ABSTRACT
Even after a life-changing analysis in which I felt I had finally attained humorous acceptance of “the bitch within,” I find that I still prefer the familiarity and general recognition that comes from being a “good girl.” Because of this, all sorts of political activism, especially political protest, do not come easily to me. It was easier in college, when there were large social movements against the Vietnam War, against sexism and racism-but even there I shunned the more aggressive Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and believed that reason would eventually prevail against such perverse logic as “we had to burn the village to save it.” By the time I got to graduate school in the post-Watergate 1970s, resistance movements had begun their retreat to academia, and there I found a much more comfortable home and community for my left-wing thinking and faith in reason. During those years, however, I was involved in several single-issue protests, one of which was a multiyear struggle against Washington University Medical School’s program, funded by AID, to invite third world doctors to train in the latest sterilization techniques. At the time, The Agency for International Development (AID) had a published goal to sterilize a certain proportion of third world women by a certain date, and the program offered free laparoscopes to the participating doctors. I’ll never forget the moment when, standing outside the medical school with a picket sign, I was accosted by an angry woman who screamed: “Your mother should have been sterilized!” I felt anger, to be sure, but I also felt shame. Her attack stirred up something old in me, a feeling that I was not good, that I was disobedient. How I wished I could revel in feeling disobedient and antiauthority, as the male leaders of the group seemed able to do. But sadly, as committed as I am to social justice, I have never been able to revel in open rebellion, and I still can’t. Indeed, I’ve seen my past repeated in the present: At the beginning of the Iraq War, when there was a movement and a hope that U.S. belligerence might be checked, I took political action. But as the war drifted on and the movement dwindled to those few people who, every week, courageously stand outside on the same street corner with their peace signs, I found myself going indoors to pound my keyboard,
not the pavement. How do those people sustain enough hope to stay out there week after week? Perhaps what keeps me indoors isn’t just a collusion with gender norms, that is, my discomfort going against the gender stereotype that brings approval; perhaps it is something, too, about how one sustains hope.
