I grew up in a home where little girls were expected to have their long curly hair tied up in a ponytail with a pretty pink bow clipped up to the top—where piano lessons were a must, not a maybe. Where dresses came with at least a foot of flounces and the sinking knowledge that if I got grass stains on the hems, there’d be trouble. I didn’t do well with this ideology—as soon as I could convince my mother to let me, I cut my hair into a short little bob and brushed the curls straight out. I started dressing myself in first grade and developed an odd sort of affection for brown stripes and sandals with socks, although in retrospect, I’d like to think that was more decided by my school’s dress code than any sort of defect in my personal style. But why did I feel the need to change in the first place?
I grew up in the age of Girl Power, but what did that really mean? I was too young to pick on the actual power lurking there. I had no knowledge of the riot grrl bands in the early 90’s; I was too young to know about any of the real feminist movements going on behind the scenes. Instead, I got the Spice Girls, and all of a sudden, girl power meant vinyl short shorts and platform thigh highs, and was this what we wanted? It certainly was when I was seven, pretending to be Posh Spice and lip-syncing on the playground (although in retrospect, Scary was totally the coolest one). I don’t exactly recall the first time I realized there was a problem—the first time I noticed that boys and girls were treated differently in some ways, but I remember a lot of bitterness towards the end of my seventh grade year, when my classmates Grant and Zach got to introduce the firemen to chapel and not me. When the boys got to watch the eighth grade viper eat the rabbit. Not that I particularly wanted to watch that rabbit die, but it would’ve been nice to be invited.
By the time I was sixteen, I was more aware of my surroundings. I’d started to read a little on my own, and I started dressing in black, as all great thinkers do. My best friend was a feminist going to protests on the weekends; I was thinking thoughts just to make my parents mad, and I felt like I was doing something. But as we begin to enter into this project, examining the intergenerational effects of gender, I’m forced to take a step back and ask myself—is this compulsion for change born anew in every generation?
My mother has a whole slew of photos at that age where we look as if we could be twins. Long dark hair, a sullen look, a slump to our shoulders as if the weight of the world was about to bring us to our knees, and black converse because… well, what other shoes do the rebel girls wear at sixteen? My grandmother looks at those photos and shudders, yet I specifically remember my great-grandmother looking just as exasperated when talking about the habits of her daughters throughout those years.
What it comes down to is this: some patterns of behavior are bound to repeat themselves. Although we might have a deep-seated respect and patience for the knowledge and experiences of our parents and grandparents, as young adults preparing to enter the “real world,” the six of us are entering into this project not just thinking we’re smarter, better, and generally more advanced than previous generations, but knowing we are—regardless of whether that fact is actually true or not. However, our goal here in this project is to trace just this kind of progression through generations of a family.
Viola, my great-grandmother, married at sixteen and had my grandmother, her first child of five, at seventeen. She remained married to that man for the rest of her life.
Betty, my grandmother, married at twenty-one and had her first child of three at twenty-two. She divorced her husband at thirty and remarried later in life.
Diane, my mother, married at twenty-seven and had me, her only child, at thirty-three.
How do these people and their individual experiences affect me? Do these cycles repeat throughout other families? Do the same patterns come up time and again?
I’m not sure, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
