Daughters of the '90s, mothers to no one

Ah, the 1990s! I may be been a child in the '70s and endured adolescence in the '80s, but the '90s is when I really grew up. I spent the first twenty years of my life being what was expected of me: a fine student, an exemplary daughter, a sidekick to my dominant friends. If an unsettling rage occasionally bubbled to the surface, it was my fault for not playing my role appropriately. Girls weren't angry--girls were good. I identified strongly with fucked-up boy-men like Holden Caulfield and Paul Westerberg, though my cis-gendered hetero-normative temperament prevented me from imagining myself as anything but a grunge god's loyal girlfriend. I had no seething female role models save Sylvia Plath, whose example was not one I cared to follow.

Enter Courtney!

Now, one could make a convincing argument that like Plath, Courtney Love isn't a role model worth following, but in the early nineties, it seemed that the world might be ready to embrace a loud, smart, cranky, bitchy, flawed, contradictory, kickass feminist. Those were heady times! I loved (and still love) the riot grrrls with all my heart, but be honest: isn't Kathleen Hanna a little too perfect? She's the punk Anne Welles, while Courtney is Neely O'Hara, who, despite her many flaws, always says what she thinks and is the Doll you root for in the end. In the '90s, I finally learned to appreciate honesty over perfection. It doesn't make you popular--hell, it might not make you happy! But it's better than the alternative, to "fake it so real [you are] beyond fake," as Courtney warned. I remain flawed, but I'm no longer a liar, to myself or to anyone else.

I'm very excited that years of following Courtney's career have led to my first piece for what is probably the smartest magazine in the country, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. In "Nobody's Mother: Abandonment as Art in the Courtney Love Family Tree," I look at memoirs written by Courtney's mother, Linda Carroll, and grandmother, Paula Fox, to trace four generations of women who've been either unable or unwilling to care for their firstborns, all daughters. The article is not available online, so please support feminist media and yours truly by picking up the REVERB themed issue at your favorite local indie bookstore (True Colors here in south Minneapolis) or, failing that, your big box Barnes & Noble near Ms., Curve, and Bust. Your best bet? Getting a subscription for only $25. This feminist truth-teller thanks you.

Postscript: I've just learned that there are THREE different covers for the issue, featuring red, blue & black vinyl records. I got the black one in the mail, so I'm off to True Colors for the other two. My granddaughters, of the '30s, '40s, '50s and beyond, need to have them all!

Vote for your favorite feminist mom: ME!

I am your favorite, right? You'd at least put me in your top ten, beside Viva La Feminista, PunditMom, Gloria Feldt, The Feminist Breeder, MOMocrats and MomsRising, right? Right??

Forgive my fragility--since the Pre-Rapture "Marriage" Debacle and the Post-Rapture Northside Twister I've been just a mess of nerves. Minnesota needs some love 'n light right now, and there's no better way for you to show it than to vote for THE RADICAL HOUSEWIFE as one of Circle of Moms' Top 25 Political Mom Blogs. Vote every 24 hours to ensure I beat my evil twin Jenny Erikson.

The Radical Housewife

Votes:

43

ABOUT THIS BLOG	The Radical Housewife is dedicated to revolutionizing American family values one dirty diaper at a time. A writer, at-home parent, and activist serving her fifth term as president of Minnesota NOW, she makes righteous indignation fun.
URL	http://www.theradicalhousewife.com/
ADDED	2 days ago
AUTHOR	Shannon Drury
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Raptured!

It must have happened early, during my regularly scheduled Saturday afternoon benders*, for when I passed out...er, fell asleep that night, all was perfectly normal in the land of Minnesota Nice. When I woke on Sunday morning, it was to a totally different world. It wasn't heaven, and it wasn't hell (though I was, as the warning goes, fresh out of beer). It was almost as if I was in....

***POST-RAPTURE BIZARRO WORLD***

...not my home state, which as I declare as loudly as possible to to everyone who'll listen (and to many more who won't) gave the world Hubert Fuckin' Humphrey! A man who stated in 1948 that he wanted to his party and his country to"walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of civil rights." Who said "liberalism, above all, means emancipation--emancipation from one's fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination, from poverty." Music to my ears!

