“The phrase “kindred spirit” evokes for women who grew up reading the stories of the adventures and misadventures of Anne Shirley Anne Shirley a young woman, an orphan, who desperately wants to have a shared relationship that is a true and lasting connection between people as deep as a connection of kin but as individually affirming as friendship.” At least that is what I said in the K entry in 2016’s A to Z.
This year K is being revisited as K terms which link to iconic Female elements in culture and for individual women. I am not terribly well informed about Hinduism having only formally studied the Bhagavad Gita in a ancient literature class in college. But in this post, written the same day the K entry is to be posted — argh, I am examining the Kindred Kali, which may (or may not, I don’t want to tout my abilities beyond what is reasonable) clear up some of the problems I have noticed in Western world friends’ interpretations of Kali who often view the deity Kali through a feminist lens.
I do not want to go over territory previously covered. However, I want to draw in the one aspect of the word kindred that is conceptually important for contemporary women; that of the kindred that is reflected in the title of the novel by Octavia Butler: Kindred. This work had some challenges that stemmed from being first published in the 1970 from feminist interpretations at a time when feminism was primarily a white woman’s tool. Womanist interpretations of identity are more inclusive of individually contradictory, but accepted, aspects of a culture reflected in individuals as a whole than feminism.
I hope to show the breadth of the concept of kindred by featuring two very distinct icons which reflect aspects of the concept.
Kindred spirits live in the domain of women. Kali is the fierce manifestation of the mother goddess.
Butler looks at how a contemporary woman who sees beyond the limitations placed on her by a set of historical facts, ultimately comes to accept that she cannot know those shaping forces without having experienced them directly. We all live in worlds we did not make, but we do have the power to shape our world by learning and experiencing all we can so we can work with constraints we inherited.
Kali created the domain that is women’s, and men’s. She is the warrior who is counterpart to Shiva. She is unbridled energy that creates and destroys and part of the cycle of time. Shiva often is shown throwing himself under her feat to stop her raging. Kali is untamed, beyond the constraints of humanity. She protects her young, but she is life and death as these states are inseparable. She does not tolerate evil deeds or demons.
In kin, and kindred, we often ignore the terrible as we want to gloss over the aspects of people and life that make us uncomfortable. Ancient Hindu tales of origin and deity understand the contradictions inherent in a world that was here before we were and that continues on after we are no more.
The kindred of whom of whom Butler writes are many: ancestors, people who share a race, people who share a lineage, women of your time, and women who came before. Sex, race, and status, as well as slavery are the themes of Butler’s Kindred. Butler is usually called a science fiction writer and she was one of stand out greats of speculative fiction. She died young, while in her 50s, but left a good body of work. Kindred is a time travel novel in which a young black woman from 1976 is repeatedly pulled back through time where she make life and death decisions about an ancestor of hers, a slave owner. This is a gross oversimplification, but that is the action that feeds the plot.
This is a great vehicle to examine race, gender, and sex in our contemporary world. A 20th Century black woman who is well educated, independent and partnered to a man of another race has to face the reality of the horrors of slavery and the complexity of family where people own and are owned by relatives, abused and treated as property by fathers who raped and owned their mothers.
Can generations of time mute the cries of indifference and cruelty that were part of all that brought all of us to the present? Time is Kali’s domain, as is night.
Kindred spans time as well as space. Kindred spans race. Kindred crosses gender and the sexes. But as Butler shows by having a woman first deal with this bit of the past that is herself, women shape the story, the history of of what comes down through families. Determining kindred is ultimately determining family and thus self.
It seems that all of the great mothers of ancient humans are complex creatures, iconic crones, frightening. The Hindu deity filling this niche seems to accept the complexity of all that is associated with the wonder and terror of life and death. Learning to see these same traits with us, within our roles, brings together the personal and historic by illuminating the mythic within us that cannot be understood, or contained, but rather respected and accepted.
Iconic J: The Jaguar Goddess
As I write about iconic elements of The Feminine, or what are representations of essential aspects of figures that stand for women in various phases of life or in actions or behaviors that are inherently female, I try achieve some balance although biases are inevitable. All humans have biases. One of the biases that I would love to overcome is my Eurocentric bias. The world is a vast mixture of peoples and cultures. I am somewhat ashamed that I am not more global in my knowledge.
To overcome some of that bias, I want to travel to the world of the Maya who like so many other cultures have symbolically celebrated the wisdom and power of aged women in one of their Jaguar deities.
