Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  That helped, but it was really outside the home that I felt vulnerable, where I feared I was letting Daisy down. I was falling short, both as a buffer and a model. “One way to avoid those comments is to become super interactive with your daughter in public,” Nakazawa suggested. “A mom I know reads to her baby and talks to her with such focus that people don’t interrupt. It’s like being buried in a book on an airplane: it discourages the chitchat that makes people feel they have permission to ask. And there’s the bonus that it intensifies your relationship with your child.”

  But what happens if someone breaks through that force field? I still needed a ready retort to “Where did you get her?” Something so automatic I wouldn’t even have to think about it. “You could try deflection,” Nakazawa said. “When people start with ‘Your children are so beautiful,’ I just cut them off and say, ‘All children are so beautiful, aren’t they?’”

  Nice, but not quite what I was after. “Okay,” Nakazawa tried, “how about something like ‘Yes, she looks like my husband but she has my sense of humor’?”

  Still not my style.

  “Well,” she said, “one woman I know says, ‘From my uterus.’”

  From my uterus. I loved it. It was insouciant, surprising, and it stopped further conversation in its tracks. Best of all, it works. Every time. Where did you get her? From my uterus. Is she from China or Korea? From my uterus.

  I almost look forward to saying it. Each time I do, I smile brightly and the person pauses, uncertain, long enough for me to make my getaway. The best part is, though Daisy may not know it yet, I’m teaching her an important lesson as a person of mixed race, as a woman—heck, as a human being: Stand up for yourself with grace and wit and then move along.

  Daisy will turn four this summer. As she’s grown older, I’ve fielded fewer inquiries about how we fit together. Maybe that’s because her hair has lightened to chestnut and the wave in it is more pronounced. Maybe it’s because it’s a lot easier to objectify a baby than a hyper-verbal preschooler. Or maybe it’s because, despite our superficial differences, she really does look like me. There’s something indefinable that emanates from her—an attitude, a gesture, a style—that shocks me when I see it, like unexpectedly catching myself in a mirror.

  Just because The Question has stopped, though, doesn’t mean the teaching should. I want my daughter to understand—I hope all children will someday understand—that the world comes in an infinite variety of flavors. And how much richer we are because of that.

  Now, if I could just figure out a snappy comeback for the new round of busybodies who won’t stop asking me, “Are you only having one child?”

  The Femivore’s Dilemma

  When this piece was published, in March 2010, a number of readers pointed out that “femivore” actually means someone who eats women. To which I say: whatever. Obviously, I am riffing off of the newly popular, ubiquitous term “locavore” as well as The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the title of Michael Pollan’s now-classic book on what and how we eat.

  Four women I know—none of whom know one another—are building chicken coops in their backyards. It goes without saying that they already raise organic produce: my town, Berkeley, California, is the Vatican of locavorism, the high church of Alice Waters. Kitchen gardens are as much a given here as indoor plumbing. But chickens? That ups the ante. Apparently it is no longer enough to know the name of the farm your eggs came from; now you need to know the name of the actual bird.

  All of these gals—these chicks with chicks—are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the workforce to care for kith and kin. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: the omnivore’s dilemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper. “Prior to this, I felt like my choices were either to break the glass ceiling or to accept the gilded cage,” says Shannon Hayes, a farmer of grassfed livestock in upstate New York and author of Radical Homemakers, a manifesto for “tomato-canning feminists,” which was published last month.

  Hayes pointed out that the original “problem that had no name” was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not changed—an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic dependence on your husband—only now, bearing them was considered a “choice”: if you felt stuck, it was your own fault. What’s more, though today’s soccer moms may argue, quite rightly, that caretaking is undervalued in a society that measures success by a paycheck, their role is made possible by the size of their husband’s. In that way, they’ve been more of a pendulum swing than true game changers.

  Enter the chicken coop.

  Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and personal fulfillment that drove women into the workforce in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food—who these days can’t wax poetic about compost?—it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

  There is even an economic argument for choosing a literal nest egg over a figurative one. Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide for a family’s basic needs—not to mention to guard against job loss, catastrophic illness, divorce, or the death of a spouse. Femivores suggest that knowing how to feed and clothe yourself regardless of circumstance, to turn paucity into plenty, is an equal—possibly greater—safety net. After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?

  Hayes would consider my friends’ efforts admirable if transitional. Her goal is larger: a renunciation of consumer culture, a return (or maybe an advance) to a kind of modern pre-industrialism in which the home is self-sustaining, the center of labor and livelihood for both sexes. She interviewed more than a dozen families who were pursuing this way of life. They earned an average of $40,000 for a family of four. They canned peaches, stuffed sausages, grew kale, made soap. Some eschewed health insurance, and most homeschooled their kids. That, I suspect, is a little further than most of us are willing to go: it sounds a bit like being Amish, except with a car (no more than one, naturally) and a green political agenda.