Late Saturday night, the Minnesota Legislature took the final step needed to place a so-called marriage amendment on our 2012 ballot. Same-sex marriage is already illegal in Minnesota, and the law has survived the "activist courts" which conservatives so deeply fear. The point of the amendment is to keep the Minnesota "Family" Council's coffers full and to perpetuate damaging stereotypes about LGBT folks and their children. Katherine Kersten, self-appointed Admiral of the Midwestern Morality Police, can write all she wants about how she and her cronies aren't bigots, but you and I know better--we read the testimony of Jennifer Roback Morse before the Minnesota Senate Judiciary committee, in which she declared that it is "brutality" for a child to be raised by same-gender parents. Smells like bigotry to me!

On Sunday, I tried to attend the Harvey Milk Rally in Loring Park (I was scheduled to speak on behalf of Minnesota NOW), but I made Matt turn the car around when tornado sirens began to wail. A mile or so north of the park, one person was killed, several others seriously wounded by the tornado that touched down, wreaking havoc in one of Minneapolis' most impoverished neighborhoods. The tornado that hit my part of town in 2009, by contrast, hurt no one at all and only made life messy, not dangerous--middle class, mostly white folk are never given a police curfew.

Post-rapture Monday? I got to hear that Tim Pawlenty is running for President because he's the one who can give Americans the "truth." This from a guy who cooked Minnesota's books and squeezed Minneapolis dry for eight years so he could tell the "truth" that he didn't raise taxes. I spent his two terms kicking myself for thinking that no one could be a worse representative of Minnesota governance than Jesse Ventura. T-Paw makes The Body look like ...well, Hubert Fuckin' Humphrey!

I don't know much about Harold Camping's theology. Tell me--do you think this what hell is supposed to look like for mild-mannered Midwestern atheists?

*don't be silly! This photo is by a winner of Regretsy's rapture photo contest. Though as a diehard Neely O'Hara fan, this is definitely the way I wanna go.

The letter that the Pioneer Press won't print

Mike Burbach, Editor: mburbach@pioneerpress.com

Mike Bass, Sports Editor: mbass@pioneerpress.com

As a reader unfamiliar with Joe Soucheray’s style, I cannot tell whether his May 19, 2011 column was meant to skewer the unenlightened readers who suggested he was somehow un-masculine for protesting the dangers of modern football, or whether he aimed to prove his macho bona fides via said mockery. Whatever the intentions of Soucheray himself, the message made by the print headline was clear: “No. I’m still a man, not a woman. It’s football that changed.”

I’m a writer as well as a feminist activist—I am not interested in policing language. Yet I am keenly aware of the power that words have, particularly in the hands of a major newspaper, to perpetuate stereotypes that are at best, irritating, and at worst, dangerous. Soucheray’s column and accompanying headline reinforce the message that for a presumably heterosexual man, there is no worse offense than to be called a woman.

Thanks to a half-century of civil rights progress, it is no longer considered acceptable to use race, ethnicity, or perceived sexual orientation as a slur. No editor would approve a headline that read “No. I’m still a man, not a faggot,” for fear of significant (and richly deserved) backlash. Why is gender still, after all these years, fair game?

Rigid gender stereotypes hurt everyone, from men who are prevented from developing emotional relationships with their children to women who are stymied by sexism in the workplace. As a newspaper that hopes to survive in the 21^st century, the writers and editors of the Pioneer Press would be wise to make decisions that better reflect our changing times.

Shannon Drury

President, Minnesota NOW

Feminist link love!

I love the blog Gender Across Borders, so I am both thrilled and humbled that my Mother's Day post was included in their May 2-15 roundup of feminist links from around the world. THE WORLD! Alrite!

Sisterhood is global, sisterhood is powerful, sisterhood is awesome. Thanks, GAB!

What do Minnesota family values look like?

As my blog title says, I'm a housewife. I've been married since June 6, 1999, and I've loved every minute. Hell, I would have wed Matt the moment we met, in November 1997. I just love, LOVE, love marriage! I'm also a stay-at-home mom to two kids. Despite my litany of complaints about them, I am madly in love with them, too. I really, really love kids!

