Lions and Vikings and Bears, Oh My

The other day, Kris came home from Target irate. That actually doesn’t happen all that often—she’s from Minneapolis, where Target was born and still resides. (Wait, that sentence sounds as if I think a corporation could be a person…) Also, her best friend works at Target headquarters in Minneapolis, so as some of you already know, my wife’s loyalty remains staunchly with her hometown chain–despite the $150K Target donated last year to an anti-gay politician in Minnesota. (To be fair, Target is a longtime sponsor of the Twin Cities Pride Festival, so their gay rights stance is a bit schizophrenic. Or “neutral,” as their PR department would have me tell you.)

Kris’s loyalty to Target isn’t surprising to me. I have long benefited from her strong sense of fidelity, as have her beloved Minnesota Vikings, currently running dead last in the NFC North. (Sorry–as a Bears fan, I couldn’t resist.) So when she came home from Target a few days ago railing on their children’s winter clothing collection, I listened. Which isn’t to say I don’t usually listen to her rants and rails. Really.

“I was looking at hats and mittens today, and you’ll never believe the selection,” she told me as we putzed around the kitchen getting our dinner and Alex’s baby food ready.

Dinner time

At some point in the past few months, we have evolved from eating frozen meals separately standing up at the kitchen counter while the other person holds the baby to actually sitting down most nights at the dining room table for a family dinner, Alex strapped into her high chair—care of a Target gift card—close enough to feed but not close enough to practice her favorite magic trick: yanking the tablecloth out from under our dishes. (Needs a bit of work, to be honest.) True, we still mostly dine on frozen foods or reheated leftovers, but eating together makes a nice change.

“Good selection or bad?” I asked, filling a glass with filtered water from the fridge.

“Good if you’re a boy. There were all these cute sets with animals on them, bears and penguins and lions and dogs, but on the tag, you know what they said?”

“What?” I asked, sensing what was coming from the irritation in my wife’s voice.

Alex's (Infant Boy) penguin outfit

“‘Infant Boy.’ Not just ‘Infant’ but ‘Infant Boy.’ And guess what they had for girls?”

“What?” I repeated dutifully.

“Hello Kitty and Minnie Mouse hats in different shades of pink. Can you believe that?”

Actually, I could. This was just more of the same in our gender-neutral baby attire woes, as readers of my previous blog post “Dispatch from the Gender-Bending Wars” might recall. Still, irritating nonetheless.

“What if you were the kind of person who didn’t want to put your daughter in something that had a boy’s tag on it?” Kris asked. “Then you would only have two choices, both pink. That hardly seems fair.”

“Especially given that there are more girls in the world than boys,” I pointed out. (Though even that is probably changing with the proliferation of sex-selective abortions in India and China, notoriously girl-negative nations.)

“I know, right?” Kris said, and offered Alex a spoonful of homemade strained peas.

Alex made her usual grunting sounds of joy and took the mouthful, clenching her baby teeth (all six of them) on the spoon and refusing to let go as she slurped up the mashed peas. A good eater, our Alex. Good sleeper, too. We know—we’re lucky.

“Whatever happened to the ’70s?” I asked. “Women wrote letters to manufacturers and advertisers to protest sexist practices, and yet here we are again. It’s like the Second Wave of the women’s movement never even happened.”

“I understand that some women like pink,” Kris added, “and that’s fine. But there have to be other options for girls than just pink princess gear.”

Alex in overalls with Grandma

There are other options, of course. Kris and I choose Alex’s gender expression on a daily basis, from the toys we give her to play with to the clothes we pick for her to wear. But every time I dress her in my favorite gray onesie or her overalls with the dog or her brown bear snowsuit, none of which are “supposed” to be for a baby girl, I consider the fact that as soon as we leave the house we will likely become the recipient of commentary from strangers who have consciously or unconsciously assumed the role of cultural gender police.

