mary mary quite contrary...

I have a funny story to share:
My first college experience, like many others, was peppered with the discovery and development of strong emotions, opinions, and self revelations. These formative years lend themselves to this kind of exploding into the world; attaching oneself to edifying beliefs and philosophies, and distancing of the outdated, archaic modalities that defined adolescence, our "parents ways", and who we "used to be". In short, when you are first learning who you are in the world, there is a fervent nature to what you ascertain. I cradled my ideals as if they were my blood, my life force, my soul. I was a feminist, a radical, maybe even a communist!! (haha, I have matured my ideas since then) This was in fact how I came to know myself, and I had such a deep desire to be empowered, intelligent, opinionated, well-spoken, and useful.

Accompanying all the energy of these revelations of insight through higher education, we find, I found there exists a juxtaposition, an antithesis if you will, of combative thoughts and opinions that dare thwart your new found self edification. It can sometimes be jarring.

This came for me once at the end of my first year, chugging along full of hope and idealism, my best friend and I were in the dorm collecting the clothes people were throwing away, in that we might donate them to the homeless shelter down the street. I came across a pile of shirts, some blue and some pink outside one of the rooms, and before I stuffed it into the garbage bag I decided to investigate. I noticed immediately that these were left over materials from the Wittenberg University College Republicans group on campus, and in an effort to promote themselves, coined catchy little phrases for the back of their shirts. I don't rightly remember what the blue "male" shirt said, undoubtedly something offensive (given the nature of what the other one said). I do remember distinctly what the pink "female" shirt said. In cutesy pink script it read, "Oh your a feminist? Isn't that cute!"

I don't mean to offend any republicans reading this, for I understand any one of HALF-WITTED intelligencia might slightly consider how offensive this could be, but I felt as if someone had stabbed me in the eyes with a red hot rusted iron poker, and dashed all my new revelations about the world. THE NERVE?? How could any woman say that? If she had only known what kind of adversity, trial, distress, grief, wretchedness, woe, and misery women had to go through to even allow her to speak that opinion publicly! I was appalled at both the ignorance and audacity of this statement--I was already peeved at the College Republicans for a public debate they recently held with the College Democrats, where they argued vehemently against gay rights with a vindication build on sand, and to me, with my new though rudimentary understanding of the world, seemed based in nothing rational.

These shirts were definitely NOT going to the homeless shelter! I would be damned before I let Wittenberg be represented that way!

This is the story I am reminded of as I read Mary Wollstonescraft. I return now as I did then to reflecting on the massive amount of strife it must have required, the courage, and the endless years of suffering hopelessness of our foremothers to get us where we are today. The seemingly innocuous statement made by the "marketing committee" of the Wittenberg College Republicans failed to even consider the massive amount of love these women must have had, not only for themselves and their own freedom, but for us and future generations,the minds of "a woman who has thinking powers", as we continually crash up against the patriarchal hierarchy. But how much more difficult or different for these pioneers I wonder?

After reading about Wollstonecraft's failed marriage to Imlay, and her attempted suicide, I reflected on the term W.E.B. Dubois coined and elaborates on in his collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk in order to describe the African experience in America. He states that the "double consciousness" is “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (2).
This concept of "double consciousness" is three fold. First, the power of white stereotypes on black life and thought (being forced into a context of misrepresentation). Second, the racism that excluded black Americans from the mainstream of society, being American or not American. Finally, and most significantly, the internal conflict between being African and American simultaneously.

Double consciousness is an awareness of one's self as well as an awareness of how others perceive the self.

I find this to also be valid for women of the time; the development of a double consciousness of female and womenhood where, as Wollstonecraft states ,"the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement." Were women also not considered fully human, unable to own property, or gain even their own inheritance? The idealism of the French Revolution celebrated the "universal rights of MAN" not including WO-man in those rights. It seemed a woman could only find validation in marriage. It was only in marriage she could access her inheritance, acquire some stability, and her personage ratified, thus only furthering her subjugate dependence on men, and their perspectives of her.

Externally, and from a 21st century perspective, Mary Wollstonecraft may have seemed schizophrenic or demented for attempting to kill herself after loosing the love of her husband Gilbert Imlay. With chocolate, I would mosey to her dwelling with words of comfort, "Girl, c'mon, don't you waste one more moment of your beautiful soul on this infidel, this vagrant. Girl you are strong and amazing, do not shed blood for his sorry ass; there are other fish in the sea! Let's go out dancing!" But no, I am privileged to respond this way because I know my worth does no depend on a man. I am privileged to define myself for myself, and even if someone as passionate, intelligent and intense as Mary Wollstonecraft would have recognized this, her society would have thwarted her. Was she clawing desperately to Imlay because she loved him, or she did not want to loose the only worth and validation in identity society gave her, even if she knew in herself it was not so. Thus a Double Consciousness; a class of people whose "values and behavior have been distorted because their social roles prevent them from becoming fully human."


I could go on for hours....

I indubitably reckon that the designers of the Wittenberg University College Republican's shirts of 2004 ever considered any of these things when deciding on a motif. I really wonder who they were meaning or offend exactly? People like me? Or are they somehow inferring that people like Mary Wollstonecraft were actually just out of line and out of mind, and I can only guess, but they probably had no idea who she was anyway.


Either way, my best friends and I made a bonfire that weekend, where we held an effigy burning of the shirts, and celebrated being female. Thanks Mary. The End.