s universities.  Stop promoting abortion and start teaching about abortion.

Where are the college courses that open the window on partial birth abortion procedures, forced abortion in China, and sex selection that is aborting a generation of girl babies in India and China?  Where are the college panels that include Silent No More women sharing the long-term aftermath of their abortions?

Will Ms. Feldt herald courageous suffragists like Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony who denounced abortion?  Does she agree with feminist Naomi Wolfe that pictures of aborted fetuses should be brought to the table?  As Ms. Wolfe points out, how can feminists truly support “a choice” they refuse to look at in real life?

If Ms. Feldt truly wants to “throw off that mantle of secrecy”, I suggest she redesign her own Planned Parenthood website.  In a search under “fetal development” the top 2 of 31 listings shout:  “Why do guys have nipples?” and “Donating Fetal Tissue.”  Where are the pictures of real fetal development…the living, thriving babies in utero?

And if Planned Parenthood is willing to talk about “donating fetal tissue,” what do they say about selling fetal tissue?  What should we know about the doctor who worked out of a Kansas abortion clinic and and was filmed on “20/20” negotiating separate prices for pieces of babies: feet, eyes, brains and spinal cords?

If it takes a t-shirt to break the silence, I hope Planned Parenthood sells millions of them.  And when the talking starts, I encourage Ms. Feldt to join hands with the women of Silent No More to tell both sides of abortion.  I hope she implores the press to open its eyes and ears to all the truth.

All the truth?  If Ms. Feldt will join in a campaign for all the truth about abortion, I will buy a t-shirt.  It’s a small price to pay to break the silence.

Unplanned Pregnancy?

June 25, 2004:    Unplanned Joy

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End of Life as a Fairly Normal Person

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

September 24, 2004

I’ve always been a fairly normal person.

Growing up, I helped my mother make biscuits, played flute in the band, did enough homework to get good grades, and envied girls who made out a lot with boys between classes.

Things didn’t change when I entered Arizona State University (ASU) in 1969, over thirty years ago.  Even though I bought wire-rimmed glasses, let my hair go straight, and quit going to church, I remained a fairly normal person.  I still did my homework and never found it worthwhile to cut classes.  I changed majors twice, hooked up with a boyfriend, and hung in there to the end, to graduate.

So, it’s no surprise that I have lived a fairly normal life for over thirty years.  Like most women I know, I balanced a marriage and raising two children with full-time work as a teacher, a real estate saleswoman, and an accountant.

Little did I know that everything would change when I went back to Arizona State University in 2000.

It seemed a good way to spend the Christmas break with my daughter.  Together, we drove to ASU, walked to and from classes, and spent two weeks buried in notes and tests.

She learned the basics of psychology.  And me?  I learned the basics of feminism in women’s studies.  My daughter warned me.  “Don’t come whining to me,” she scolded.  “You’re choosing to do this yourself, so I don’t want to hear you complaining.”

I was expecting a few surprises to pop up here and there.  After all, my own kids were in college, and life has changed in thirty years.

Indeed, there were little surprises in every class, but nothing I couldn’t handle.  I learned the distressing news that I was married to a patriarch and was also raising a patriarch, my son.  So sad.  I had always considered them the best of the new breed of man.  Until women’s studies, I didn’t know patriarchism was an unavoidable genetic trait.

I learned that women still focused on their body types.  Boy, was I glad to go to college and gain this insight!  Now I finally understood the significance of having cheerleaders on Monday Night Football shaking their cleavage at the camera.  I just never could figure that one out.

And I learned that even after thirty years of feminism, it seemed still worthwhile to discuss who should open the door for whom.  Thankfully, the male student sitting in front of me was just as mystified as I.  “What’s the problem,” he asked.  “Who got there first?”  For the rest of that class period I kept imagining somewhere in America a little old hippie lady and her hippie dude stuck in an elevator like Charlie on the MTA, unable to get out because they didn’t know who should go first.

These were the little surprises.  But they were absolutely nothing when compared to the big surprise, the mind-blowing news that I was no longer a fairly normal person.

Imagine my surprise the day my professor told the class my marriage license was nothing more than a contractual exchange of sex for money.  That little piece of paper was my formal promise to give sex and my husband’s promise to pay me for it?  Licensed prostitution?  I was a prostitute?