Look at me! I am a PARAGON of good old fashioned American family values. You are not going to find a doll in Minnesota who wrings her skinny plastic wrists and frets about "the children" more than me.

The Minnesota "Family" Council, Minnesota Majority, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and like-minded groups are of the opinion that our state needs constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Why? Let's read the testimony of Jennifer Morse, a NOMmie who gave this testimony to the Minnesota Senate Judiciary Committee on May 5, 2011:

The essential public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. We can see the importance of this purpose by taking the perspective of the child: What is owed to the child? ....The child’s rights to care and relationship must be supported pro-actively, before harm is done, for those rights to be protected at all.....The same sex partner of a biological parent is never the other biological parent. Rather than attaching children to their biological parents, same sex marriage is the vehicle that separates children from a parent.

In other words, Morse thinks that if you substitute a second Barbie for the Ken in the photo above, you suddenly have two harmed children. Unattached children. Damaged children. HURT children. And NOM's friends, the Minnesota Republican Party, believes that married moms like me, as a rule, will vote in droves to protect these vulnerable sweeties, even if they're made of plastic.

Seriously?

Unfortunately, yes. Barring some last minute dose of reality, Minnesota's 2012 ballot will allow voters to enshrine discrimination into our state's constitution, all in the name of protecting "the children." NOMmers want a culture war, and they're gonna get one, but it won't turn out the way they think.

Not in Minnesota, not ANYWHERE.

Attention "ladies": Roe v. Wade as interpreted by Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen

The clip below, from a hearing in the Minnesota State Legislature on Friday, May 6, has already made its way around the Minnesota blogosphere, but it deserves national attention. It needs to go big: crazy nasty-ass honey badger big, "leave Britney alone!" big, Rebecca Black big, bed intruder big. How else to respond to the implication, made by state representative Glenn Gruenhagen, that the seven men on the Burger Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973 just to get in women's pants??!




WHAT REP. GRUENHAGEN SAYS:
"Let me just remind you, especially ladies, it was seven men that made abortion legal. Not seven women. Now what's the significance of that? Men, a certain percentage, have developed a perverted view of women and what abortion tells men is they can use women and lose them. OK? Use and lose them and run from their responsibility... Again I plead with you, ladies, help men support legislation that teaches men to accept their responsibility when conceiving with a woman. Don't support government legislation and programs that tell men they can impregnate women and run away from their responsibilities. Please ladies, think about what's been done to you in the last 40 to 50 years."

WHAT 'LADIES' HEAR:
"Forget what you may have heard in those 'womyn's studies' classes of yours--those seven men on the Supreme Court in 1973 were horny, twisted perverts. Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion to score with loose Washington chicks, not to guarantee your right to medical privacy. Thurgood Marshall, your civil rights hero? Voted on Roe to realize his dream of boinking every last clerk in the office, not to give you any civil rights of your own. Ladies, men are dirty hornballs who need to fuck everything that moves! Only abortion law keeps us in line! Heaven knows that YOU don't want sex. Justice Elena Kagan, a celibate spinster, would NEVER have voted in favor of a woman's sexual agency. I know she'll vote like a proper lady when the time comes."

An urgent appeal to Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak

If every child in Minneapolis were as safe, well-fed, healthy, and appropriately educated as these two little girls, I would support your plan for a new football stadium.

But they're not. These two girls are the lucky ones.

Consider this: the poverty rate in Minneapolis is 22.6 percent. Hennepin County admits that, within its borders, "on any given night....more than 3000 men, women, children and young adults are homeless." Minneapolis Public Schools expects a budget deficit of at least $30 million, which will have devastating effects on the district's already abysmal achievement gap. Recent reports that half of mortgages in the Twin Cities are underwater should tell you that the need for social services will only rise, not lessen, in the decade to come.

Mayor Rybak, please get your priorities in order. The children of Minneapolis need you as their advocate--the Vikings don't.

Just say NO to public funding for a football stadium.

My motherhood transformation, or: on Mother's Day and every day, I can see your broken heart.

How did I become the Radical Housewife?