In May, shortly after I wrote my first blog post on gender non-conformity and parenting, the “Genderless Baby” in Toronto made headlines. Baby Storm is being raised in a gender-neutral environment, with parents who refuse to tell anyone outside of a narrow circle the child’s biological sex in order to allow him or her to escape gender conditioning as much as possible. When the press got wind of the story, it went viral. As did the public’s wrath—articles and reader comments abounded on web sites detailing the certain trauma being inflicted on the child by its non-conformist parents. A number of child development experts also weighed in on the couple’s poor parenting skills and the problems ahead for their three children. Dr. Harold Koplewicz of the Huffington Post noted, “Teaching them that they are only safe—understood, accepted—at home is not a very character-building message.”

Nature vs. Nurture?

And yet, as one HuffPost reader commented, isn’t it the truth? As a one-time girl who preferred bikes to dress-up, jeans to dresses, blue and green to pink and yellow, I can attest to having had to fend off verbal and sometimes physical attacks for my gender non-conformity. As an adult, the same. And as the mother of an as-yet bald baby girl we sometimes dress in “boys’” clothes, I have to say I think things might just be worse now. As Kris said the other night, “It’s like there’s this tremendous backlash against anyone who doesn’t fall in line.”

The Genderless Baby incident is a perfect example of North Americans’ discomfort with gender non-conformity. According to another HuffPost article, Dr. Ken Zucker, a Toronto expert on children and gender identity, indicated that “the story has caused anxiety among people who are now wondering how they became who they are.” By reviving the nature vs. nurture debate in a controversial manner, Storm’s parents became a focal point for the anxieties of a supposedly post-feminist society that on the one hand likes to claim that equality between the sexes has been (mostly) achieved and yet on the other still dictates and closely monitors acceptable behavior, traits, and desires for both girls and boys.

Go Bears!

Last night, my friend Josh and I decided to take Alex to a nearby sports bar to watch the Chicago Bears play the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football. I donned my retro Walter Payton jersey, purchased in 1994 for $2 from a Chicago thrift store, and dressed Alex in the Bears onesie Kris recently brought home from a local consignment shop. As Josh and I sat down at a table on the edge of the lounge area (no babies allowed in that bar), the waitress approached with menus.

“What a cute little boy,” she said, smiling down at Alex.

“Actually, she’s a girl,” I corrected her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the waitress, still just a girl herself, said, clearly flustered.

“That’s okay. She doesn’t exactly look like a girl, especially in this outfit,” I offered, trying to make her feel better.

“Babies should be able to wear anything,” she said. “They’re just babies.”

“Exactly,” I agreed, smiling at her.

Kris finished work and joined us a little later, and the three of us chatted and laughed and watched football and oohed and ahhed over Alex, naturally, who was happiest racing across the wood floor in her little red shoes while holding onto someone’s hands. The game was close, the company good, and Alex was in good spirits despite the relatively late evening hour (7PM). Going out definitely beat staying at home on our own, we all agreed.

But the baby’s bedtime was fast approaching, so at halftime, Kris got ready to take Alex home. Noting activity at our table, the waitress came over and asked how we wanted to split the bill. Kris and I pointed at each other and told her we would pay together. A few minutes later she returned with two bills.

As we looked them over, Josh remarked that he’d been charged for my cranberry juice.

“Right. You two are together,” the waitress said, gesturing to Josh and me, “and she—” pointing at Kris “—is separate.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, not wanting to make a big deal of the error. I glanced at Josh. “I’ll just pay you back later.”

The waitress paused. “Wasn’t that right? You two are together, aren’t you?”

I hesitated. But she’d asked a direct question, and I wasn’t about to lie about who was with whom even if it would make her feel better.

“No. We’re actually together,” I said, pointing at Kris, who by this time had Alex’s car seat tucked under her arm.

“Oh,” the girl said, flustered again, looking from one of us to the other. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I told her. “No worries.”

And it wasn’t a big deal. Kris left with Alex, and Josh and I moved into the baby-free bar area to watch the second half of the game. At one point I wondered if the all-male crowd noticed me with my short hair and my backwards baseball cap, but I had come in with a baby and was still sitting with a man. Probably they assumed, as had the waitress, that I enjoyed heterosexual privilege, just like—presumably—everyone else in the bar.

