For Strong Women
A strong woman is a woman who is strainingA strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing “Boris Godunov.”
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears
in her nose.
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine,
why aren’t you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.
A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.
A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.
Marge Piercy, The Moon is Always Female, Alfred A Knopf, 1997.
To be a woman is to be many things, but quite often it involves being misunderstood, undervalued and overworked. Sometimes the misunderstanding is almost enticing; as it is when"Old Blue Eyes" is saying it---
"I'm supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I've flunked more often than not. I'm very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don't understand them." Frank Sinatra (1915-1998)
But it's also demeaning and removed from reality--
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)--I tried (unsuccessfully thus far) to track down the source of this quote, since Shaw was an enlightened man and a supporter of women's rights. He may not have personally felt that way, but it was a widely accepted social view. (A well-articulated article about the "proper" place for men and women in politics from a 1903 article in Atlantic Monthly is a window into this point of view-https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1903/09/why-women-do-not-wish-the-suffrage/306616/)
The perceptions of women's roles in economics, politics and society have evolved and expanded in my lifetime, but there currently seem to be forces determined to diminish and contract those advances. It truly does seem that "a woman's work is never done."
Still, whether or not they were recognized for their strength, most of us have needed the women in our lives to be there for us in one way or another and they usually came through for us. I think of my mother as an example of the women in this poem. She contracted rheumatic fever at age 8 and languished in bed for a year, needing to relearn how to walk; this had a lifelong impact on her health and strength. I'm picturing her now as that small child confined to bed and adding to this picture for the first time in my mind, my grandmother's experience. Grandma was already 28 when she married Grandpa in Skeitz, Germany and they immigrated to America in 1911 along with their 4 children (a 5th was on the way), when my mother was 3 years old(she was the 3rd child). By the time of Mom's illness about 1916, there were 8 children under 12 years old, and 3 more yet to come. Grandma had her last child at age 46. I tremble to think of the unending work and effort she had to expend every day.
From that example of perseverance, my mom faced her own challenges; widowhood with 2 small children at age 32 and needing to find a way to survive through the Depression and WWII which sent 4 of her brothers to war. She was both strong and weak, independent-minded, but sometimes purposefully helpless and dependent (traits probably acquired in her sickbed). Sometimes she put on her rags of martyrdom and complained.
"Oh," she'd say, "you'll never know how I suffered..."
"So, tell me already," I would think to myself.
But the sum of her was joyous and generous and loving and was she was loved in return. My friends and so many others always spoke of her with outright affection. She had a disarming way of turning strangers into friends. The coffee pot was always on and something tasty cooling on the counter. She's been gone almost 30 years; but of course, not really. I'm starting to see her everytime I look in the mirror...
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other.
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other.
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