Women’s Space

The kids and I went to the local fabric store yesterday.  I am making my youngest, Maggie, a Halloween costume this year. She’s going to be the character Gir from the cartoon series “Invader Zim.”  So, I am making her this costume.  Although off and on throughout my life, fabric stores have been almost a second home for me, It’s been some years now since I’ve actually gone to the fabric store, purchased a pattern, fabric, notions, enjoyed the entire, satisfying ritual.  When my oldest children were little and before we were ensconced in patriarchal religion, I made Halloween costumes every year for them — Peter Pan, red and white striped clown suit with blue pom-poms, butterfly, Superman, a yellow and black felt bumblebee, a Ninja warrior.  Over the last going-on eight years now, my long commute, my job far from home, have made this kind of creativity and sewing, just in general — something I have loved throughout my life — next to impossible to enjoy, save for stolen moments here and there during all-too-brief vacation times filled with their own urgencies and demands and deadlines.  

I loved being in the fabric store again on a leisurely Saturday afternoon with my kids.  I loved going through the pattern book, finding the hoodie pattern, picking out the fleece for the tail, the ears, matching the thread, selecting the interfacing, the dividing zipper.  Especially I enjoyed the women– all of them.   A bastion of true woman-only space is as near to every woman as her local fabric store.  Fabric stores, in my experience, are staffed by women and supported by women in ways almost no other kinds of retail outlets are.  An added bonus is,  fabric store employees are usually old women, sometimes retired from some other job and working in a fabric store because they want to.  The grey heads are everywhere, the sensible shoes, the warm sweaters.  They take their time, they are never rushed; one should never go to a fabric store with the idea of purchasing something quickly!  The women chat with you, they ask you what you are going to make, they comment on the material you are using, they smile at your children and ask them what they will be for Halloween.   This is an ancient women’s ritual; it is art, culture, community specific to women as a people, this choosing and laying out of the bolt of fabric, the smoothing, the careful measuring, the cutting, the handing off of the material, woman to woman, then transforming the stack of fabric, carefully folded, piece by assembled piece, into a garment.  It is truly no man’s land.  I felt sad and frustrated realizing this was really Maggie’s first trip to the fabric store in this particular way, that her first encounter with this aspect of women’s culture did not take place until she was 10 years old.  I also felt happy knowing her own journey was just beginning.  I think she will be quite a seamstress in time.  She dresses carefully, is extremely picky and has great difficulty finding clothes she likes in regular stores.  Her prized garment at the moment is a red and black hoodie with kitty pawprints for pockets and ears on the hood.   

It was in this context of this trip to what still remains of women’s culture that I read Kay Leigh Hagan’s  essay, “Heart Sisters,” this morning from her book, Fugitive Information:  Essays from a Feminist Hothead.  I love Kay Leigh Hagan like almost no other feminist writer, in part because her writing brims over with affection for, and delight in, women as women.  She wrote about her mother’s bridge club that met all the years she was growing up, describing the club as ultimately much more than a bridge club, more “an innocuous cover” for a women’s support system.  Within that support system, Hagan wrote, women “shared resources, wisdom and even magic, creating a space to celebrate and empower themselves within a sanitized misogyny desperately reinventing itself.”

Hagan described all the ways the women in her mother’s bridge group loved and supported one another throughout their lives.  One of their rituals was “Heart Sisters.”  In this ritual, women would draw names once during the year, at a holiday luncheon one of the women prepared (this task rotated over the years, so each woman prepared the luncheon only once in a decade).  The name each woman drew was her “Heart Sister” for that year.   The identity of one’s Heart Sister was a secret, a sacred trust.  The only mission of one’s Heart Sister was to surprise and delight.  Heart Sisters devoted themselves to giving one another pleasure, encouraging one another, acknowledging victories and accomplishments, surprising one another, remembering birthdays and other special days, always anonymously. 

