Inequality Lies at the Root

By Jan S. Gephardt

When you get right down to it, inequality lies at the root of Women’s History Month. Imagine if there were no historic, male-centric preponderance of lopsided favoritism. In that case, all months would be equally devoted to the historic achievements of both men and women. But there’s not. So, here we are.

Certainly, the same could be said for Black History Month, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement. (Of course “all lives matter,” but there’s no enduring legacy of systemic brutality against white men. Only the stubbornly obtuse would argue otherwise). But that’s the thing. Inequality lies at the root of nearly every social ill. Inequality of access to health care. Of access to housing. Or education, or healthy food. It goes on and on.

All of these are undeserved inequities. That is, for the most part the people who suffer from them did nothing to deserve them. Oh, right. How dared they be born in a particular time, place, and social position! Very negligent of them! But of all the inequalities that surround us, perhaps the most foundational – and probably the oldest – is gender inequality.

Gender Inequality Lies at the Root of All Inequality

When you can discriminate against your own mother without a second thought or the slightest qualm, that’s a special kind of low. When you can demean your daughters and turn your lifemate into a chattel, you’re beneath reprehensible.

No, I’m not talking only about men. We humans – all of us – have collectively been buying into some version of this arrangement for millennia. If anything, that only makes it more horrifying, not less. And once you’ve crossed that very basic, intimate line? Heck, what’s going too far, after that? Skin color? Spoken accent? Different religious tradition? Pick whatever you feel like hating, and do your worst! There’s a saying that common sense is not so common. In human history, it seems common decency has been all too rare, as well.

This pernicious insistence on a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority within our own families creates a powerful unconscious bias. It dictates many aspects of how we see the world and relate to others. And as a result it enforces a host of other arbitrary rules. “Boys are blue and girls are pink” is only the beginning.

Two Quotes-in-Point

This post was inspired two quotes I paired up and shared on this blog in 2017. Here they are (one re-envisioned a bit):

I didn’t say much about either quote when I first posted them (I didn’t have Yoast SEO critiquing me with red frowny-faces back then, for one thing). But it seems to me that considerably more could and should be said on the topic of the messages our families and our society send.

I’ve been both a teacher and a mom. Granted, that was a while ago (my kids are millennials). But with that background, I can attest that parents can’t control all – or even most – of the messages kids receive. Sorry, fundamentalist home-schoolers and cranky conservative legislators. It’s a losing game. No matter how draconian you are, you ultimately lose this battle.

In a society like ours, messages come through. They penetrate, in spite of everything a person tries to do to control them. The trick is teaching our kids how to evaluate what comes through. Preferably, we’ll do that in a way that doesn’t distort their thinking in even more dysfunctional ways than society already has adopted.

What are we Teaching Our Kids?

There’s a humongous battle going on right now in the United States, about what we’re teaching our kids these days. First, a moment of perspective: there have always been people (especially, but not exclusively, conservatives) getting their panties in a twist over what we’re teaching our kids these days (in whichever century “these days” are).

Back when my kids were in school, I remember how another mother worried about whether our children were being taught that “it’s okay for somebody to have two daddies.” She was outraged to discover the idea didn’t outrage me. And it’s a story that truly should be a remnant from another era. But lately it’s back again, along with deeply corrosive controversies about children’s sports competitions.

It's pretty easy to see how inequality lies at the root of this thinking. People who self-identify within the LGBTQIA+ community have never been in a numerical majority. This inequality of influence made them easy to oppress. And yet we have evidence that there have never stopped being LGBTQIA+ people at any point in history. This inconvenient fact argues that they are a naturally-occurring phenomenon. Therefore, “born that way.” And therefore not a “lifestyle choice” that could be taught.

What does it Mean to be . . . Whoever You Are?

The LGBTQIA+ community has nearly always alarmed and infuriated others who buy into the historic distortion. Because, put simply, they subvert it. A person who’s built their whole worldview on two genders, one of which is “superior” to the other, doesn’t know what to do with other expressions sexuality (or asexuality).