The Bears won (woo-hoo!) and Josh and I got caught up on each other’s lives and I went home to my wife and daughter in our little house at the edge of a big woods, and all in all it was a good night. But as I locked the front door and turned out the porch light, I couldn’t help but reflect on the rigid expectations of the outside world, the many conventions to which Kris and I have no interest in conforming. We aren’t going so far as to withhold our daughter’s biological sex from strangers or friends, but we are refusing, like many other parents, to abide by accepted rules of gender expression, a choice that no doubt would anger plenty of people–even those whose business it most decidedly is not.

Alex helping with the laundry

The truth is, most of Alex’s clothes up to now (she’ll be nine months old in a few weeks) have been given to us. We’ve purchased probably fewer than two dozen articles of clothing, many of which have been diaper accessories or socks. In addition to new clothing gifts from a variety of quarters, Kris’s brother and sister-in-law sent us hand-me-downs from their two boys while another friend’s sister mailed us a box of clothing that had belonged to her granddaughters. As a result, sometimes Alex wears frilly pink sleepers with flowers and duckies, and sometimes she wears blue and green sweatshirts with obviously more macho puppies (huh?) on them. Sometimes both items at the same time, even.

Kris and I aren’t overly concerned with the diversity of clothing options, though we both tend to prefer non-pink, non-frilly ensembles. But just because neither Kris nor I are girly girls doesn’t mean our daughter won’t be. In fact, like Alex P. Keaton’s parents on “Family Ties,” we often talk about how we could well end up with a child who is decidedly different from either of us. Either way, it’s up to our Alex to figure out who she is and what she likes (as long as she isn’t a Packers fan, of course), and it’s up to us, her parents, to love her unconditionally. Nature and nurture both have something to say about gender, but biological sex alone doesn’t–and shouldn’t–determine how we perceive ourselves and each other.

That, I think, was likely the point that Baby Storm’s parents were trying to make before their voices got lost in the hurricane of gender anxiety swirling around our twenty-first century society.

Love makes a family

Review of Beautiful Game from Just About Write

The second official review of Beautiful Game recently posted in Just About Write, an e-zine for readers of lesbian fiction. Reviewer RLynne had this to say about my third Bella Books release:

Christie captures the life of a college jock, from the roughhousing to the incredible tension and excitement of the game.  Even those who are not soccer fans will be gripped by the exciting championship action.  And, she captures the equally incredible sweetness and heartache of a first adult love.

Edited by Katherine V. Forrest, Beautiful Game is a wonderful romp back into the ups and downs of college life.  Christie’s characters are wonderful, and U. C. San Diego is a beautiful place to visit.

I also just received a Facebook note from a reader who said Beautiful Game had provided her a welcome escape from her regular life. In my own household, the last couple of weeks have been a bit of a struggle–dealing with a bad cold, a chronically ill dog, and our daughter’s first illness (the cold I managed to give her). A little bit of escapism here and there, as I well know, can be a wonderful thing!

Village Books Reading, 9-17-11

Last weekend (September 17) I had a reading/ book signing event at Village Books in Bellingham, WA, where I went to grad school a few years ago. It was a good turnout, with 30 people showing up on a Saturday afternoon, and my dad even flew in from Michigan to attend. And, of course, to hang out with Alex, his first grandchild. It’s probably a toss-up as to which was the most compelling reason to visit–but I’m flattering myself with that supposition, no doubt.

In any case, below is a video of the first part of the reading, in which I discuss Facebook, lesbians in the locker room, and the division between genre and non-genre fiction. If you’d rather read the written transcript of my talk, I’m copying that in below as well.

Written Transcript

To start off, I thought I’d talk to you today about why I write lesbian romance novels. But to do that, first I thought I’d talk to you about Facebook.

My mom and I were talking recently, and she reported that she and a friend were discussing their mutual bemusement toward Facebook. Specifically, they weren’t sure why anyone would want to be online friends with people they didn’t know.