The incorporation of animal spirits into the gods and goddesses that helped the Maya give meaning and order to their world is essential to any understanding of their world view. Nature, people, and the animals and plants of their environment cannot be looked at individually. A pantheon of ruling and guiding spirits collectively influenced all peoples lives, not just human-formed deities, but mythic and magical beings taken from all aspects of the environment in which they lived.
The Jaguar was the top predator in the Mayan world. It is easy to understand the awe given to the Jaguar by the Mayans if you have ever been in the wild near a large cat.
My own first such experience was in Arivaipa Canyon in Arizona when my daughter was young. We were hiking as a group of around 10 people including a couple of children. This was a permitted hike in the section managed by the BLM. A mountain lion walked with us all of one day, as far as we could tell, pacing us along a cliff-top trail. It was stealthy but once spotted, we kept the kids in the middle of the group so the cat would not get any ideas that it could snag a straggler. I was not afraid, but I was in awe. I was just a part of nature, as was the mountain lion. Jaguars are bigger than mountain lions.
As a side note, a border wall would further endanger these cat species which do include the mountain ranges and wilderness area north of Mexico as the northern part of their ranges. A jaguar was spotted a couple years ago in Madera Canyon near Tucson.
Gods still walk among us.
Iconic H: Hype, Hyperbole, and Hymens
If we are going to cover the iconic elements of THE FEMININE some space has to be given to discussion of the concept of virginity and the hymen. This is a brief article, but a necessary one, as an iconic aspect of how women are defined depends on this trait that is largely a culturally constructed concept and not a biological state.
Whether a hymen is intact, or ever existed, is a definitive sign of nothing. This inner labial membrane does not exist in all girls; variation is the norm, with all degrees of presence and absence of the trait found in neonates.
There is no one physical presentation of this trait. So to have the social status of a girl or woman defined by something that can not be verified is not only ludicrous, but dangerous.
It is tempting to think that in the 21st Century a person cannot have her life ruined by the conjecture of others, but many extant fundamentalist religions seem to be based on such belief and men’s control over it.
The definition of a virgin is someone who has not had sexual intercourse, and the proof of this state is the presence of an anatomical state that may never have existed.
No one should need to prove such a status. That such a state or thing is believed to exist, and essentially has to be confirmed by another person, is inherently a matter of social control – not one of fact.
Language around this topic backs up the social control aspect of the concept of virginity. As most people know there are many ways to have sexual relations with others. There is nothing binary about sexuality or ways to be intimate with a sexual partner. There is no one thing that can be given nor taken.
There are many quite good explorations of this topic, some quite graphic, and I need not go into detail here and will just link to an article in the Atlantic.
Many feminist studies of this trait, as defined and managed by a patriarchal culture, see this as one of the major proofs that men seek to define and control all aspects of women in what is considered the default or basic state of relationships. This is changing for some, but no one is immune to such a s deep historical belief that spans all cultures to at least some degree.
Iconic G: Generation of Women's Generational Icons
In this post from the A to Z compendium of The Feminine Icon. We are at the letter G today. I decided to look at the way we have associated whole groups of women with a single term that captures some element of what has changed for women in a specific time period.
Most things remain the same, but difference is what is noted and categorized as capsulizing an entire generation.
Also it only takes only a few generations until you can have a totally mythic ancestor or icon, with god like properties; usually it is stated as 6 generations. So the icons covered here are only going back to late 1800s. People still living today remember people who were born in the late 19th Century.
From the Past
Gibson Girl
The idealized common woman, young and beautiful of course, of the 1890s and early 1990s was an image popularized by artist Charles Dana Gibson. The public domain image below is typical of how the girls, as they were called, were depicted. This one happens to be a beach scene.
The differences inherent to this idealized image are masculine aspects of the clothing. Not the tie and aspects of military uniforms. Corseting is still essential for anyone emulating this look, but the overall appearance is a curvy softness with hair loosely coiffed. Bare arms or neck are often featured, but usually not both. The Gibson Girl is confident and coy.
Suffragist
The next icon overlapped with the previous one. The suffragist at the turn of the 19th to 20th Century in the U.S. was seen as something quite different from any known societal element. This graphic, called the awakening, emphasized the novel west to east migration of votes for women. The classic Greek representational elements depict democracy on the move and women in the east reaching out to hurry an embrace of liberty.
But the truth is the Gibsonesque girl was a Suffragist and so was the Flapper. Both were around before women received the vote in the U.S.
In fact, this image from a Studebaker advertisement in 1920 shows aspects of all three early 20th Century types of women.
