by Jocelyn Barrett
So here we are again. This
is officially the November/December issue, which really means that here at Fifty-One %, we
have all sailed gracefully past the point of stress overload, and are teetering on the
edge of nervous breakdowns. I’m sure everyone reading this can relate. So we mushed
November and December together in order to bring you a more quality product. Here it is.
The Big Holiday Issue.
I learned quite a few things of great interest in gathering the info for this
issue. The first and most disturbing: when you type "women art" into a search
engine on the internet, you are assaulted with about six hundred pornography sites. If
you’re lucky, you can find two sites which actually showcase artwork by or featuring
women that is not classified as "adult entertainment." The second is that on
almost every given day of the year, some country somewhere in the world is celebrating its
independence day. I found a calendar that listed all of them, it was fascinating. Today,
for example, is Independence Day in Barbados and Yemen. Fascinating. On every day,
somewhere, people are celebrating their freedom.
I was born into a Catholic family, and so every year I celebrate Christmas.
When I was young the church played a huge role in my family’s celebration. Christmas
eve my sisters and I sang in the children’s choir at evening mass, my mother attended
the mysterious midnight mass, we would be laying awake in excitement and hear her leave.
There were depictions of the nativity all over our house – my mother would raise the
ceramic nativity on the coffee table a week before all of the other decorations went up,
so we never forgot that was the central image of Christmas. What that did for us, her
children, was to take the focus off of the commercial aspect of the holiday, and refocus
it on what she saw as the meaning behind it.
So what happened when I grew up and rejected Christianity as my religion? The
yearly event of Christmas posed both a dilemma and an opportunity. The dilemma was that I
was in love with the idea of Christmas, but I had been so fine tuned to the religious
aspects of it, what would I do as a non-Christian?
The opportunity I discovered was far greater. It was a chance to define for
myself what I saw as my reasons to celebrate at this time of year. And isn’t that the
point? Whether we are singing for our god or goddesses, or gathering to share the joy we
felt in having won the November referendum, or to celebrate the birth of Christ. We as
women and humans need to take time out to take a step back, realize how much beauty there
is around us, and get a little ecstatic. If you read the blurb about the pagan origins of
Christmas, you’ll see there’s a reason why these celebrations happen in the
middle of winter. Because it’s cold, it gets dark early, we are working ourselves to
the limit, and when we’re not working, we’re so tired we end up stuck inside
staring at the ceiling. The pagans feel that if they make their own light, share their
warmth and happiness, they can coax the goddess back. One of my favorite parts of modern
holidays is the lights, I love to see so much light. If we don’t take the time to
focus on the inspiring parts of our lives, then what is it that we as feminists are
fighting for? If we ignore the beauty it might begin to fade away, and it’s a lot
harder to think about fighting for a world with no beauty.
We often feel so pressed, we’re often feeling like we’re doing all of this
work, we’re struggling and the world isn’t as friendly as to us as it aught to
be because we’re doing this feminist work. Our cups can sometimes feel mighty empty.
And it is important, I think, while I exhort us to get busy and do all this work I have to
also say to you, I am not telling you empty your cups. I think that it’s important
that we continue to find ways to fill our cups, to recharge ourselves. The truth is that
the more recharged we are, the more dangerous we are, the more energy we have. I think one
of the things we know is we usually like to have a good time. Activism tends to make you
want to have a good time. I think that we should, no matter where we go, talk about the
pleasures of the body, the pleasures of song. We need to find occasions in which we sing,
in which we dance, in which we do those things that give us energy and pleasure and joy.
To remind ourselves that the feminist movement is a movement of life, and every
opportunity that we move to affirm ourselves and our life force – hugging each other,
hugging a baby, making love, making cakes, frying chicken – whatever it is that makes
us feel good, we should do it. Do it and do it and do it, and sing about it, and talk
about those pleasures to each other, because I know how tired we can all be trying to do
this work.
Marcia Anne Gillespie, Editor of M.S. Magazine, speaking at the 1997 Maine Women’s
Studies Conference