In my experience, I have two types of Facebook friends—writing community friends, almost none of whom I know in person but who I correspond with regularly about fiction in general and lesbian fiction in particular. Social media channels offer wonderful networking opportunities for writers of niche fiction, because typically we don’t receive as much coverage in mainstream media publications or outlets. My other Facebook friends are people I’ve known throughout my life. In fact, Facebook has been a boon for someone like me who graduated from high school and immediately left my hometown, Kalamazoo, Michigan, vowing never to return. Much of the impetus for this vow came from the fact that I realized at some level that I was gay, and I also believed it wouldn’t be psychologically or physically safe to come out at my high school. Like many other young lesbians, I resisted my attraction to other girls. I told myself that I should be interested in boys, that I should try harder to be a “normal” girl. As a result, I lived something of a double life as a teenager—hiding my sexuality even from myself, for the most part.

The first time I remember acknowledging it to myself was at soccer practice the spring of my senior year of high school. I had just decided to go to Smith College, a women’s college in Massachusetts almost a thousand miles away. It was my first choice all along, but a generous financial aid award had suddenly made it possible. At soccer practice, my coach overheard me telling a friend I would be leaving for Smith in the fall. In front of the entire team, he made a crude comment about not dropping the soap in the locker room, if I caught his drift. It took me a second to realize that he meant I would have to be careful of lesbians. As understanding clicked into place, another thought occurred to me: My coach had it backwards—I would be the lesbian in the locker room that my teammates might worry about. But even as the thought skittered toward my conscious mind, I shut it down. I wasn’t ready to come out yet, not even to myself.

Looking back now, I realize that I picked Smith because I sensed that it might offer a community where I could integrate my sexuality into the rest of my life. Where being gay could be one facet of selfhood among many: middle class, white, Scotch-Irish-Dutch, Michigander, agnostic, lesbian, student, and, of course, soccer player. My freshman year of college, I joined the soccer team. On one of our first away games, I took a shower with a group of upper class women who, it turned out, were all gay. The straight members of the team got dressed without showering, while we gay women laughed and sang and razzed each other under the spray, unconcerned about our bodies or each other, comfortable in our own skin. At Smith, I could be me. I no longer had to hide the gay part from everyone, even myself, just to survive.

Twenty years later, things have changed again. I currently have a dozen or more Facebook friends from Kalamazoo Central High School, only a few of whom are gay and yet all of whom seem interested in hearing about my life as it is now: writer, university admin, wife, soccer fan, non-biological mother to our baby daughter. And yet, I still often feel the kneejerk urge to hide part of my identity: my career as a lesbian romance novelist.

The summer I turned13, my family drove from Michigan to Alaska in a Ford Escort wagon hauling a Coleman pop-up camper. Given the space we had to work with, our reading options were somewhat limited. (What I would have given for a Kindle then!) Anyway, I soon finished off my own books and turned to my older sister’s stash, which included a Harlequin romance. I read that book in what felt like one sitting—and might have been, given that it took us two weeks to drive across Canada. I absolutely devoured it, and thus an addiction was born.

In the years that followed, I fed my Harlequin addiction faithfully until tenth grade, when I lost interest in reading traditional romance novels. I had started to write my own short stories and novels by then, and though I no longer read Harlequins, romance usually played a role in the stories I told. At Smith, I studied history and writing, and actually wrote the short story that served as the basis for Beautiful Game during a fiction-writing class my junior year. Just as I’d resisted being drawn to girls in high school, I tried to resist the pull to write love stories. I told myself I should be writing about other things, “real” things, serious things. The intellectual and academic climate at Smith reinforced the notion that romance novels didn’t count as literature, that genre fiction wasn’t something any self-respecting Smith student or alum should spend her time on. Among our more famous alumnae authors are Sylvia Plath, Gloria Steinem, and Julia Child—women who I get the sense probably didn’t indulge in romance novels. Or, at least, wouldn’t have admitted publicly if they did.

