Women, Groups

About seven years ago, Blanche Wiesen Cook spoke about her Eleanor Roosevelt biographies at the Brazos Bookstore. She spoke of Roosevelt's female friends, whom Roosevelt took with her wherever she went, even into meetings with important men in government. "'Never go anywhere without your gang,'" Cook quoted Roosevelt as saying (or something to that effect).

At the time, I regularly attended a woman's group, called The Woman's Group, which met each Sunday at 11:00 am in the Unitarian Church. When the Woman's Group found out that Cook was speaking on Roosevelt at the bookstore, we all attended, en masse. We even had dinner with her afterward at a restaurant in the same neighborhood; and I ended up sitting right next to her at the table.

When I had first heard of the Women's Group, I never planned on attending its meetings. I was engaged in a bit of picture painting (badly, of course) when I noticed both a notice for the Women's Group and for a women's book group in the "Events" section of the local "independent" newspaper that I was using to protect my roommate's IKEA table from my sloppy pseudo-Pollack style of painting mess. "Ah, the Women's Group is probably full of a bunch of corporate types," I thought. I figured that they would be more like the lawyerly NOW chapter in the city rather than the radical theorists and activists of the defunct university chapter that I had belonged to. The book group looked more interesting.

So, I went to the book group, which was filled with fabulous women, and had read Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life for that week. This was more like what I wanted. Feminism, reading, interesting women at different stages of their life. "You should go to the Women's Group," the book club leader, Anne, urged. "I don't know," I said. "It's at a church, wouldn't it be kind of conservative?" "Oh, we aren't part of the church," she said, "and there are all sorts of ideas there." So, I went.

As it turned out, the Woman's Group had a very broad definition of "feminism." The founder, Iris, had kept the group going for thirty years with no more precise a feminist philosophy for the group than "each woman defines her own feminism." She could always be counted upon to support anything that a feminist-identified woman did, and to help connect women with one another be it for business, legal council, support, or friendship. "Women have to help women," she said, "Because men sure aren't going to."

Women had never really been my allies in life. I had fairly antagonistic relationships with most of my female friends growing up. Maybe this stemmed from my relationships with my mother and her mother. I am pretty certain that this had something to do with the general attitude in my home, reinforced by many of the messages bombarding me from outside of my home, that girls were "bitches," or "weak," or "silly," or in some other way "wrong." After a childhood of thinking that females were the far superior gender (I had brothers, what more proof did I need?), I disliked myself as an adult female, and I disliked other females by extension. As a fellow female graduate student once said, "the worst thing that someone can do to you is make you feel bad about who you are." She was right, because feeling bad about yourself alienates you from not only the rest of the world, but people with who you can identify and who will be your allies.

In spite of my dislike of myself and of other women, I desperately yearned for some kind of human connection, especially that kind of connection that you have with people who "get it" because they have experienced some of the pain and frustration that you have. I yearned for other women who understood, especially as I stopped disliking myself for being female and started to become angry at all of the messages (and some of the messengers) who told me that I was wrong simply for having two X chromosomes. I yearned for a community of these women, and doubted that they even existed.

At the Women's Group, for probably the first time in my entire life (and I was over thirty) I found a group of women whom I could trust. I had had a brief taste of that trust earlier, in the college NOW chapter, but this was much more free-form, much more social, and, in some ways, much more necessary for me at that time. Nastiness did crop up, but no one was vying for power within the group, no one saw anyone as controlling limited resources, and everyone had a common goal, nebulous as it seemed, of preserving the Women's Group as a place where we could all go for some sort of mutual understanding.

When Blanche Wiesen Cook quoted Eleanor Roosevelt, the room erupted in applause. As one woman from the Women's Group stood up to make a comment, she introduced herself as being "here with my gang." We were, and we accepted Cook among us, as well. There was a safety, a comfort, and a courage in our numbers.

Photo Credits:

IMAGE 1: Blanche Wiesen Cook and my friend, the Radical Feminist Separatist Persian Lesbian.

IMAGE 2: Blanche Wiesen Cook and the members of the Women's Group who stayed to close the place down (some went on to a bar afterward).