Small Strokes Big Oaks

This is a section from my Diversity paper (intro here) about what it means to be a “good woman” or a “good wife” and why a few women seemed to feel the need to coach me toward their idea of it.  All comments/ideas/responses welcomed.

On June 29, 2009, during a particularly stimulating class discussion about Stuart Hall’s essay “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference” in relation to the nature of community and how we decide who we let into our community and who we keep out, I had several different ideas about my community, the community into which I placed myself during that first job, and how I fit (or didn’t fit) in.

Community, as we most basically defined it, is a set of people with something in common.  This could be place, mindset, skin color, ethnicity, or any other factor.  A community, however, is also about having strength in numbers; this is why we want to be a part of a community.  A community also helps us shape our identity.  Because of this, when we are accepted into a community, we are unwittingly participating in the history under which that community was formed and continues to function.  As Hall says,

…there are conditions to identity which the subject cannot construct. Men and women make history but not under conditions of their own making… We are always constructed in part by the practices and discourses that make us, such that we cannot find within ourselves as individual selves or subjects or identities the point of origin from which discourse or history or practice originates. (229)*

In other words, we may partly create our own identity, or our own history, but as a member of a community, we are subject to that community’s history.  Being born a woman, I was born into the community of womanhood, and as such, I bear the weight of years and years of womanly tradition.  I was taught by a strong woman to be strong and independent, but this is not how women have historically been portrayed.  Women who were taught to take part in a more historical view of womanhood, my coworkers for example, were instructed to take part in a more traditional role.  Almost immediately, I did not fit into their community, and I wasn’t ever sure why.  I always knew I was independent, but I never really thought of myself as an independent woman until I arrived in the midst of these women, who had already formed their historical, collective identity for which there was no room for one such as me.  As Hall writes, “As one knew one’s gender, one was able to locate oneself in the huge social division between men and women… These collective identities stabilized and staged our sense of ourselves… [which is] in part held in place by these great collective social identities” (231).  That was the only role they knew to be in a woman’s repertoire, and if I wasn’t a part of that tradition, they must have worried, on some level, that I wasn’t really a woman.  Or I definitely was not a “good” woman.

However, there is a problem with the word “good.”  What does it mean, exactly?  My simple computer dictionary has over 20 definitions of the word, and this is partly because of history.  Over the course of time, the word “good” has come to be defined in many different ways, and has been used differently to describe different things.  Just like Hall says we need to look at “Black” in a new way, maybe we need to look at “good” in a new way.  Hall writes, “In order to say ‘Black’ in a new way, we have to fight off everything else that Black has always meant – all its connotations, all its negative and positive figurations, the entire metaphorical structure of Christian thought, for example” (230).  Perhaps we need to do the same with “good” in terms of a “good wife.”  Like a student in class said, “‘good’ only means what the language says it means.”  Why can’t being a “good wife” mean simply loving your husband and working toward a happy marriage?  Why does it have to mean domesticity and docility?  Because being a good wife is not just a part of history, but a part of the history of language itself, and without a change in such language, without a change in everything else it has always meant, there will forever be conflict over what a “good wife” really is.  This is especially important considering that identities are ever forming, and we are never truly complete.  With every new experience, we take on a new piece of our identity – perhaps changing, rejecting, or adding something within ourselves.  According to Hall, feminism has been showing us this for quite some time: “The notion that identity is complete at some point – the notion that masculinity and femininity can view each other as a perfectly replicating mirror image of each other – is untenable after the slightest reading of any feminist text” (235).  As much as these women wanted to be part of my identity-forming process, they did not see their own identities as malleable, as is suggested by many stories they told about themselves and each other – most often, they began with some bit of foolishness, then ended with the idea that “this is just how we are.”  They, however, saw my identity as still forming because I was significantly younger than they were.  This could be the root of the problem in any situation involving a generation gap: Not only are the histories different, but the idea of identity is different, as well.  As much as they wanted to be a part of my identity-forming process, I could not let them because my history and my understanding of the world were so much different than theirs.

*Full citation: Hall, Stuart. “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference.”  Beyond Borders.  Randall Bass and Joy Young, ed.  New York: Houghton Mifflin Comany,2002.  228-240.