The fact is that in reading and writing circles, genre fiction (mystery, romance, science fiction) tend to be considered lesser than non-genre fiction. This was true at Smith, and it was true here at Western, where I got my Master’s in English a few years ago. Even in the queer writing community, there is still a division between genre fiction and non-genre fiction. A few months ago another Washington State writer, Lambda Literary Award winner Jill Malone, posted some comments on a blog that I, for one, found disappointing. Malone wrote, “In the bookstore where I worked, it was understood that the good writers—like [Jeanette] Winterson and [Sarah] Waters—would be in general fiction, and the other writers would be in genre fiction… They were shelved there because there’s fiction, and then there’s genre.”

Perhaps it wasn’t her intent, but it sounds to me as if Malone is saying that genre fiction isn’t—can’t be—good fiction; that genre fiction is somehow sub-fiction. She is not alone in this view, of course. But despite the entrenched denigration, romance novels are exceedingly popular. Jane Austen, often cited as the mother of romantic fiction, is one of the most widely read writers in English literature. According to the group Romance Writers of America, romance fiction has the largest market share of any genre at 13.5 %, and achieved sales in excess of 1.3 billion dollars—in 2008 alone. Yet romance novels are routinely scoffed at, their authors made to feel less than, as if they should be writing something else. Jill Malone gave voice to this notion when she said in her blog post, “Maybe we [as queer writers] should be concerned less with telling ‘lesbian’ stories and more with telling ‘authentic’ stories about what it means to be alive and seeking.”

In interviews and at other events, I’ve said that I view writing lesbian romance novels as a consciously political act because the love that dare not speak its name takes center stage. These books explore the part of queer life that is most denigrated by the dominant culture: same-sex love and relationships. Romance novels do make up a specific genre with all of the attendant writerly conventions and readerly expectations, the same way a romantic comedy on the big screen follows a particular set of plot points to reach a predictable (happy) ending. But predictability and happy endings do not necessarily rule out authenticity.

As I mentioned earlier, I sometimes hesitate when people ask me what I write. Usually I shoulder on ahead and say, “I write romance novels. Lesbian romance novels.” I come out of the closet, so to speak, and while it isn’t always a comfortable experience for me or for my conversational companion, I almost always feel better about myself afterward for having done so. As a lesbian romance writer, I have to decide weekly, sometimes daily depending on the setting, if I am going to be open about who I am and what I write, or if I’m going to lie. It’s a continual coming out that never ends–just like being gay.

And here’s where Facebook comes back into the story: I recently reconnected with a junior high friend who now lives on the East Coast. Hilary and I were part of a motley crew of geeks who got to escape from our junior high and, later, high school once a week for an English class taught at the local college. Hilary, it turns out, is also gay, and left Kalamazoo for Berkeley and the West Coast first, and then Yale art school and New York City, never, apparently, to look back. When I told her in a Facebook message that I was writing lesbian romances, she responded that she should have known—apparently when we were thirteen I announced that I wanted to write Harlequins. She also told me she’s now dating a Smith alum herself, and wishes I had clued her in sooner to the greatness of women’s colleges.

In a way, Hilary’s art is based on genre fiction. She told me that many of her paintings, which are represented by a New York gallery and (according to Google) have been well received by art critics, were inspired by vintage lesbian pulp fiction cover illustrations. I love that. Twenty years later, we’ve both integrated who we are into what we do, her as a painter, me as a writer. And I have to say, this is the happiest I’ve ever been. As one Facebook friend from grad school wrote on my wall recently, “Wow, dreams realized. Congrats!”

I know I’m lucky, because they really have been.

Me, my dad, Alex and Kris celebrating at Village Books

Update on Bookselling Fundraiser for Maggie

Well, the response from the lesfic community has been fantastic, which comes as no surprise to me. It’s been wonderful receiving notes from fellow readers and writers, all of whom are animal lovers of some kind. As of this morning, I’ve sold a total of 31 signed copies of my novels to a variety of individuals, many of whom chipped in a little extra to help. I’ve also received a very, very generous donation for Maggie’s ultrasound from a fellow author who is a longtime supporter of animals and their people.