[from the Fall 2006 issue of the Minnesota NOW Times]

I was born feminist and progressive, raised in the Free to Be...You and Me era by a couple of baby boomers who, while not quite flower children, took to heart the political upheavals of the age. In our house, all people were equal and everyone had unlimited potential. So I took my college education and became an at-home parent! I could do anything, be anything, handle anything. Only when my son Elliott was born in 2000 did I realize how wrong I was.

Elliott was not just a colicky baby. He was a screaming, hollering, kicking, squalling-until-he-ran-out-of-air-and-turned-purple baby. For hours at a time my sweet, wanted, loved, adorable baby boy would wail inconsolably, while every cell in my body went into meltdown. I crashed, mentally and physically. No one told me that parenting would be this horribly fucking hard.

Talking about the difficulties and sorrows of raising children, colicky or no, is a cultural taboo; perhaps it's a Darwinian trick that keeps us humans breeding. I love my son very much. But what could have happened if my advantages hadn't been there? What if I had been single? Addicted? Seventeen? A rape victim? Homeless? Uninsured? All of the above?

I would have snapped. And who would suffer the consequences? Me, or my kid?

You've all seen the stories on the news of parents booked on charged of grievous assaults on their children. You see their grainy mugshots and think: how could anyone do that to their child?

I knew.

I knew how such a horrible thing could happen even though I had nearly nothing in common with the sad adults on the news. I had things that many of them did not: a safe, monogamous relationship (with a man, so I had access to his health benefits in addition to countless other hetero perks); a middle class lifestyle that allowed me to be home with my child; good health; a college education; a support network and friends and family; and many more. In short, I had everything I needed to get out of my desperate situation.

I dialed my nurse practitioner, my mother and my husband for help, and I got it. But millions of other mothers and children in crisis didn't, most through no fault of their own.

If the children are our future, we need to take care of everyone, TODAY. Even if you don't have biological children, you have an investment in this too. Who repairs your car's brakes? Who prepares your restaurant meal? Who's answering your 911 call? Someone's child. We all have an interest in being sure that child was raised with love, compassion, and dignity. Every person's future depends on it.

I joined Minnesota NOW because our multi-issue organization addresses the inequalities that remain obstacles to women and families today. A popular quote says that to be a parent is to walk with your heart on the outside of your body. My motherhood experience has proved that true and then some--now I can see the hearts outside of everyone, and most of them are broken. And that, my friends, has made me radical.

Answer: Yes, the good ones WILL be reserved for the rich.

(provided by the United States House of Representatives, May 4, 2011)

Question:

No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women have always had them; they always have and they always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while the poor women go to quacks?

(provided by the late Shirley Chisholm, herself a member of the U.S. House from her election in 1969 until her retirement in 1983)

Things I do for my favorite writer (and the children--don't forget the children)

I love Gene Weingarten, but who doesn't? Sure, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner, but how many of those stiffs can write prose that makes you weep one week and wet your pants laughing the next? Nick Kristof and Maureen Dowd can eat their hearts out! If I could write with one percent of Weingarten's intelligence and verve, I'd be happy. Also, his Facebook profile picture looks like this:

Why am I thinking of Weingarten today? Because today, I had the opportunity to learn from what he taught me. Just a few minutes ago, I completed my purchase at my southside Cub Foods (yes, the one that blew up--it's safe now) and headed out to my car to load the bags in the trunk. Parked next to me was a jet-black Toyota Tacoma with small child in the back seat. On a sunny day. A little child, no older than 9-10 months old, tops. LOCKED IN A BLACK CAR ON A VERY SUNNY DAY.

!!!!

If you haven't yet, please read the story that earned Weingarten his second Pulitzer, called "Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?" Obligatory trigger warning: if you are a parent, this story will make you cry. If you are not a parent, it will still seriously bum you out. After you blow through a box of tissues, tell me what YOU would have done if you were me in the parking lot of Cub Foods at high noon.