I recognized this ritual, though I had not realized it took place ever among women in bridge clubs!  My mother had grown up on the “wrong side of the tracks” and never trusted bridge club-type women’s gatherings even as the wife of a professional, middle class man.  I inherited (or learned) her skepticism.  But both my mother and I would, in our own time, encounter this Heart Sisters ritual under a different name, “Secret Sisters,”  practiced in Christian women’s groups of all kinds.  It seems that women have historically supported each other in this particular way under all sorts of auspices– in quilting and sewing circles, in garden clubs, at the local Grange, wherever they have gathered as women.

Hagan writes, echoing my own experience of a five years ago:

The first year I attended the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, I was walking through the lush, fern-filled woods when I encountered a banner tied high between two trees.  White with lettering of silver glitter, the banner read, simply, “Celebrate Womyn.”  I was stunned and suddenly tearful, imagining what the world might be like if the messages surrounding us at every turn of the dial, page, and corner exhorted us to “Celebrate Womyn”…In that moment of insight, I pledged to celebrate womyn at every opportunity, in ways communicating that message to myself as well as others.  This is, I think, the revolutionary aspect of the Heart Sisters, whose purpose, it could be said, was to celebrate womyn.

I like the synchronicity of happening to be on the “Heart Sisters” chapter of Hagan’s book on the day I had gone to the fabric store.  I’ve been doing some deep thinking about relationships between women, connections between women, in light of the sadness and anger I’ve felt during the 2008 election campaigns.  I read something on a blog a couple of days ago that also gave me pause and has me thinking along these lines.  I won’t link, mostly because the blogger had been troubled, she said, as she noticed who was reading, and I don’t want to add to that troubledness, because I like and appreciate this blogger.    But someone in a comment wrote that she almost never talks about her radical feminist views and politics in real life to those she encounters casually; she saves her political analysis and commentary for the blogosphere.  She doesn’t worry about how what she writes is received; she figures if someone feels attacked or offended, it’s their problem, not hers and they shouldn’t be reading her then.  And, that’s true enough, I don’t disagree.  Underneath that discussion, though, is a different, in my opinion, more critical and pressing discussion, that has to do with creating the kind of real life connections that, as Kay Leigh Hagan correctly says,  really are the stuff of revolution.   Can women make real life revolution together, when you get right down to it, by clobbering other women on their blogs and boards and websites?  I don’t think so.  Especially if, in their daily lives, they are not discussing revolution-making at all with the women they encounter.  To get to revolution, of course, we have to first go through the process of making connections and creating intimacy, in real life, with real women.

‘There is no final end,’ says Marilyn French, ‘there is only the doing well, being what we want to be, doing what we want to do, living in delight.’  My Heart Sisters remind me of this essential truth by modeling courage, imagination and creativity.  It is in the mundane setting of our daily lives that we exert our greatest influence.  Despite the elaborate and desperate attempts of the dominant culture to distract us, the enduring love among women, expressed in the most ordinary of ways, guides our attention again and again to the power at our core.  ‘It is possible to live with an eye to delight rather than to domination.  And this is the feminist morality,’ says French.

Loving over time, respecting change, mirroring our realities; unfailing honesty;  the sharing of resources, creating a personal culture to celebrate ourselves as women– this is what I offer my Heart Sisters and what I have come to expect of them.  This is what was modeled for me by those who came before.  What I am suggesting here is that we acknowledge the immediate tranformative energy of our commitments to one another.  That we practice rituals of endearment, affection, and delight with the same earnestness we use to challenge the abuse of power.  That we appreciate the extraordinary influence of a thoughtful gesture.  That we understand the revolutionary significance of women’s enduring love for women, wherever it can be found, and in whatever form.

I think it is easy to forget, to lose sight of, the deep truth of what Hagan is saying here.  We can write our feminism, our lives, our commitment to women, all the live long day, including on the blogosphere, and that is important work and has its place.  But without love, affection, delight,  true connection between women in real life  – women of all kinds, women who are “wrong” and women who are “right,” women whose politics mesh and don’t mesh, women out of every background and in every situation — we won’t be able to make real revolution.  It will continue to elude us.  The good news is, revolution-making in its humblest beginnings is as near as the local fabric store, as near as creating the rough equivalent of a bridge club, as near as allowing oneself to be so uncool and unhip as to take for herself a “Heart Sister.”

Heart