Archives for November 2012

My legs are heavy like sacks of sand and my breath comes short now, almost four hours in. I am supposed to be running, but what I manage is a trot. It seems ridiculous that I swam a mile and biked thirty for the privilege of doing this in the hot sun on the high plains.

Yet no part of me wants to stop, not even my burning quads. I will finish this because that’s what endurance athletes do.

At first glance, the word “athlete” might not spring to mind to describe me. Maybe “mother,” “soft,” or “plump” – and those are the kinder words. What five seasons of triathlons have taught me is that the first glance gives little indication of the heart within. In my triathlon club, Karma Multisport, women from twenty-something to seventy-something train and race and celebrate together. It doesn’t matter how fast any one of us is, what matters, entirely, is the heart within each of us. I am inspired by these women, especially the ones I learn have also endured illness, injury, and loss – which is almost everyone. What these women are able to bear and to carry with them through the miles makes them unspeakably beautiful to me. I am a white American woman of privilege, and I have also endured many things in my nearly fifty years that would surprise you, including hunger and fear and violence, thankfully in smaller doses than many. Still, I carry these experiences with me, my Girl Scout badges of endurance. You can’t see them, and I rarely talk about them, just as when a race is finished I don’t focus on the way my foot started hurting two hours and fifty-three minutes in. I focus on the feeling that flooded me when I crossed the finish line.

What if we women could value the ability to endure like we value beauty? We would celebrate the woman who cared for her ailing parents for ten years, the woman who lived through starvation and violence in a Congolese refugee camp, the woman who worked two full-time minimum wage jobs and gave up sleep so that her children could eat. If we could value them, could we learn to value this quality in ourselves? To make living through, maintaining, moving forward more important by far than a smooth jawline or a perfectly plucked eyebrow arched in judgment? Let’s learn to bank the fires in each other, as my coaches and teammates in Karma do for me, rather than pick apart the physical flaws, the weaknesses, the apparent beauty or lack thereof. Let’s value the ability to endure, to recognize it in ourselves and to celebrate it in other women. Because — let’s face it — we have to keep moving forward. What other direction is there?   Rebecca Arno is vice president of communications for The Denver Foundation (www.denverfoundation.org), a community foundation serving the seven-county Metro Denver area.  

<Editor’s note: This is the second in a series entitled VOICES, which will run until TEDxMHWomen on December 1.  The series will hear from various local women on a variety of topics and seeks to activate the community in discussion. If you have a thought on the article,  join in the conversation.>

My first semester of grad school, I took a seminar on ‘Haussmannization: Constructing and Deconstructing 19th-Century Paris’ … I thought I was going to study the architect who rebuilt France’s most famous city as we know it today. I wasn’t wrong, just short-sighted. “Haussmannization” was so much more. It involved the tearing down of medieval structures and adding light to the dark city; it was the rehabbing of Notre-Dame-du-Paris; widening the roads into the now famous boulevards; the opening of public gardens; shows at the opera; and “unaccompanied women” shopping at the newly created department stores. This upheaval blurred the lines among class, traditionally accepted gender spheres, and socio-cultural accepted masculine/feminine roles.

Paris during the last two decades of the 19^th century may have been a collision site of “XX” meets “XY,” but it wasn’t the first time or place these questions of gender definitions had been challenged. Throughout history there have been plenty of times where women were “pushing the boundaries:”

• Hatshepsut usurped the crown of Egypt and is considered to be one of the most successful pharaohs, reigning longer than any other woman of an indigenous Egyptian dynasty and reigning, supposedly, as a man (FYI–this really irritated her step-son who was supposed to inherit the throne).
• Queen Elizabeth proved to be one of the most successful monarchs in England’s history.
• Catherine the Great enacted a coups d’etat against her husband, Tzar Peter III, and then went on to acquire more land and had more military victories when compared to other monarchs (of either gender) of her time.
• Women were very successful shopkeepers and store owners during the Golden Age of the Baroque era.  American women appeared on the battlefields alongside men fighting for our country’s freedom.
• Southern Belles ran the plantations during the War Between the States, often increasing them in size and profitability.

Unquestionably, there have been strong female voices and presences throughout history, and I always believed I was one of those strong presences. In fact, I’m quite sure that I would have manned a canon at Petersburg to fight for a cause I felt passionate about, regardless of my gender – even knowing my Grandpa and Grandma would tell me that it wasn’t very “lady-like.”

So if I’m “not lady-like” … am I a “feminist”? I don’t know. I’ve often shied away from the definition of “feminist” as that term conjures up images of women who might scorn me for my love of scarf and hat shopping (yes, they must match), incessant reading of romance novels, crying at Hallmark commercials, and desire to own every cute skirt out there. (I was an impressionable 18-year old art historian and Carolee Schneemann, “an avid 70’s feminist artist” may have scared me… or scarred me!)

So then… who am I?

If I’m not “lady-like” AND I’m not comfortable with “feminist,” how do I define myself? What is “female” to me and others of my generation? Are those of us born “XX” destined to live as a noun defined by a dictionary and people who lived millennia before we were born? Or do we “girls” awake everyday to a challenge of defying the socio-culturally accepted understanding of “female” and “feminine”?

Is there any wiggle room here? Can I define the word “female” for myself AND request that society not just accepts but respects me for who I am?

Why do we spend so much time trying to fit into pigeonholes we didn’t create for ourselves?

Why do we expect others to fit a label we created for them?

I like baseball. I like martinis. I like TED. I like pedicures and disagreeing with the refs during college football games because I know what I’m talking about. I like wearing cute clothes and I’ve never demurely turned down food because I didn’t want to count the calories. I was a dancer growing up and love drinking beer … actually I’m fairly snotty about both of those passions.  I am a former art history professor turned paralegal turned Clinical Communications Manager who still loves to attend Denver Art Museum ‘Untitled’ events on Friday night, watch college basketball on Saturday, and ski on Sunday. My father has been known to take me to the Governor’s mansion in formal dress and ask that I not cuss and teach other Senators any “new words.” I love shoe shopping but won’t wear pink (I kicked off those pink booties in the hospital nursery).

About the time I turned 30, I decided to stop apologizing for being me. I decided to embrace my love of poetry, baseball, cussing, beer, pedicures, shoes and everything else that makes me uniquely me. I vowed I wouldn’t change who I was in order to fit society’s expectation of me or to contort my identity to fit a pre-constructed idea of who I, as a “female,” should be. I decided to honor myself and love my individuality.

I also swore not to judge others by my expectations, my labels, and my “vocabulary cage.” Who cared if women were acting “manly” or “womanly,” or engaging in activities “dudes” participate in or “dudettes” partook in? I would not raise my eyebrows in disdain of those that didn’t fit my preconceived notion of female. Or male. I made a vow to accept others and myself just as we are – to honor individuality as a gift of diversity and joy.

So maybe the title of this article entry shouldn’t be “Defining Feminine”… but instead, “Do You Accept Yourself and Others?”

I leave you with these questions I often ask myself:

Do you like you? What pigeonholes do you refuse to conform to? Do you accept others as they are… regardless?