Except, maybe hate it.

What does it mean to be yourself? Whatever it means to be your true, authentic, full, rich, realized self, it’s the epic task of every individual to continue being it, all the time. All our lives until we die, we’re still becoming who we are in this moment.

Who are you? One of the books recently popular with book-banners is titled All Boys Aren’t Blue. And it’s true. Boys – yes, and girls – can be “any color” their heart dictates. But can they express that self safely? If it’s not safe for boys to be raised “more like our daughters,” then everyone suffers. The distortion persists, and thereby warps everything.

Rooting out the Root

People speak of toxic masculinity, and that’s certainly one facet of our dysfunction. My stubbornly feminist son has wrestled with the concept. With the ways it’s presented, argued, and too often discounted. But he’s not the only one who’s found toxic masculinity, in itself, presents an incomplete picture of the problem.

This is where we come back to that basic, fundamental point I made above. Because when gender inequality lies at the root of all inequality it’s got to be our bottom-line “first focus.” And it pretty much never has been. But I think everything will remain out of joint to one extent or another until we fix this first problem. Because the rupture within our selves, our homes, and our families ripples outward.

When our most intimate primary relationships are disfigured, that disfigures who we are in our core and distorts everything we perceive. When our perceptions are distorted, our understanding of the world is twisted. A twisted understanding of the world warps our interactions with others and contorts all of our interactions. No lasting good can take root until the root of the problem is dealt with.

It behooves us to start digging.

IMAGE CREDITS

The first image in this post, with the quote from Robert Webb, is my own (Jan’s) design. I first published it in 2018 on my Artdog Adventures blog under the title, “Challenging Absurd Distinctions.” Find details about the image’s origins there. Likewise, the Gloria Steinem and Madonna Ciccone quotes were first published in 2017 under the title “Double Standards and Our Kids.” The photo of Gloria Steinem that I added to the original quote is courtesy of Biography.com.

The Craig Sloane quote (drawn from the source article) about the social stigma felt by LGBTQ individuals comes thanks to Healthline and their excellent article about substance abuse in that community. The quote about the “insane” system that develops within dysfunctional families is from Goodreads. I re-envisioned the quote with help from “yuliiahurzhos” and 123rf. Many thanks to all of my sources!

What do You Want to be When You Grow Up?

 By G. S. Norwood

In the previous blog post, I wrote about my career in the arts. That started me thinking about all the bad career advice I got along the way—back when I was still trying to answer that age-old question: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Back then, in the Stone Age, little White American girls had two basic career choices beyond wife and mother. We could be a teacher or a nurse. Little Black girls were told they could be maids. Of course, even then, women performed a much wider variety of jobs, but society’s imagination offered us very limited options.

The newspaper’s Help Wanted section included columns titled “Jobs for Men” and “Jobs for Women.” Woe betide any women who aspired to a job meant for a man. I am, thankfully, a bit too young to remember similar columns designated for men and women of color.

“What do You Want to be When You Grow Up?” The well-meaning elders who advised the author had a limited view of young women’s career options. (credits below).

The Stereotypes Persist

Even today, in the stories we tell ourselves in film, the stereotypes persist. At 12:47 minutes into this 2016 interview for Vanity Fair, Oscar winning actress Octavia Spencer spoke about how hard it was for her to find roles that offered any kind of variety.

“Right after I did The Help—it was barely in the can—I was all excited about the possibilities that were to come,” Spencer said. “And 90% of the roles were, ‘We have this great role for you,’ and it was a maid. ‘We have this wonderful role!’ and it was a maid.” And I was, ‘You know, I just played the best damn maid role written. I don’t have a problem with playing a maid again, but it has to top this one.’ And none of them did.”

Fortunately for all of us, Spencer got proactive about finding better roles, and followed the success of The Help by playing the strongly maternal Wanda Johnson in Fruitvale Station and mathematician/computer pioneer Dorothy Vaughan in Hidden Figures.