The messages of support and the heartfelt wishes for Maggie’s recovery have been so uplifting, especially on this particular weekend when the memory of humanity’s capacity for hatred–and renewal–is so powerful. In thanks, Maggie, my daughter Alex, and I taped a short message on the webcam this morning:

At this point, I still have 1 or 2 copies of each book available, so if you’d like to contribute to Maggie’s treatment, email me: katechristie8 at gmail.com. And thanks again to everyone for keeping Maggie and our family in their thoughts. We appreciate it!

Bookselling Fundraiser for Maggie

Hello friends. As the title of the post implies, I’m writing today about a slightly different topic. Our ten-year-old dog, Maggie, was recently diagnosed with immune-mediated hemolytic anemia (IMHA). Basically, her immune system has taken to attacking and destroying her red blood cells, leaving her anemic, lethargic, and nauseated. So far we’ve been able to treat her with a variety of medications, but the tests we’ve exhausted in trying to rule out other diseases have added up.

Maggie, our first baby

Today I’m writing to ask potential readers of my books to buy a copy directly from me. For only $11.50 (US), you’ll get a brand new book, signed by me if you so choose, with free media mail shipping available in the US and the knowledge that you’re helping out a good cause. I can take credit card payments via PayPal. I also have one of each book listed on eBay.

If you’re interested in buying a signed copy of one or more of my books, please email me at katechristie8@gmail.com. And thanks for your support–we’re hoping to see Maggie up and around again playing with her sisters very soon.

The Political is Personal; or, Hear Me Roar

The other night while I was feeding Alex her before-bedtime bottle, I was suddenly struck by an urge to hear Helen Reddy’s classic “I Am Woman.” So I reached for the laptop sitting nearby on the coffee table, opened a browser window to Google, and searched “helen reddy i am woman youtube.” In 0.15 seconds (roughly), up popped a link to a video of Reddy performing the song live in 1975. When Alex finished her bottle, I burped her, sat her upright, and played the video for her, singing along to the empowering words. Sure, my daughter’s only five and a half months old, but it’s never too early to start teaching her about the strength and power of womankind.

My own parents pioneered this lesson more than thirty years ago when they took my sister and me to our first march on Washington, a NOW-sponsored demonstration to show support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This hardly radical amendment, first proposed by suffragist Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party in 1923, was introduced in every Congressional session between 1923 and 1970, but failed to pass Congress until the second wave of the American women’s movement pushed it through.

Here is the text of the ERA, as finally passed by Congress in 1972:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

After passing the House and Senate as the 27^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the ERA was sent to state legislatures for ratification. Like other twentieth-century amendments, the ERA was given a seven-year deadline to achieve ratification by a minimum of 38 states. In the first year alone, 22 states ratified the amendment. But then right-wing opponents of the ERA went to work, drawing on the right’s favorite tool even then—fear tactics, often unfounded, almost always exaggerated.

In the mid-1970s, anti-ERA advocates like Phyllis Schlafly declared that the amendment was an attack on women and the family. If the ERA were to be ratified, these anti-feminists warned, women could lose their husbands’ financial support and be drafted into the military, while abortion and gay rights would be upheld and states’ rights undermined. In a book called Positive Woman, Schlafly declared, “lesbianism is logically the highest form in the ritual of women’s liberation.” By connecting the ERA with hot-button social issues of the time—Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, a year into the ratification process—Schlafly and her conservative followers chipped away at support for the amendment particularly in southern states, where opposition to abortion and gay rights has traditionally been stronger than in other parts of the country.

The 1978 ERA Crowd at the Capitol

By the late 1970s, the ERA was in danger of failing to meet its seven-year ratification deadline—only 35 of the required 38 states had voted to ratify. On July 9, 1978, the one-year anniversary of the death of ERA author Alice Paul, NOW organized a pro-ratification march on Washington that drew more than 100,000 ERA supporters from around the country. My mother, a feminist who worked at the time at our local university’s Center for Women’s Services, and my father packed up my sister and me, and we drove from Michigan to D.C. to participate in the March for Equality.

