The Holy Trinity of Womanhood
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in April 2024.
The challenge for women is to balance being a mother, a wife and a person. Being any or all of not-a-mother, not-a-wife, not-a-person can be equally if differently challenging. The miracle is that we manage at all. Doing it well?? That’s really amazing.
I think of the persona as being the body on which the clothing of other roles hangs. Sometimes a wifey blouse and motherly pants, and sensible shoes that help you putting one foot ahead of the other. I don’t mean to sound like it’s a slog, because sometimes those shoes bounce and dance like a child in spring. Nor is it necessarily uncoordinated – the parts can pair nicely, topped off, perhaps, with an attention-getting hat that says something important about the persona. But, as in life, what we wear – the role that leads is the strongest marker of who we are. It’s what allows people to quickly and efficiently place us in their world.
As the life cycle churns on and the intensity and immediacy of the wife and mother role abates, a woman is faced with the challenge of outing herself as who she really is. The clothing becomes increasingly sparse and the body emerges. Nakedness has always been a powerful state. It can bespeak ultimate vulnerability – a child entering the world clothed only in its mother’s juices. It can be shared -- sparingly, cautiously, generously -- as in sex. It can be used powerfully for or against the person whose body it is – seduction on one hand, domination on the other.
No wonder the crone is such an ambivalent creature. From one perspective, she is the dry and wrinkled shadow of the beauty and vigor she once held. From another, she is fearsomely free, someone with no need to please or conform, with nothing to lose, no external handles that can be grasped to control her.
There are friendlier perspectives on the post-mother post-wife persona: the matriarch, the elder, the grandmother. They have a quieter power. They don’t gather in a darkened woods and stir a pot of trouble; they are valued for simply being. They bespeak continuity, rootedness, an integrated and holistic wisdom. They are not the guru at the top of an arduous climb but the person sitting contentedly beside the hearth, perhaps rocking, perhaps reading, perhaps knitting.
Around the time Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, 1963, it was ‘discovered’ that women needed clothes other than mother and wife that expressed the inner self; it was more than symbolically a suit that garbed them to compete in the ‘real’ world, the business world, the world that was the purview of men. I entered adulthood in that era, the first wave of women who thought they didn’t have to choose between having a domestic life and having a career. The idea of women contributing to family resources was not new – women had always augmented family income by adding value (cooking, sewing, cleaning) and had often brought in actual money by selling their skills or products outside the home – in the farm community where I was raised, women raised chickens and sold eggs. But the idea of women taking ownership of their contribution in the way that men always had was new. And controversial.
It is no longer debated that women should be in the labour force; in fact our economy at an individual and collective level is dependent on it. The controversy has gone underground. The patriarchy (using that word not as a statement on gender but as an omnibus for all things capitalist and materialist) has decided to let women figure out how to make their contribution while withholding the means to make it an even playing field. Women are now expected to wear a third suit of clothing, a blazer over the wifey blouse and mommy pants, preferably with stilettos to message sexuality, and quite possibly a mortarboard to signify intelligence.
Is the holy trinity of womanhood disintegrating with the addition of this further obligation? It’s definitely under attack. Women are deciding against motherhood and wifedom in unprecedented numbers, covering a naked body with only a suit. It’s very difficult for them to decide against careerdom unless they’re independently wealthy, which is a suit of another cut.
Do the crones and the matriarchs have a role to play in bringing balance back into women’s worlds? I think they do. The next wave of feminism? Maybe. It will need to be tsunami, a powerful and destructive wave originating in a tectonic shift in the skeleton of the world. Climate change may do that for us, may bring patriarchy and the rapaciousness it signifies to its knees, and expose the value of matriarchy, the pot-stirring crones and the quietly wise elders. It might de-genderize how we divvy up the work of the world. I think that would be a wonderful thing. Then we could talk also about the holy trinity of manhood.