Octavia Spencer passed up a lot of stereotyped roles to follow her dream. (Inspiring Quotes).

Be a Stripper

Young people are guided into careers in ways that are shaped by their family history and by the cultural norms of their time. When I was in high school, a new wave of feminism was just taking hold in America, although it hadn’t penetrated too far into my corner of Missouri. As seniors, about to enter our post high school careers, we were all given an aptitude test that was meant to identify jobs we might be suited for. I don’t know what that test was called, or what range of careers it included, but I do remember the ideal career it identified for me: Stripper.

I’m going to be generous and assume that a) the test was referring to someone who takes paint off industrial surfaces using solvents, or perhaps connects pieces of film into a continuous reel. And b) the test was primarily geared toward suggesting blue-collar skilled trades in traditionally male fields.

Editorial note from Jan, who worked in a print shop around the time G. got that test result: In the printing industry at that time, a "stripper" prepared photographic negatives to make photo-offset lithography plates to go on printing presses. It was a decent blue-collar job until the advent of desktop publishing a couple of decades later.

I don’t think “Stripper” was the test’s nod to my being female, with an interest in the arts. But where were the teachers and nurses? The college professors and directors of concert operations?

Bad career advice for creative people also may come from standardized aptitude tests. (credits below).

What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

I profoundly hope that particular aptitude test is no longer on the market. But career options continue to be limited by society’s expectations. Not so very long ago nearly every college bound adult was told to go into computing, because that’s where the employment growth and competitive salaries could be found. Never mind that some of us have no aptitude at all for that kind of work.

A better approach, I think, is to guide people toward careers that use the talents and abilities they naturally have. As job seekers, we tend to believe that jobs have to be hard and involve ‘work.’ But the truth is, the best careers are built on the skills and interests we have had all along. The stuff we’d do for fun, for free. We discount our talents because those things come easily to us. We forget that they don’t come easily to everyone else and are therefore valued by the people who can’t do that stuff.

One standardized test I recommend to young people now is Clifton Strengths, developed by the management consulting company, Gallup, Inc. It helps you identify your own individual talents and suggests careers where you can use them.

John’s aunt lived to see what spectacularly bad career advice she’d given in reply to “What do You Want to be When You Grow Up?”  (credits below).

Aim Low?

Your parents love you. They want you to have a steady income and secure employment. Maybe that’s why parents so often tell their children to curb their aspirations, as Mimi Smith told her nephew and future Beatle John Lennon. It’s safer than shooting for the stars.

Or, as novelist Deborah Crombie’s mother used to tell her, “If you go to secretarial school, you’ll always have a job.”

She wasn’t exactly wrong. What she should have said was, “Typing is a skill that’s highly portable, and can be used in many fields.” And that, I think, is the key to finding your career bliss. Have a lot of useful skills in your toolbox. Typing, coding, generating new ideas, balancing books, and listening empathetically are all useful in a wide range of careers. Even stripping.

It takes literally hundreds of creative people to make a movie. (credits below).

Your Job Hasn’t Been Invented Yet

But the truth is, your ideal job might not have been invented yet. I advise students whose parents don’t think they can make a living in the arts to take the folks to any Marvel movie. Sit through all the closing credits. Hundreds of names will scroll by—all of them people with jobs in the arts. Perhaps more importantly, many of those people have jobs that weren’t even invented when the adults who advised them last considered the job market.

When you combine your unique talents with the skills in your toolbox and the needs you see emerging in the world around you, you may invent a whole new answer to that age-old question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

IMAGE CREDITS

We have a lot of people to thank for the pictures in this post. Photos for the “Women’s Work” montage and the John Lennon quote were selected and arranged by Jan S. Gephardt. All three of the vintage photos for the “Women’s Work” montage have backstories worth sharing!

WOMEN’S WORK

Virginia Woodard is the tired teacher in her classroom. This was the end of her first day of teaching in 1960 at Mission View Elementary School in Tucson, AZ. The school still serves students today. Dan Tortorell photographed her for the Tucson Citizen. According to the information on Tucson.com, “She told the reporter she almost decided to turn back after getting within a block of the school.” For perspective, 1960-61 was also Jan’s first grade year.

