Choice

Delivered by Rev. Deane Oliva

Unitarian Universalist Church of Evansville

May 9, 2009

 

I had a good friend in high school. Her name was Janine.  One day as we were going through the lunch line, Janine began to cry.  Startled and concerned, I asked her what had upset her. Through her tears she replied, “Tomorrow is my birthday.”  “Well, congratulations. Happy Birthday.” “You don’t understand. I’ll be sixteen tomorrow.” She was really getting worked up.  “I’ll be 16! And I am not married yet.”  Janine was about to become a failure, an outcast, worthless,  the first girl in a long line of generations who had not married by age sixteen and then become pregnant. She was devastated, without any view of who else she might become. 

I’m not sure that it would have done any good to tell Janine that she was a pioneer, that she was going to have more choices than any other female had had in her family. In fact, she already had forged a new milestone. She was in the eleventh grade and still in school.  How many choices did Janine have in this process?  She was so bound to her culture that she could not see beyond the traditions that held her captive. 

I too was in that position. About to enter junior high, I asked my parents if I could attend Catholic school which I assumed was much better academically than the public schools.  “No,” my parents answered. “We will not spend money for catholic school for a girl. You are just going to get married when you graduate from high school.”  Not too surprised, I weakly protested, “Darn, that’s not fair,” and returned to my activities.  And that was that. I did not give it another moment’s thought, because I simply did what my parent’s told me to do. Listen to your parents. Don’t speak to an adult unless spoken to. Always show respect, not curiosity.

Then how did I get to college you might ask?  Thank goodness for “Mr. Mazz.”  Mr. Mazzerotti was my high school chemistry teacher. One day he called my parents into his office and asked them about college.  When he noted their hesitation, he waggled his finger at them and firmly said, “You will send her to college.”  First generation Americans, my parents dutifully shook their heads at him and said, “Yes sir.”  This was definitely a change of attitude for my parents and when they returned home and confronted me with this life altering fact, I made a pact with them.  I told them that I had little interest in college but that I would apply to one school and, should I get in, I would attend, but if I did not get in, they would have to support my decision to be a roller derby skater.  They agreed and even bought me a roller skate for my charm bracelet to seal the deal.

 

A roller derby skater! What was I thinking!  Well, arguably it was the most exciting job I could think of.  It certainly beat being a secretary or a sales clerk neither or which I thought I would be good at.  I didn’t have the training to be a teacher or a nurse. What else was there?  In a world constrained by a limiting culture, how much choice did I have?

That was a long time ago, just before the second wave of feminism.

The first wave of feminism began in 1789 when Olympe de Gouges published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman to protest the French Revolutionists’ failure to mention women in their Declaration of the Rights of Man.  This was followed by Judith Sargent Murray wife of John Murray, father of Universalism, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s enlightenment theory, advocating liberation and education of women, and then a cadre of feminist leaders in the 1800’s including Sojourner Truth who delivered the famous  Ain’t I a Woman speech in Akron Ohio as well as Unitarians Margaret Fuller who wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century which argued that development was severely limited when people’s roles were defined according to their sex, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who believed further that organized religion would have to be abolished before true emancipation for women could be achieved. The first wave of feminism was said to have ended when the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote became law in 1919.

However, lest we focus too much on the right to vote, let us remember that women had very few rights up until that time and other victories were won along the way. Our neighboring state of Kentucky, for example,  in 1890 was the last state to re-consider women as chattel property, who could not own the clothes they wore. Until the 1800’s women were denied many basic rights. A man virtually owned his wife and children as he did his material possessions. If a poor man chose to send his children to the poorhouse, the mother was legally defenseless to object.

This was not too different than the status of women in the era of the Roman republic in which all women were under the control of male guardians. And yet, like the suffragettes and abolitionists the Roman women were able to stand up for themselves when the stakes were high enough. 

Early Christianity perpetuated the Roman and Greek ideology.  Women are good for conception, for motherhood, as a helper, not as an equal. Male children were preferred.

In the seventh century came the first large crack in this patriarchal system. Islamic women were granted personhood, female infanticide was banned, and polygamy became legally controlled. Women were given inheritance rights, the dowry became a wedding gift, part of the bride’s personal property. These basic rights given to women were not to be realized in Western cultures until, as we have seen, many centuries later.

Motherhood the biological and social role of the woman has always been regarded as her primary purpose. A woman’s place is in the home is a stereotype that many of us have struggled with.  The second wave of feminism directly attacked this target. Heralded by Betty Friedan’s 1963 work, The Feminine Mystique, these feminists decried the fact that women were defined by their relationship to their husbands and children, thus denying them their own personal identity.  Housewifes were termed “parasites.”  Traditional families must go. Sexual mores must be changed to allow women the same rights as men.  The rhetoric was strong, pointed, ruthless.  The pushback was similar, loud, pointed, ruthless. Sexual politics became central to the debate.