  After talking to Hayes, I rushed to pick up my daughter from school. As I rustled up a quick dinner of whole-wheat quesadillas and frozen organic peas, I found my thoughts drifting back to our conversation, to the questions she raised about the nature of success, satisfaction, sustenance, fulfillment, community. What constitutes “enough”? What is my obligation to others? What do I want for my child? Is my home the engine of materialism or a refuge from it?

  I understand the passion for a life that is made, not bought. And who doesn’t get the appeal of working the land? That’s as integral to this country’s character as, in its own way, Walmart. My femivore friends may never do more than dabble in backyard farming—keeping a couple of chickens, some rabbits, maybe a beehive or two—but they’re still transforming the definition of homemaker to one that’s more about soil than dirt, fresh air than air freshener. Their vehicle for children’s enrichment goes well beyond a ride to the next math tutoring session.

  I am tempted to call that “precious,” but that word has variegations of meaning. Then again, that may be appropriate. Hayes found that without a larger purpose—activism, teaching, creating a business, or otherwise moving outside the home—women’s enthusiasm for the domestic arts eventually flagged, especially if their husbands weren’t equally involved.
“If you don’t go into this as a genuinely egalitarian relationship,” she warned, “you’re creating a dangerous situation. There can be loss of self-esteem, loss of soul and an inability to return to the world and get your bearings. You can start to wonder, What’s this all for?” It was an unnervingly familiar litany: if a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage.

  Part 4

  Girls! Girls! Girls!

  (and One about Boys)

  Children Are Alone

  In the twenty years since my first book, Schoolgirls, was published, girls have made important progress: more take higher-level math, more go to college, more feel they can “lean in.” Some things, though, have not changed: girls remain less likely than boys to believe they can be leaders, to label themselves as brave, or to pursue most STEM fields. Other issues—especially those relating to body image, sexuality, and sexual violence—seem to have grown more intense. I am still in touch with Becca, now thirty-five, as well as a handful of other girls from the book (I lost track of April after high school). They’ve told me it’s a bit odd to have their thirteenth year immortalized—three were even assigned Schoolgirls in college classes—but the portrayals ring true.

  I’m not sure why the editors didn’t give this story, an adaptation of the book which ran in July 1994 in the New York Times Magazine, a title that was specific to its being about girls. Perhaps, in 1994, that notion seemed somehow too limited.

  “ME! ME! ME!” April Welch,* a thirteen-year-old African American girl, leans forward in her seat, waving her hand frantically in an attempt to catch the attention of her math teacher, who has just asked for the proper way to say “two over five.”

  “Mrs. Sandoval!” she shouts at the teacher. “Me!”

  “Okay, April,” Mrs. Sandoval says, smiling.

  April drops her hand, relieved.

  “You can’t change it,” she announces, indicating the fraction cannot be reduced.

  The math teacher’s smile tightens almost imperceptibly. “We know that, April,” she says. “That wasn’t my question.”

  “Oh,” April replies, turning away and rummaging in her backpack for a tube of ChapStick.

  As the class proceeds, April volunteers continuously, each time with the same frenetic urgency. When the teacher takes attendance, April, unasked, informs her of the whereabouts of a student who is cutting class. Later, she offers to take a note to the office and then to pass out math books. But most often, April raises her hand in response to a question that Mrs. Sandoval has posed, although whenever the teacher acknowledges her, April’s answers are invariably wrong.

  When Mrs. Sandoval asks for the difference between the numbers in a series that begins 26, 24, 22, April’s hand flies up.

  “They’re both in the same range,” April says when she’s called upon, “but one of them is kind of—”

  “Listen to my question, April. What is subtracted to get this number?”

  April falls silent, more quiet than she has been all period, and darts her eyes desperately.

  Someone stage-whispers, “Two.”

  She raises two fingers, hesitantly, still not speaking.

  Michael, a round-cheeked boy who sits next to April, turns to me. “She’s loco in the cabeza,” he says.

  I have been watching April for several days as she moves from English class to math to science to social studies. Today, like the other seventh graders, she rushes from the classroom when the bell rings, and I hurry to catch up. As we fall into step, I tell her she has me a bit confused. Other students raise their hands when they know an answer. She seems to raise her hand simply because a question has been asked.

  April spies a paper clip on the floor, picks it up, and begins twisting it open. “I guess,” she says, staring at her handiwork, “I guess I raise my hand because I want to be part of the class. I just . . . I just want to talk and feel part of that, you know?”

  A friend of April’s passes us and April calls out to her, interrupting our conversation. April digs into her backpack again and produces a handwritten invitation to a Halloween party.

  “There’s going to be music and dancing, and there will be someone to drive everyone home.”

  The friend studies the invitation. “Is it at your mom’s?” she asks.

  April shakes her head and fastens her gaze on a spot just to the left of her friend’s shoulders. “Uh-uh,” she says. “I’m not staying with her right now.”

  Becca Holbrook turns to me abruptly. “Do you want to get into my parents’ relationship? My mom and my dad?”