The photo of the two unidentified nurses, taken by Gordon A. Larkin, dates to 1954. We used a detail. Scrubs Magazine identifies it as Photograph 825 from the Mount Saint Vincent University Archives.

Jan found the 1960s-era photo of an unidentified Black maid and White child on Bettye Kearse’s excellent post, “Mammy Warriors: An Homage to Black Maids.” It's written from the perspective of a Black woman whose ancestors included slaves. She critiques the persistent stereotype and pushes back with a blast of reality.

CAREER ADVICE

The Octavia Spencer quote-image came from a compilation of the Oscar-winner's wit and wisdom on “Inspiring Quotes.”

The classroom full of adolescent test-takers shows students taking a standardized test circa 1978 at Cook Jr. High. At least the decade is right, even if these kids are a little younger than G. was when her test results advised her to be a “stripper.” Lawrence Cook Middle School (current name) remains an active school in Santa Rosa, CA. Many thanks to the Santa Rosa-based Press Democrat for the photo!

Take a look at an (unidentified) 1970s-era print shop stripper in action. It's the second photo down on this page of photos by Dan Wybrant. That guy looks a lot more like the print-shop strippers Jan knew, than her sister ever did.

ENTERTAINERS EXTRAORDINAIRE

Jan illustrated the widely-available John Lennon quote with a detail from a photo by Andrew Maclear and Redferns. It was captioned, “John Lennon of The Beatles performs with The Dirty Mac on the set of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus.’” She found the photo on Cheatsheet.com.

For a case-in-point for G.’s argument that a Marvel movie requires hundreds of (gainfully employed) arts workers, see this post on Polygon. It explains what the VFX (visual effects) artists did to create Avengers: Endgame. If you read it, you’ll also see where Jan found the screen-capture from the movie’s end credits.

The research was fun, and we thank all of our sources.

Oppression

The Artdog Quote of the Week

My Quotes of the Week this month are inspired by Women's Equality Day, which this year  happens to fall on a Monday (when I try to make sure my Quotes of the Week go live).

When I went looking for appropriate quotes for the rest of the Mondays, I found this little gem from Letty Cottin Pogrebin. She's the writer and social activist who founded Ms. Magazine (full confession: Ms. was massively influential in my early life).

This is one of those quotes that makes me nod and say, "Oh, she got that right!" So it was a natural for me to include in this women's equality-themed month.

But although the place where I found this quote is full of lots of cool quotes and images, I didn't particularly groove with the way this one had been visually realized. I had a different thought about how it should be presented. I hope you like it.

SHARING IMAGE CREDIT: The visualization of this women's equality quote was all mine, but I couldn't have done what I wanted with it, if I hadn't had a little help. My help in this case came from Wikimedia Commons and a photographer named Andreas F. Borchert, who photographed the perfect pediment for me to make my point. 

Part of this image is an adapted detail from Borchert's Dublin Roman Catholic St. Audoen's Church Pediment. In order to fulfill the creative commons usage requirements, it's important for me to credit this source (though you know me: I would have anyway). And I certainly did take Mr. Borchert's license to "remix" his image pretty far. I cropped the section I needed, then applied the Sketch: Reticulation filter in Photoshop. I finished the work in Adobe Illustrator, where I created the typography and reduced the opacity of the pediment photo. 

Now it's your turn: if you like this women's equality-themed quote-image realization and want to use it, please credit both Jan S. Gephardt and Andreas F. Borchert, with links back to his license page and this blog post. Thanks!

Making progress . . .

The Artdog Image of Interest

Have we made progress? Some. Could we improve more? Undoubtedly.

From Visually.

In matters of equity and social justice, no picture is ever static, and progress is always relative. This infographic was created in 2014, so the data is already 5 years old or older. But this is a moderately recent snapshot of where we stand.