 

In the latter 19^th century a wide variety of contraceptive methods were available at local pharmacies.  The accessibility of these devices provoked many. In 1873 a bill prohibiting the distribution of these devices across state lines or through the mail was passed in Congress. The Comstock laws, as they were called, also prohibited distributing any information about abortion.

The first US Birth Control Clinic was opened in 1916 by Unitarian, Margaret Sanger who also founded Planned Parenthood. Although Planned Parenthood today is viewed as a premier health care giver and sex information provider, its early days had a decided eugenics structure.

Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children born to a mother who had 18 pregnancies, was an avowed believer in eugenics.  She is quoted as saying, "The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.[1]" and “The purpose in promoting birth control was ‘to create a race of thoroughbreds.[2]’” Yet, her own decision to start a birth control clinic was formed by her work with the poor in New York City. There she found women literally dying to learn how to stop unwanted pregnancies. It became her passion to stop this unnecessary death.

The advent of the birth control pill in 1960 coincided with the feminists’ fight for sexual reproduction rights. Women’s liberation was a key buzzword and became both a rallying point and a phrase of ill repute as women aligned with the feminist goals or resisted a headlong thrust into new roles.  Although at that time women perceived themselves as having more choices, the era led to the super-woman profile composed of hard working career women who also attempted to be the perfect mothers and wives. As families went from Ozzie and Harriet to the Huxtables, economic changes which at first reinforced the two parent household with extra discretionary income, soon came to be the albatross of necessity, as more and more families could no longer live on one income.  Soon, what once was a small window of choice, became a necessity of survival.

Tests made in the 1960s showed that the scholastic achievement of girls was higher in the early grades than in high school. The major reason given was that the girls' own expectations declined because neither their families nor their teachers expected them to prepare for a future other than that of marriage and motherhood. That trend is reversing. Thus, today we see more and more women advancing educationally.    According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, in the early 1900s about 19 percent of undergraduate degrees went to women. By 1984 the number was 49 percent and now, at 58%, women obtain more bachelor degrees then men.  Masters’ degrees are obtained decidedly more by women than men. In 2006 women earned over 356 thousand master’s degrees, compared to 237 thousand for men.  Interestingly, in the first year of college the sexes are approximately equal. It is hypothesized that more men drop out of school because they are offered higher paying jobs in fields such as construction which are traditionally not open to women. 

I am glad to see the numbers advance.  I remember when the common sense was that women were deemed generally inferior to men intellectually and specifically in the math and sciences.  Then, a wonderful Kettering study showed that when primary students – primary students – were given the same math problems but with different objects, they scored differently.  For example,

Pat wanted to bake three chocolate cakes.  Pat needed four cups of flour and two cups of sugar to make one chocolate cake. How much flour and sugar did Pat need to make three chocolate cakes?

 

Fran wanted to build three model airplanes.  Fran needed four sticks of glue and two tubes of paint to build one model airplane.  How many sticks and tubes did Fran need to build three model airplanes?

Sure enough the girls could answer the baking question, but did not do as well on the building question.

Just how constrained we are by our tradition and cultural milieu is often not even considered as we make our daily decisions.  A husband who shoots his wife commits a “passion shooting.” A wife who shoots her husband commits murder.  It was as late as 1968 that Pennysylvania voided a state law which required that any woman convicted of a felony be sentenced to the maximum punishment prescribed by law.  Prostitution laws are enforced almost exclusively against women.

Although women comprise approximately 45 percent of the labor force they hold very few decision making jobs.  They continue to be paid less for doing the same job as a male. We might immediately jump to the conclusion of gender based wage bias.  Yet, an article by  Shankar Vedantam suggests that our cultural heritage may be the culprit. Approximately 12 years ago a group of female Carnegie Mellon graduate students lodged a complaint with their economics professor Linda Babcock. : All their male counterparts in the university's PhD program were teaching courses on their own, whereas the women were working only as teaching assistants. When Babcock took the complaint to her boss, she learned there was a simple explanation: "The dean said each of the guys had come to him and said, 'I want to teach a course,' and none of the women had done that," she said. "The female students had expected someone to send around an e-mail saying, 'Who wants to teach?' " The incident prompted Babcock to start systematically studying gender differences when it comes to asking for pay raises, resources or promotions. And what she found was that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations. These differences, Babcock and other researchers have concluded, may partially explain the persistent gender gap in salaries, as well as other disparities in how people rise to the top of organizations.

Women working full time who have never taken time off to have children earn about 11 percent less than men with equivalent education and experience.

