So fascinating, and affirming, the way the unlikeliest women inspire one another, often forming a chain of empowerment and inspiration. I've been thinking about how George Sand became a heroine to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the former considered the most immoral of women and one whom Robert Browning would visit only as testimony of his love for his wife. What's more, Sand didn't even like EBB, and Elizabeth knew it! Yet Sand's name (her real name, Aurora) became the title of Elizabeth's most "feminist" work, "Aurora Leigh," which, in turn, became the basis of Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." Woolf admired EBB enough to write Flush, a kind of biography from the point of view of Elizabeth's beloved spaniel; I remember reading this as a child and recently ordered it to read again. It is not the kind of work we associate with Virginia Woolf who clearly somehow "loved" her mentor as well as admiring her, as in some way EBB "loved" George Sand for her writings.

The most important idea Woolf took from "Aurora Leigh" related to the money necessary for a woman to guarantee she can have privacy, creative space, and time of her own. When I teach "A Room of One's Own," I make certain the students notice both parts of the prescription: independence (money) and liberty. The students, both men and women, must make decisions about how they will acquire the means to live so that they may lshape life according to their dreams. EBB, in one of the greatest ironies I can think of, managed to seek her own dreams not simply because Mr. Browning came calling, not simply because she had the courage to leave England, but also because she had the funds to make it happen. They were her own inheritance, in her own name, nothing her father could take away, though I'm certain he chafed to do so. This money, enabling both of the Brownings to live as poets, came from the Barretts' direct ownership of slaves. Browning's father, in fact, had rejected his own similar inheritance, once he saw in person the source of it, from the stripes on the backs of the family's "possessions" to the illegitimate children who were beginning to dare to claim their share of both families' gain in the courts. I have no way of knowing how much Elizabeth thought about the source of her own freedom fund, but I know that soon after her marriage she wrote a powerful poem about a slave woman whose despair causes her to smother her own mulatto child.

How many women of Elizabeth's day had no emergency funds? How many were forced to stay in whatever prisons or hells they inhabited simply for lack of money to sustain themselves, and, in that day, from no place to find it? A middle-class woman wouldn't even have been allowed to work herself to death in one of the factories. Perhaps she could have become a prostitute, as so many women did in order to eat. The cost was too high for many of these, drowning seemingly their preferred way of release. I wonder to what extent the insistence on marital duty persuaded other women that they were not merely prostitutes of another sort. If they had children, I'm sure most were able to endure, but I wonder if we'll ever know how many Victorian women lived and died scandal-free but died in one way or another by their own hand.

Laws, employment openings, changes of attitude: these have made much difference to women, yet we've not escaped the tensions between means and opportunity. There are still many women who cannot choose their own lives because of various financial hurdles or fears. Of course I think of poor women but of many other situations, such as those in which women subordinate their own career decisions to those of their husbands, perhaps relocating in a place where work is not available to them or staying home for so long that nothing is available except minimum-wage income. My mother stayed in a terrible marriage for 25 years because she believed she could not make it on her own; she was wrong in the end, thankfully. But now I know that perhaps she wasn't wrong all along. How would she have lived and supported four children in a small town that had no jobs even for men? She could have moved in with her parents, but her sister already had done so, and, having had to do this myself once, I know it is a terrible solution because, once again, adult independence is lost. Because of this, I admire the courage of my friend, Anne, who has recently quit her long-term job with no firm prospect of another to travel and write, to be herself in the fullest sense.

And that takes me full circle. Anne is not an unlikely inspiration, but undoubtedly, she is one.
posted by Sandy at 8:16 AM

I watdhed a short film the other night about the Statue of Liberty. As a frame for the documentary, various famous people (mostly artists and intellectuals) were asked to define the word "liberty." I was interested that they had difficulty in doing so. They all knew there was something in the word beyond a mere equation with freedom. So I've dwelt with the word since then, trying to find my associations with it before I went running to etymology. I thought about the ability to cast off restraint. One speaker mentioned, rightly, that in society there is always the tension between the freedom of the individual and the necessary inhibitions of the state. Then, perhaps because I am a student of the French Revolution and of literature that focuses on this theme, I realized how radical is the idea that any person has the right to decide when restraint becomes excessive, beyond bearing. Yet when liberte is linked with egalite, that becomes the conclusion (well, perhaps fraternite implies that others should agree that the excess exists).

Tickling my mind all along was the sense in which liberty has meant the right to go freely within a certain space, as when slaves were given liberty (some tangible sign, a note, perhaps from the master) that they could travel to town for an errand or visit another plantation. And this seems to be the same sense in which one would be given the key to a city, the liberty of the city, surely a medieval idea of freedom within walls or boundaries. I think that this kind of liberty is one we cannot afford to underestimate, though we take it for granted to the extent of resenting any curtailment of our freedom of movement, including the visas or passport checks of other countries. It was no accident that American slaves chose the word "liberty" as equivalent to independence. Until earlier this year, I had , for seven years, managed without a car of my own. In Australia, I had the use of public transport, limited itself by the machinations needed to get where I wanted to be. Merely going to work and back claimed three hours of every day, the very hours I might have used for myself. Here, often I could not walk far and found myself without liberty--all the more difficult because I had been on my own for years with a car that I could point in any direction pretty much as I chose, assuming it was running, that is. Having my car has transformed my sense of what my life can be. Little wonder I refused to give it up for a trip to Ireland.

It seems to me that liberty connotes something more than absence of restraint, somethign more actively positive and linked to individual choice. One of the definitions implies this: "the positive enjoyment of rights and privileges, power of choice." Several of the people interviewed during the film concluded that it means the power to do as one pleases. That sounds a bit hedonistic, but I think they meant the power of self-determination. When I was in high school, I chose as my favorite Bible verse Luke 4:18. Jesus has come home to Nazareth. Standing up to read in the synagogue, he choose words from Isaiah; the text says he searched until he found these words of poetry:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed.

This passage won me to this Messiah as no other could have done. It has stayed with me all these years, shaping my conception of deity, reminding me that both the substance and the message are entirely wrapped in compassion and love. For this reason, perhaps, though I have struggled with my faith, I have never found it necessary to go through a period of rejection or unbelief. To Christ, each one of those individuals mattered, poor, blind, or broken-hearted, those who lacked whatever kind of liberty needed to make their lives their own. Not carelessly, of course, or frivolously; here is some difference from the freedom to drink at age 18 or to wear what one pleases. Certainly not the freedom to injure thoughtlessly or hate just because it's not illegal. But the freedom to trust the Spirit that we deserve the right to walk in the way right for us, which may not be the same that someone else would choose for us.

For each of us, there should be a circle in which we walk proudly, genuinely, ably as ourselves that no one has the right to restrain. It makes judgment of others very difficult. Perspective matters: patriots for liberty/common traitors; heroic individuals/rebellious upstarts; selfish/self-valuing, etc. In Romola, George Eliot asks the question that controls all of her novels: When does the duty to self become greater than duty to others? A difficult question indeed: where should liberty begin and end?

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." W.E.B. DuBois
"Liberty is one of the valuable blessings that Heaven has bestowed upon mankind." Cervantes
posted by Sandy at 11:35 AM