Tag Archives: feminism

What Would You Do?

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So what would you do?

I joined the American Association of University Women to meet other educated women. They fact that they wanted to change the world for the better for future women was a bonus.

The group recently decided to book a DEI speaker; when I found out who it was, my heart sank. Don was on the board of a local theater and held a terrible conversation with me about being unwilling to pay a black female storyteller the same as a white male teller. During the conversation, he said the festival was already diverse because it had a performer from the LGBTQ+ community. I was the one causing trouble by making a false claim in the first place.

I left that committee; Don then denied he’d said most of that. In my opinion, this man has as much business talking DEI as the pope does birth control. I took my concerns to the AAUW person overseeing that program, who said she hadn’t booked him and shared my belief that he was inappropriate, not least because a man would talk to women about DEI. She asked me to line up an alternate. I did, but Don was then left in place. “What’s done is done,” she emailed me, when I asked what happened.

So here’s my question: do I go to the meeting and confront this DEI champion of the old school upholding he is benefiting from, or do I walk away? An org that says it intends to make the world better for successive generations of women but doesn’t want to start now isn’t a good bet for a future plan. But is it worth going to the talk, sitting with a fixed smile, and then asking him why he supported not paying the white male and black female storytellers (of equal national standing) the same amount?

Because, you know, if women want to change the world, we need to do so politely. Raising our voices, challenging questions, breaking a sweat: do we really need to do those? Won’t I just be seen as a woman being rude, perhaps even personal?

Every chance to make the world better is a rare one these days. If I don’t confront this situation, am I doing what I am accusing the AAUW group of: taking the easy way rather than challenging the old order in favor of stronger voices with better representation? Or will I be the bitch who yelled?

Accepting advice now, thanks.

THE MONDAY BOOK: The Truth about Lorin Jones, by Alison Lurie

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This is an odd book, and a compelling one. It was published in 1988, which I am reliably informed by industry insiders makes it ANCIENT.

But it remains one of my favorite return-to reads. It’s about an art historian named Polly Alter who is writing a biography of painter Lorin Jones. Alter wants Jones to be the victim of male injustice, handled badly by her art-critic husband, suppressed by the glass ceiling, etc. etc. But as she seeks out people who knew Jones, Alter finds more and more complicating factors that remind Alter and the reader that people are never simple, or easy to capture. Or even, sometimes, all that easy to love.

And that’s why I like this book so much – Alter’s trying to capture Lorin Jones, and Lurie is capturing Alter and the other characters (some of whom have appeared in other Lurie novels). I love the way Lurie writes characters; they talk differently from each other; they come from different moral perspectives; their agendas are complicated and shifting and don’t just serve as plot devices. Reading The Truth About Alison Lurie is like diving into a writing workshop about characterization and dialogue.

The ending of this book (no, I won’t put a spoiler in here) remains one of my all-time favorites. Stephen King said about writing that life is ambivalent, so why shouldn’t writing be. But the way Lurie handles ambivalence, with a bit of humor and a great deal of compassion, has stuck with me since high school (when I first read Truth).

It’s a good novel for curling up with on a winter’s day, and it’s a good intro to how Lurie writes. I admit to not liking her other books as well as this one (even her feminist fairy tale collections!) but that’s okay. If this was the only thing she’d ever written, it would have been legacy enough.