I was only six years old that summer, but I’ll never forget the jubilant mood of the crowd that descended on D.C. I can vividly remember riding on my dad’s shoulders among a sea of smiling people, part of the multitudes of ERA supporters milling about the capitol plaza on that hot July day. The march was marked by the same sense of hope and elation I’ve experienced at almost every peaceful political event I’ve ever attended, along with a palpable air of determination to stand up for women’s rights and the friendliness common among like-minded individuals working for change through the exercise of our First Amendment rights. Talk about an awesome civics lesson.

My Mom at the 1978 March for Equality

“It was really miraculous,” my dad says now, looking back across the decades. “At the end of the march, you and I sat down on the grass on a street corner and watched wave after wave of people passing. It was amazing how many people were there.”

My mom had to be back at work on Monday, so way too soon we were climbing into the station wagon and driving through the night to our home in Michigan. My parents, still buoyed by lingering optimism from the weekend, listened to the radio for news of the march, attended by more people than lived in our mid-sized city. To their disappointment, the only news that seemed to be making headlines was a small group of American Nazis who had held a rally in a Chicago park that same day. The rally drew a dozen or so Nazis and a couple of thousand counter-protesters, barely a fraction of the number of ERA supporters who had peacefully marched on the nation’s capital. But the media chose to focus on the Nazi rally while granting the ERA demonstration, the largest feminist political action in American history, only minor coverage.

President Carter Signs the ERA Extension

However, in the wake of the march, Congress passed a joint resolution to extend the deadline to 1982, which President Carter signed in October. This gave ERA advocates three extra years to seek support among the states that had not yet ratified. Unfortunately, as the 1970s came to a close, the American political climate was shifting to the right. In 1980, the Republican Party officially removed support for the ERA from its party platform. Later that year, Ronald Reagan, the first American president to oppose the ERA—even Nixon immediately endorsed it when the bill first passed—was elected.

By the summer of 1981, time was again growing short for ratification. To draw attention to the cause, NOW sponsored ERA Countdown Rallies in June in more than 180 American cities. The Washington D.C. rally took place in Lafayette Square near the White House. Road trip veterans, my family again piled into the station wagon and made the long drive from Kalamazoo to Washington to lend our voices and bodies to the cause. The crowd’s mood this time wasn’t quite as jubilant, tinged even with a sense of uneasiness. The window of opportunity seemed to be closing on the ERA, and who knew when it might open again?

Me and Mom in D.C., 1981

Despite the marches and rallies, hunger strikes and peaceful sit-ins, petitions and acts of civil disobedience, the heady activist days of the sixties and seventies were over. No additional states ratified the ERA after 1977, and the 1982 deadline came and went without being met. The Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress a decade earlier, had failed to achieve ratification.

In the decades since, the ERA has been reintroduced in each session of Congress, but as in earlier decades, it has been mainly held in committee. In 1983, the only other year Congress actually voted on the amendment, 14 cosponsors of the bill voted NO, while 3 failed to vote at all. The ERA was defeated that year by a measly six votes.

Since the early ’90s, ERA activists have adopted a new approach deemed the “three-state strategy,” taking cues from the most recently ratified constitutional amendment. Had it been approved, the ERA would have become the 27^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Instead, the “Madison Amendment,” which mandates when Congressional salary changes may go into effect, became the 27^th Amendment when state #38 ratified it in 1992—despite the fact that the Madison Amendment had been passed by Congress in 1789, more than 200 years earlier.

The ERA’s case is a bit more complicated given that Congress stipulated a 7-year deadline for ratification in the bill’s proposal, with an additional 3-year extension added later. But pro-ERA legal analysts maintain that based on the two centuries granted to the Madison Amendment, the ERA’s pre-1982 ratification tally of 35 states should be allowed to stand, in which case only 3 more states would be required to ratify the amendment now. The Congressional Research Service analyzed this argument in 1996, and agreed that the three-state strategy may in fact have merit.

What would be required for this strategy to succeed? Congressional support like we saw in the early 1970s. A pro-ERA President wouldn’t hurt matters, either.