It was probably a good thing the bell rang just before I was able to close my mouth and open my eyes.  In the entire semester’s study of marriage in a class dedicated to issues of feminism, we spent five minutes reducing marriage to a contract for prostitution.  And that was the end of our consideration of marriage in Women Studies 300.

Watching the professor erase the board and stack her books, the immediate shock wore off.  I mulled things over.  Too bad I didn’t know about this prostitution deal back in 1970.  Sure would have paid better than teaching!

Following students out of class, going down the stairs to meet my daughter, I couldn’t wait to enlighten her.  “Guess what I learned today?” I teased.  She raised her eyebrows to warn me.  “I married your dad for money.  He married me for sex.”  I laughed.

Like always, she knew the perfect way to sum up two weeks of feminism.  “Well, it serves you right.”

See Archives for past editorials.

 

Unplanned Joy

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

June 25, 2004

The road to success and happiness is paved with planning…and more planning.  This is the modern mantra of American culture.  If you want to be happy, plan for it.

Tasha’s life was a model of planning.  Born Natasha Danvers in 1977, she is one of Britain’s “brightest Olympic hopes” in track and field, a consistent medalist in hurdles.  As a junior, she was the 1995 European Junior Silver medalist, moving on to sixth place in the World Juniors in Sydney the following year.

In 2001 she took the Gold medal in the 400m hurdles in the World Universities held in Bejing.  On an objective numerical basis, scoring the best British all round hurdling performers, Tasha is ranked third.  Against world hurdlers, she is ranked sixth.

If anyone knows about the planning it requires to be successful, Tasha knows.  Looking ahead to the 2004 Olympics, she told Sporting Life in 2003, “I’ve been able to train hard.  I’m different mentally, more dedicated.  The results are showing now.”

And she knows her training is paying off.  “The way I’m running right now, the times I’m putting down, I think I should be aiming for not just making teams or finals.  What I should be aiming for right now- I’m at the point where I can go in and expect a medal.”

Tasha’s determination and dedication to her goals is the stuff parents and teachers thrill to see.  She is the shining light we hold in front of students to inspire them.  “Here,” we tell our young people, “this is what planning for success looks like.  You can be just like Tasha.  And you can succeed.”

But Tasha has another lesson to teach our young people.  She can teach them one of the most important lessons of planning for success, a lesson about what happens when the best-laid plans take an unexpected turn.

Right in the midst of her intense training schedule, Tasha noticed a change in her body.  “I was in the shape of my life.  I was more focused than ever before….Then things didn’t feel quite right.  I was feeling tired all the time, feeling flat for no reason.”

A trip to the doctor surprised Tasha and her trainer/husband Darrell Smith.  They were facing an unplanned pregnancy.

“The timing could not have been worse” she told reporters.  “If I had run at Athens it would have meant greater financial security, more recognition.  There is nothing negative that can happen when you have a shot at an Olympic medal.”

Like millions of women and couples around the world, Tasha and Darrell faced “The Choice.”  Even the term “unplanned pregnancy” seems to suggest getting rid of the pregnancy and getting back to the plan.

And like millions of women, Tasha is truthful, “I cannot lie, I considered an abortion.  On the one hand you look at the situation and say, ‘I can have a baby and incur more costs, more problems.’ We don’t even have a house yet, we are staying with Darrell’s parents.  And I am the major breadwinner.”

But this is where Tasha can teach us the ability to plan for the unplanned.  Considering her options, she realized the path to happiness is paved with more than plans.  “Even the thought of it [an abortion] depressed me.  I cried thinking about it as I tried to convince myself this is what I should do.”

Tasha is still facing an unplanned pregnancy, but she is happy now.  She looks forward to giving birth in early 2005.

Darrell reminds everyone that her career is bigger than one competition.  “We will definitely prepare for the Commonwealth Games in 2006,” and if things go as planned, they hope to participate in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Tasha’s picture is up on the refrigerator in our house right now, a reminder that some of life’s greatest moments come from planning to accept the unplanned.  A heart that is open to life as it comes is a more certain key for happiness than anyone has dared to admit in the past thirty years.

Tasha is a witness to the unexpected path to happiness.  She has new plans that seem to change daily.  On her website she tells her fans, “It’s six months before I give birth and already baby is dictating the pace.”

One suspects that Tasha will succeed no matter what happens in her life.  She has embraced the magic of unplanned joy.

 

 See Archives for past editorials.