Writing Our (Fore)Mothers
How Coming from a Long Line of Strong Women Shapes my Writing and my Life
Recently, I had a conversation with an acquaintance who was decrying the move of women into the workplace, insisting that we’d lost the ideals of “traditional womanhood.” Since the ideals that person was talking about included the idea that wives were the property of their husbands, I’m awfully glad we’ve lost them… but it’s also not true that the traditional Jewish wife was someone who stayed at home to take care of the children.
Before emigrating to the US, Sheva Baila ran the dairy at an estate near Linkuva, Lithuania. Her husband, Joseph, was a teacher and Talmudic scholar. Far from being an unusual arrangement, this was actually the norm in the Pale of Settlement: wives worked so that husbands could complete the daily mitzvot of study and prayer. (Some men also worked in jobs unrelated to study or prayer, of course, but generally not so that their wives wouldn’t have to.) Work outside the home was considered a perfectly normal, even desirable, part of a “traditional” wife’s role in the family.
I don’t think my great-grandmother Bertha worked outside the home while she was married to my great-grandfather, but I also don’t know very much about her life. She died when my grandfather—who was the eldest sibling of five—was in his late teens. (Family, do any of you know if she worked before or during her marriage to Lake Sr.?) I do know that Lake’s second wife, Anne, was a school teacher.
My own mother grew up without a mother, and so my Aunt Josie—my grandfather’s sister—stepped in to play the role of grandmother for my siblings and me. She was also someone who worked, both in the family businesses and in the community. She was a founding mother of Branches, Huntington’s Domestic Violence Shelter, and served on the local boards of Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the American Cancer Society.
My own mother worked for many decades at Information and Referral, a sort of catch-all social services agency that provides information, linkage to agencies, and sometimes direct support to the residents of Huntington with an emphasis on—but not exclusively for—the homeless and impoverished. Her title there was (and I promise I’m not making this up) Queen of All She Surveys. (I think this makes both Haven and I The Princesses of a Good Many Things.) Because of her deep roots in the community and the amazing amounts of good will she’s engendered, she was often able to find resources when there weren’t any from official sources, and a good many lives have been enriched—and a few even saved—because of her hard work.
I also have the examples of a good many great aunts and cousins to draw on. My cousin Mary Lake is a world-recognized leader in women’s health. My cousins Lynn, Lois Anne, Louise, and Annette all have had—and many still have—successful careers in the arts. (Having models for successfully being a working artist is so important, because it counteracts the “common wisdom” that such a thing isn’t possible.) My cousin Rosilyn breeds thoroughbreds, and my cousin Rachael is an artist doing ground-breaking work at the intersection of art and narrative medicine. And my cousin Joan is, and always has been, a powerhouse of local politics and philanthropy.
None of this is to say that I don’t have female relatives who have focused primarily on raising their children and taking care of their families, or that none of these women did so until their children were older and then became more engaged outside the home. Many did, and I can’t recall ever having anyone suggest that this was somehow a lesser calling. (Although it was absolutely assumed we would all go to college.) It’s just to say that the expectation was never that I, or any Jewish woman I know, would stay out of the public sphere. That’s never been what being a traditional Jewish wife entailed, and it’s certainly not the expectation of a Polan woman.
I’m grateful for this, and for the advances that my foremothers made in securing for me the freedoms and privileges of full citizenship in the United States. So on this Mother’s Day—when my social media feeds are full of young white women playing at something they call #tradwife—which seems a lot like the Total Woman tropes of my youth—I want to take a moment to say thank you to my mother, and to all the women of our family, for gifting me with such wonderful examples of the various ways one can be a woman in this world. In no small part, the impetus for this project has been your stories, and my admiration for all the things you have done and been.
Yay for the Polan women! My Mother was a substitute teacher (which we all hated) and went back to school to get a Masters degree, but unfortunately all five of us got the flu and she had to drop out. She was a good one, and I am a lucky one. I do love my cousins!
Wonderful!