In one early study, Babcock brought 74 volunteers into a laboratory to play a word game called Boggle. The volunteers were told they would be paid anywhere from $3 to $10 for their time. After playing the game, each student was given $3 and asked if the sum was OK. Eight times more men than women asked for more money. Babcock then ran the experiment a different way. She told a new set of 153 volunteers that they would be paid $3 to $10 but explicitly added that the sum was negotiable. Many more now asked for more money, but the gender gap remained substantial: 58 percent of the women, but 83 percent of the men, asked for more.

Another study quizzed graduating master's degree students who had received job offers about whether they had simply accepted the offered starting salary or had tried to negotiate for more. Four times as many men — 51 percent of the men vs. 12.5 percent of the women — said they had pushed for a better deal. Not surprisingly, those who negotiated tended to be rewarded — they got 7.4 percent more, on average — compared with those who did not negotiate. [3]

 

These findings suggest that we make choices based on how we have been led to think of ourselves. Although women in the United States have made impressive legal gains over the past 50 years, they have not yet culturally absorbed these gains into their psyche, their traditions, or their views of themselves.  Perhaps that is because these gains are not being reinforced in the culture.  Perhaps as our Unitarian sister Elizabeth Cady Stanton states, religion must be abolished in order to achieve true emancipation. Certainly there are religious groups that continue to preach that women are the mere help-mate of man, subject to his rule, properly placed in the home, tending to the children. These values are not isolated in this community. Although we went through a period of yellow and green outfits for babies, once again we are back to pink and blue, to boy toys and girl toys, to boys activities and girls activities.  When will we learn how limiting these categories are!  How they stilt the child’s imagination, impoverish their grasp, and weaken their choice making.

I chose to talk about choice today because motherhood is a choice. It is a choice that was first polarized by the feminist movement, further fractionated by economic necessity, and lately reinvigorated by a media driven, substantively bereft political system. I am appalled by the reaction to President Obama’s invitation to speak at Notre Dame, to the misplaced passion of those who have a conviction that they flaunt above all others. Let us be truthful.  Procreation is no longer the major reason for sexual intercourse. Once that fact is appreciated for the truth that it is, one must then consider whether or not every sexual act should potentially produce a child. If not, then the question of birth control, including abortion is necessarily on the table.  As much as one might like to be, one cannot be in denial about this incontrovertible fact.  My heart cries every time I listen to these debates. Is the fetus a baby? Do we have words that reflect a viable life form and differentiate that from human baby? When is a baby a baby?  Whose life is to be protected? Who makes the decisions?  Does the woman have the right to decide upon the life or death of the fetus? Where does the father fit in?  Can you be pro choice and against abortion? Can you be pro life and for abortion? 

I believe that these legalistic arguments have dominated the arena for far too long.  Let us not dwell on the timing of the abortion, the legality of an abortion, not even the rights of the woman to decide.  In the end, the woman will decide.  I pray that she not make a legal decision.  I pray that she not make a convenient choice.  I pray that she make a sacred choice.  No matter how it is framed, a human potential is formed at conception.  Whether it is conceived in joy, error, or violence, a human potential is formed.  The woman who bears this potential must make a decision, one which she deems in the best interest, - for whom, one might ask, in the best interest as she knows it.  I pray that she not linger over the legalistic rhetoric, the polarized preaching, or the preconceived notions of her friends and family.  A baby is forming and she must make a decision. May she turn inward during this time and find her higher self, that which will guide her through this process.  When the choice is made to bring a baby to term, let it be a promise for the future to love, nurture and provide for the baby to the best of one’s ability. When the choice is made to terminate a pregnancy, let it be with an appreciation of a life denied. May the mother grieve as she also affirms her choice.  May she not trivialize the event. 

Let us affirm that the right of a woman to control what happens to her body, bears with it a responsibility, one to take steps not to become pregnant if one does not want a child. A woman who decides not to use birth control in these circumstances, one who has unprotected sex with abandon, is as morally wrong as the person who drinks and drives.  There are lives at stake. Today, I argue here not for a pro life or a pro choice-pro abortion stance. I argue here for a pro reverence stance. I argue to take the decision back where it belongs. It is a sacred choice. 

William Ellery Channing challenges us in his work “The Free Mind” that to be free, one must recognize its own reality and greatness, one must not be content with a passive acceptance of tradition, nor be framed by outward circumstances. One must resist the bondage of habit and not mechanically copy the past or live on its old virtues.  To make enlightened choices every woman must have thrown off the yoke of servitude, the oppression of inferiority, and the fear of retribution.  They must appreciate their unique gifts and be ready to express them to their fullest extent. 

In this culture, in this congregation, we have many strong women who exercise their gifts in a free and thoughtful manner.  They are role models for others less sure of their own gifts.  By their behavior, by the openness of their hearts and minds, by their transparent process they have the opportunity to offer themselves as choice making models for those who need to see this behavior, in our congregation and in our larger community. May we not fear to take the risk. May we accept setbacks and mistakes as the new opportunities that they are.  Most of all, may you make the choices which affirm who you are.  May it be so.

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