The fact that our government has refused for nearly a century to pass an amendment that guarantees equal treatment of American women under the law is a sign we still have a lot of work to do, in my opinion. Apparently other people agree—since I started writing this blog post a few days ago, the Huffington Post’s Barbara Hannah Grufferman penned an article, “What It Means to Be 50 and a Woman in America in 2011: A Birthday Message to President Obama,” in which she challenges President Obama to lead the fight for the ERA to become the 28^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The President should fight for the ERA, she argues, “to ensure the legal and constitutional rights of women in America, including those of his daughters.”

What rights are those? Here are just a few:

• The right to be paid the same as men for equal work. American women still make just 77 cents to every dollar a man earns for equal work.
• The right to help lead our government and the corporations where we work. Women in leadership positions in America, both in business and politics, are still few and far between.
• The right to affordable childcare. According to a recent study published by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, child care fees in the United States exceed annual food costs and median monthly rent and mortgage payments.
• The right to choose how to manage our reproductive systems. Since 1973, anti-choice activists have worked to pass legislation limiting access to abortion among girls and low-income women, while fundamentalist organizations have set their sights on Planned Parenthood who, by the way, spends only 3% of its total health care services budget on abortion.
• The right to be free of fear, both from strangers and from spouses/ partners. According to the National Violence Against Women Survey, 17.6 percent of women respondents had been raped at some point in their lifetime, while national statistics reveal that 40 to 50% of the several thousand American women murdered each year are killed by an intimate partner.

Kris, Me, Alex, and My Mom

As the daughter of feminists, I was taught from an early age to champion the fight for women’s equality. As a Women’s Studies major at Smith College, I studied the history of the first and second waves of the U.S. women’s movement, and learned how to advocate for women’s rights in a patriarchal culture. As the new mother of a daughter, I now have a slightly altered perspective—it isn’t just me or my mother or my sister or my wife whose rights are at stake. It’s my daughter, too.

Two and a half years ago, President Obama shared a letter with PARADE that he wrote to his daughters on the occasion of his inauguration. In it, he said:

America is great not because it is perfect but because it can always be made better—and… the unfinished work of perfecting our union falls to each of us. It’s a charge we pass on to our children, coming closer with each new generation to what we know America should be….

These are the things I want for you—to grow up in a world with no limits on your dreams and no achievements beyond your reach, and to grow into compassionate, committed women who will help build that world.

Here, here! To our President’s words I add the following: I am a woman, and a feminist, and a lesbian, and a mother. And, naturally, I am still roaring.

Yes we can!

Review of Beautiful Game from The Rainbow Reader

Just got wind of the first official review of Beautiful Game, penned by The Rainbow Reader, a reviewer of lesbian fiction. In a Facebook post, she described my book as her latest “victim,” purchased in a post-Women’s World Cup frenzy. This characterization made me a bit nervous, I have to admit, particularly when I visited the blog and learned that she’d intended the book to be a guilty pleasure, not destined for public review. Gulp.

As it turns out, though, she decided to post a review because she liked the book so much! Fantastic news from my perspective.

Some salient points from the review:

[The main character] is more than a gay athlete lusting after another gay athlete.  She has friends, some she genuinely likes and some she merely tolerates.  She actually practices and plays a sport, and feels angry and hurt when people are disrespectful.  She studies, goes to classes, and writes papers.  She has a summer job in another state, and she drives a beater Tercel.  She has a soccer tan.  And, in spite of the reputation as a playgirl that everyone wants her to have, she is respectful of boundaries.  In other words, she is a fully developed character – as a reader you really get to know her, and thus appreciate the journey you share with her. How utterly refreshing!

<snip>Beautiful Game is a complete story from start-to-finish – no overused plot devices, no convenient characters, and nothing left undone.

<snip>I don’t know why some books make a bigger impression than others; I just know that they do…  To me, Beautiful Game is a beautiful story.

Waiting for strangers to comment on your work can be a nail-biting prospect for any author. Reading reviews like this one where the writer articulates exactly what you were trying to do as you worked on a novel for weeks, months, even years alone in your office with only your imaginary characters to keep you company–well, it’s a genuine pleasure. When the negative responses arrive (and they almost always do), I’ll be able to return to this first post to remind myself that book reviews are subjective, and with the bad often comes the good, too.