Oh, Yes They Do

By Joan Chittister

"Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life," the Poet Robert Southey wrote in a famous letter to Charlotte Bronte, “and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it,” the letter says with more than a mild ring of irony to it.

The fact is that Southey’s poetry is hardly known these days. Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is a best-seller still.

Point: Robert Southey and all those philosophers, theologians, and patriarchs of the same sexist ilk were wrong then–women did write--and they are still wrong now. I know that because I am a writer of over 30 books myself.

The difference is that I am an American woman born in an era when women rose up to claim the human rights that men had been giving men for over 200 years but had failed to do much to assure for women. Brave women bore the ridicule that being called ‘feminist’ brought with it. They risked the rejection that came with building “a woman’s nation.’ They braved the social cost, the terrible discomfort, of being “the first this, the first that.” They gave their lives to changing laws and opening doors. Most of all, they taught their daughters to expect for themselves the same opportunities their brothers took as birthright, to arrogate unto themselves the same possibilities the male world assumed for its sons.

No doubt about it: much has changed for women in our lifetime.

As a result, many younger women now assume that feminism is over, passe, accomplished, “so your generation, Mother.” They fail to recognize--because they are American women, too--the range and restricting impact of the disparities, in fact if not in theory, still present between men and women even now. The data is clear, the figures are real: there is yet a major wage gap and promotion gap. There is certainly a gap in domestic equity and security. There is still a parity gap in political representation and social, economic, financial and religious presence and influence. They are all clear. Too clear.

As an American woman, then, I know that our vision is still unfinished, our daughters are still unsafe, our lives and the lives of women everywhere are still unfulfilled.

As American women, then, we must use what power and voice, resources and vision we have gained for the sake of women everywhere still denied education, still murdered and burned, raped and made captive in the name of marriage, for those powerless in the courts and unwelcome on the streets, for girl children unwanted and unborn everywhere till the whole human race is finally, finally, fully living and fully alive.

As an American woman, I am heir to the legacy of courageous women who are leading men, as well as women, to a new and better sense of what it means to be human. And I must use it–for all our sakes.