I didn't hesitate. I called 911. Moments later an angry white man in his late-fifties started waving at me frantically from the garden center tent propped up in the Cub parking lot. He shouted, as he gathered up his flower purchases, that he'd been watching the little girl the whole time. I didn't get off the phone. The man, clearly well-to-do and unused to ruffians calling the police on him, came out to the car, unbuckled the girl, and carried her into the garden shop on his hip, mumbling all the while.

I told the operator that the guy was yelling at me for calling him in. "Well, I'm with you," the operator said. "That's a pretty young kid to be left in a car." The operator said that a squad car would come out for a chat with the guy, whom I described. When I completed the call and the man finished his transaction, I approached him. I explained that I (a loyal Gene Weingarten fan) felt that I had to err on the side of caution.

"Well, you didn't need to call the cops," the man snarled. "You could have asked, hey, is anyone in the garden center watching this kid? And you would have known she was fine."

"Sorry," I answered. "When I see a baby locked in a hot car, I call the police."

"You made a judgment call," he snapped. "And you did it without knowing any of the facts. I was right here the whole time."

"No, YOU made the judgment call," I yelled, furious. "You made the call to leave a kid in the car when you could have just as easily picked her up and taken her in! Look how easy that was! But this isn't about you, it's about her. I DID IT FOR HER."

I wish I could say I stormed off in righteous indignation, but remember, I am a Minnesota native who lives in fear of stepping into someone else's beeswax and who quivers when talked to harshly by a stranger. I'm writing this to justify my actions to myself, to my community, and to my writerly idol, should he have a Google Alert on his name.

Did you read Weingarten's story? What would YOU do?

"Who would want to die for a document that excludes them categorically?"

News that would have given me great delight nine and half years ago is leaving me queasy and unsettled today: Bin Laden is dead, but so are 1500 US soldiers who fought in Afghanistan, and 4500 US soldiers in Iraq. I've been trying to uncover estimates on the numbers of civilians in those countries who have died from the War on Terror, but the process is giving me a headache that feels like I've had a spike drilled in the back of my skull. Each site I find has a different methodology, a different time frame, and a different number--though all are high. Let's just round the civilian deaths up to "tens of thousands." Do you feel queasy, too?

How about tearful? Heartbroken? At a complete and utter loss? These emotions and more surged through me in successive waves as I read a story in today's MinnPost about a local father testifying against the insanely awful Prop 8-style marriage amendment that's about to be passed my home state's legislature. This father, Jeff Wilfarht, speaks on behalf of his son, Cpl. Andrew Wilfarht, because Andrew cannot--he died serving in Afghanistan two months ago. Andrew was gay, a fact his father said bothered no one in his unit. Here's the photo of Andrew that accompanied the story:

Today, instead of contemplating the death of the jerk who triggered this whole war in the first place, Jeff Wilfarht is hoping to testify in the Minnesota House Civil Affairs Committee to talk some sense into the legislators who think discrimination ought be be part of the constitution. Wilfarht shared with MinnPost's Doug Grow the message he wants all legislators to hear, including the following:

Our son was gay. If you recoil from that, I will not attempt to persuade you otherwise. He nonetheless made the ultimate sacrifice--gay or not, he was your brother in arms. All soldiers regardless of sexuality bleed red.

Being gay, he was part of a minority group. Recall that as a Republic, our constitution is about keeping a majority from oppressing a minority.

The language of this amendment does not intend to enshrine a right....this language is exclusionary to a minority. That type of language should not, must not, be what soldiers die for, especially on foreign soil. Who would want to die for a document that excludes them categorically?

So I ask you, on behalf of a dead soldier, on behalf of a dead soldier's father: will you join me in speaking up vocally and loudly about this matter?

My queasiness turned into tears that have abated, somewhat, since I've written this post. Today is not a happy day, people. But I know what will be:

The tireless activists of Join the Impact--Twin Cities are organizing a march and rally on Sunday May 22 in solidarity with groups across the country to observe Harvey Milk Day. Your truly, the Radical Housewife herself, will speak at the 2 pm rally on behalf of Minnesota NOW (officially) and parents like Jeff Wilfarht and me who love their children and want a better world for them (unofficially). PLEASE join us, either in Minneapolis or elsewhere, to speak up vocally and loudly for justice, and hopefully, peace.

Thank you.