Lillian Faderman - Woman: The American History of an Idea

WOMAN

The American History of an Idea

LILLIAN FADERMAN

Published with support from the Fund established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham, a distinguished graduate of the Class of 1917, Yale College, Captain, 15th United States Field Artillery, born in Chicago September 17, 1894, and killed while on active duty near Thiaucourt, France, September 17, 1918, the twenty-fourth anniversary of his birth.

Copyright 2022 by Lillian Faderman.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944804

ISBN 978-0-300-24990-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)

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For Phyllis,
who has been making everything possible for fifty years

O n January 13, 2021, the forty-fifth president of the United Statesthe man who had bragged before his election that because he was a celebrity, women whom he had just met let him grab them by the genitaliawas impeached for the second time, for inciting a mob to insurrection. The following month, nine impeachment managers from the House of Representatives presented the case against him to the Senate. One of the impeachment managers was Stacey Plaskett, a fifty-four-year-old Black woman, who had grown up in a housing project in Brooklyn and was the mother of five children. Plaskett had also been an attorney specializing in public finance law, a prosecutor in the Bronx district attorneys office, counsel to the Houses Ethics Committee, and senior counsel in the Department of Justice. In 2015, she had been elected to the House as a delegate from the Virgin Islands. Plasketts prosecutorial skills were stunning as she made the argument that Trump had violated his oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. She stole the show, some in the media declared. Her

THE MINISTERS AND MAGISTRATES in colonial New England had declared of woman that she was helpful in the propagating of mankind, that she yielded Subjection to [her husband] as her Head, and that she had no desire to be a rash wrambler abroad. Though often contested, those formulations of the idea of womannotwithstanding some modifications here and therekept a tyrannical hold in America for four hundred years. They popped up, briefly at least, even at the start of the new millennium, when opt-out women agreed that it was natural to let men head the family as breadwinners and that happiness for a woman was giving up her rash wrambling abroad and staying home to take care of the babies.

Opt-out fever broke by the second decade of the new millennium. Was that the end, once and for all, of womans retreat back to the home? Virtually everywhere in the United States, women had now moved into what had been mans world. Did their unprecedented movement (and its infinite visibility through social media) signify that finally the old notions of woman had died? Was anything left of those ideas that had been so tenacious for centuries?

Woman must not wrinkle her forehead about politics?the governors of ten states and territories. They were one-third of the justices on the Supreme Court. A woman was sworn in as vice president of the United States.

Woman exhibits a natural modesty of feeling and manner about sexual matters?

The New York Times got it: Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion Take Control, a headline announced. Women critics pronounced WAP a personal, thorough and incredibly detailed account of what (womens) sexual pleasure looks and feels like. WAP was the epitome of female empowerment, they enthused; its focus on womens satisfaction in the bedroom was healthy and sex positive. In the first twenty-four hours after its release, the video of WAP had 26 million views on YouTube; it was subsequently streamed over 300 million times. Billboard magazine named WAP front and center among the best rap songs of the year and crowned its creator, Cardi B, Woman of the Year. Bloomberg named her number one in its Pop Star Power Rankings.

Womans gentle and unassuming tenderness makes her a stranger to violence?

Nor would Schlafly have sassed her generations gender notions as saucily as Greene did in her likes of Facebook posts that drooled over bloodshed: a bullet to the head as a good way to remove Pelosi from her role as Speaker of the House, and a yearning to hang H [Hillary Clinton] and O [Barak Obama]. To a reign-of-terror proposal that such traitors suffer death, Greene responded with chilling deliberation, Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly. A month after taking her seat in Congress, Greene concocted a quintessential rejection of womans gentle and unassuming tenderness. Hoping to become the face of Second Amendment rights, she announced that she was raffling off two AR-15smilitary-style semiautomatic rifles like the one used by Omar Mateen when he killed fifty people at an Orlando, Florida, gay bar; by Adam Lanza when he killed twenty-six people, including twenty children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut; and by James Holmes when he killed twelve people and wounded fifty-eight in a darkened movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The AR-15, Greene said, was in the crosshairs of gun grabbers all across America, but she promised that its banning wont happen on my watch. The ad for her gun giveaway included a photo of Greene in a military-style jacket, looking very ungentle and untender and cradling in her arms an AR-15, her finger on its trigger.

Woman is pale, delicate, sentimental?

By the final game of the competition, many of the 20,000 fans in the stadium had dyed their hair vibrant purple-pink to match Rapinoes. They were chanting Equal pay!, too, because one of Rapinoes many sociopolitical battles had been to fight the disparity in prize money between the mens teams, which collectively were awarded $38 million, and the womens teams, which were awarded $4 million. LGBTQ rights was another of Rapinoes battles after she came out as gay in 2012. The centuries-old fear of aggressive women being dismissed as Amazonian, manly, unnatural, or dykes is now history, Rapinoe told the press. She added, only half joking: You cant win a championship without gays on your team, its pretty much never been done before, ever. Science right there.

At a celebration party after a ticker-tape parade up lower Broadways Canyon of Heroes, Rapinoe was interviewed as she clutched her trophy in one hand and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot in the other. A little tipsy, she looked right into the camera and shouted: I deserve this! I deserve this! Everything! But it was not simple egotism, as the journalist Jenna Amatulli understood: it was women owning their victories and praising themselves. It was the antithesis of pale, delicate, sentimental woman.