  “Sure,” I say, caught off guard.

  We are sitting on the bleachers at the edge of the P.E. field at Weston Middle School, a bucolic suburb that’s a good fifty miles from April Welch’s math classroom. A group of boys is playing a rowdy game of after-school football and Becca watches them idly, stopping our conversation when they come too near.

  Like April, Becca is thirteen years old. She is a white girl who sits with her shoulders curved and her head hung slightly forward. Today, like the last few times I’ve seen her, Becca’s eyes are red-rimmed. At first, she says the pinkness is caused by her contact lenses, but later admits it’s more often from crying.

  “A while ago,” Becca says, “my mom came into my room and she sat on my bed and said, ‘Good night, I love you’ and that motherly kind of stuff, but she was in tears. It’s not like she was bawling or anything, just these tears on her face, and I don’t know what’s going on. So I say, ‘Okay, good night, Mom,’ and she closes the door. The next day, she told me it was ‘fear crying.’ She told me that she’s scared of my dad and that she can’t stand sleeping with him anymore. He wants to have sex every night and she doesn’t enjoy it at all. She said it’s like rape for her every night.”

  Becca pushes her hair, home-streaked with Sun-In, away from her face, revealing an anxious expression. “She said that if she didn’t do it, though, she’d be out of there like the speed of light. So it’s like she has to give in to him for, like, an insurance policy or something.”

  This is not the first time that Becca’s mother has confided in her about her embattled marriage. More than once, Becca has told me that she feels older than her friends because of what she knows about “life and relationships and stuff.” Given that unique understanding, she believes only she can offer her mother true succor. “When my mom first started telling me these things, I felt suffocated in a way,” Becca says now. “But, I realize I’m the only normal thing in her life. I’m the only one who can really comfort her.”

  She drifts off for a moment as the crowd of football players tromp by us, their game over. “I think sometimes it would be easier for my mom if my parents didn’t have kids,” she continues when the boys are at a safe distance. “But then, she needs to get things off her chest and so she needs me and I can be there for her. . . . It’s like we’re two eyes of a hurricane.”

  I met April and Becca in the spring of 1992, as I began reporting for a book about teenage girls. Beginning the following September, I spent a school year tracking them and seven of their peers in two Northern California middle schools—one in a middle-class, largely white suburb and the other in a low-income, urban community serving mainly children of color. I sat in on the girls’ classes, spent time with them on the playground and at home, and talked to parents, teachers, and peers. The girls were a diverse lot, within each community as well as between them. They were from single-parent and dual-parent homes; from affluent, working-class, and poor families. Some excelled in school; some performed poorly.

  At first, April and Becca seemed as different as two girls could be. April, who attends John J. Audubon Middle School, was introduced to me as the kind of girl who slips through the cracks of the educational system: although her teachers say she is bright, she attends classes only sporadically, and her mother, who was a teenager when April was born, struggles with an addiction to crack.

  Becca is from a two-parent f
amily. Her father is an administrator for the federal government. Her mother, herself a teacher, is well read and deeply concerned about teenage girls’ self-esteem. Becca describes herself as a “sensitive” girl. Unlike April, she shies away from participating in class, fearing, she says, that if she makes a mistake, “My self-confidence will be taken away.”

  In spite of appearances, however, it quickly became clear that Becca and April faced the same predicament: both girls were faltering under the burdens of their mothers’ lives and were becoming aware of the limitations of their parents and teachers. Both girls were trying, at home and at school, to make their distress clear. And as the year unfolded, and their attempts to gain attention continued to go unheeded, both girls were ultimately forced to make critical decisions on their own about how—or even whether—to survive.

  Initially I was told that April Welch would be entering eighth grade in the fall, but as it turned out, since she had repeated sixth grade, she was entering seventh and was a year behind her peers. At Audubon, repeating students who attain a C average by the end of the first marking period are promoted to their proper grade, but since retained students are often assigned to the same classes with the same teachers and the same curriculum that failed to inspire them the first time around, that goal is seldom realized. At any rate, the students know that at age fifteen, no matter how many times they have been left back—and regardless of whether they can read, write, or add—district policy is to promote them to high school.

  “The first time I was in sixth grade, I hardly came to school at all,” April tells me early in the year. “I was enrolled, but I’d just cut. I’d walk into school and walk right back out. I was scared, I guess. I’d just graduated from fifth grade and I thought middle school was a big old step.” She shakes her head, as if in disgust toward her former self. “My mother didn’t say nothin’ ’bout it. She just said it was my life and I’d learn in my own time, and I did. I tried to run from it. I wanted to start over at some other school, but I didn’t. I knew I had to face what I did. I came back and started sixth grade again. It was kind of embarrassing, but that’s how it had to be. I still haven’t caught up, neither. I mean, I have a little, but not how I want to. Not like I was in elementary school. Back then, I did good. I used to understand better.”