I normally celebrate February as "Social Justice February" in a nod to Black History Month. But remember that--as with feminism--greater social justice makes the world a better place for ALL of us.

IMAGE: Many thanks to Visually and the team of Noureen Saira, designer, and Elliott Smith, writer, via University of Phoenix, for this infographic "snapshot."

Challenging absurd distinctions

The Artdog Quote of the Week

IMAGE: I put this quote-image together with some help from Julie Kim of Red Rocket Creative Strategies (for the background photo--see also the excellent article that goes with the image!) and Robert Webb, without whose quote this thought would not be complete! Thank you both!

Can a Man REALLY be a Feminist?

Artemesia Gentileschi, (possible) self-
portrait as The Allegory of Painting.

In the creative fields, as well as in all others, women have had an uphill battle for equal consideration. 

A small sampling the not-so-widely-renowned names of painters Artemesia Gentileschi, Louise Bourgeois, or Berthe Morisot provides a good example. They worked alongside such male contemporaries as Caravaggio, Dali, and Renoir, and arguably were just as skilled and visionary. But you might note I only needed to list one name for each of the men, and you undoubtedly knew who I meant, if you have any background in art history. 

These women have become better known in recent years, but I challenge you to find them in an art textbook from the 1950s or '60s. You'll find loads of women in those textbooks--but they'll be the models (the objects), not the artists.

Louise Bourgeois, part of the Femme Maison series.

You can find parallels in any field, not only the arts. In most of the world, for most of history, it has been a man's world. Little wonder, then, that feminists for years have "closed the circle" and not been much interested in male input. 

Especially since I live in a relatively conservative part of the country, I am all too well familiar with the commonly-held belief that the term feminist has become a synonym for man-hater. 

Berthe Morisot, Portrait of the Artist's
Mother and Sister.

Centuries of abuse and resentment will cause reactions of hatred and repudiation. But that's ultimately a losing game for everyone, if attitudes toward the opposite gender do not evolve.

One of the great tragedies of contemporary life, in my opinion, is that more recent generations of young women have rejected calling themselves feminists, even while they enjoy many privileges they never would have had without the historic role of feminists.

How long will it take before the realization hits that if you exclude roughly half the population from the conversation--especially the half that, to this day, often holds most of the power--it's going to be difficult to change the way society as a whole thinks. 

Why would a man ever have any interest in gender equality? Don't they already have it pretty good? Well, yes and no. If you insist on strict gender stereotypes, then "being a man" is a pretty scary, dangerous, unhealthy thing to be (just look at the mortality statistics). A man may have more advantages in some ways, but he's held to unrealistic, self-destructive standards, in others. 

Men aren't given much credit when they show their feelings, take care of their children (other than paying their bills), or try to make peace instead of fighting or arguing, for example. Gender stereotypes force men to be domineering brutes, just as they force women into subservient roles. 

The UN's "HeForShe" campaign, started in 2014, has received criticism for trying to include men in the conversation--not just because equality is good for women, but because it's good for men, too. The campaign's leaders may not always strike the right note for everyone (or for every situation), but it seems to me they're asking the right questions. 

Perhaps feminist and feminism aren't such accurate words for this new paradigm, given their single-gender emphasis, despite the fact that we usually focus on the relatively more disadvantaged female side of the equation. 

But gender equality itself is an idea that must ultimately prevail, if we (whatever our gender) are to live fully-realized and fulfilling lives. It's good for women, and it's actually good for men, too. It think it's time to invite men into the discussion as equals.

2/14/2017 update: If you'd like to learn more about Caravaggio and other artists of his time period, go to The Caravaggio Page on Artsy!

IMAGES: Many thanks to that ever-bountiful resource, Wikipedia (please consider making a contribution)! The photo of the painting by Artemisia Gentileschi is from her Wikipedia page. The three images from Louise Bourgeois' series Femme Maison are from the Wikipedia page devoted to that series. The photo of Berthe Morisot's painting is from her Wikipedia page. And the logo for the HeForShe campaign is from the Wikipedia page about the program.