Flapper
The two images I’ve chosen to represent the Flapper shows the vast width of territory the icon covers, the fictionalized and symbolic one to the left and the reality to the right.
The artistic rendering of the Flapper in a Butterfly costume shows the new freedoms and celebratory decadence associated with the dancing and illicitly drinking woman of prohibition. Just as real as prohibition was the celebration of life that occurs after WWI.
The office workers in the Shorpy image shows more of the reality of women working so as to support the independence for which previous generations and older sisters had fought.
Bu
But then everything changed.
Dust Bowl Dorothy
Then there was this thing called the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
Dorothea Lange, above left, the photographer who took the pic of Florence Owens Thompson, center, created some of the best known photos which came to epitomize the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The fictionalized image of depression-era dustbowl female is Dorothy Gale as played by Judy Garland.
Independence, toughness, and something closer to reality – working photographer, mother struggling to feed her family, and orphan learning to appreciate what really matters in life – captures the iconic elements of living through the pre-WWII Great Depression.
Rosies
No one during the time of the U.S. involvement in WWII called anyone who joined to workforce to do traditional males jobs in support of the war effort a Rosie. But that is how we have come to know them.
The real factory-women working during WWII was far more diverse than the icon we have come to know.
Then by 1946 and the end of the war women were to revert to classic roles as though the men had never left and women had not grown accustomed to a lifestyle predicated on working outside the home.
Donna Reed
The perfectly coiffed, home-making, mother of many, who can bring a whole community together and have a casserole baking in the oven was exemplified by Donna Reed’s role in the 1946 Capra film, It’s a Wonderful Life.
The only problem with this image is that the idealized family of the post WWII era and the 1950s homemaker with the suburban barbeque that this image morphed into never really existed. These were Hollywood and advertiser s creation. That did not stop them from becoming iconic.
Then everything changed again… but not really.
Beatniks & Hippie-Chicks
The antithesis of the 1950s homemaker, the beatnik, a chick, had an outer appearance completely different from what had come before. Jazz infused, black turtleneck and skin tight black pant clad, with an existential bent, open relationship inclined, and at best a sidekick to the male cool-cats who ruled same as men before but without the cultural constraints that layered over traditional society.
This duality in rebellion continued on into the 1960s and on to the next icon of the hippie chick.
Living Icons
Women were still not thought of as independent agents in the world, but some of them began to act the part.
As we go through time more and more references are available to confound singular images as icons. But the elements of the Generation of hippie chicks may be best contained in Joni Mitchell or Carole King. Carole King married early at age 17, the same age when she wrote, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. By 1968 she was divorced and in 1971 her album tapestry Tapestry hit the top of the charts and stayed there for 15 weeks then stayed on the charts for 6 years. These women dominated the 60s and 70s as respected, intelligent, and immensely talented forces shaping and reflecting the times.
It is tempting for most non-Boomers to think of these iconic women musicians as Boomer icons, because they were of the same age as the hippies, but actually, they were born before the post WWII baby boom began in 1943.
Similarly the next phase of proto goth punky women, who were first represented by Patti Smith were older than the first Punks and were actually Boomers. Patti was born during the first year after WWI, in 1946.
Jumbled up Sorta Now
Proto -punk Patti Smith opened the floodgates into a Goth amalgam still presenting itself into the 21st Century. These Late-Boomer and Gen-X characters, and the real women who emulated and inspired them bridged and obscured the iconic Goth iconography that included some of male Beat ethos into their own fin-de-siècle self-expression.
The iconic goth image played opposite the gray-suited working woman. But a suit does not really have enough depth to be an icon in and of itself.
Please note that nearly all of these icons mentioned above are white. Maybe we haven’t evolved much.
Shortly after the 80s something happened. The 90s. At this point in the generational discussion I feel as though I should bow out as my millennial daughter is born.
But even I noticed that something was well… something began to happen in the 90s… the new women rising were in control in ways previous generations were not. Perhaps this video will remind you of what was happening.
Then the new century and millennium brought us fully into the age of the female warrior and protestor.
Needless to say perhaps but we have pride in those who serve and in those who stand up for what they believe. The making of icons is not an easy path.
Into the Future
Still being in the moment, almost, it is difficult to say what might become iconic. We rarely have control over our own cultural encoding, but we have far more than we used to.
I think there will be many strong iconic women who become the icons of new generations.
(2011) Intersectionality and mediated cultural production in a globalized post-colonial world, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35:5, 834-849, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.628035
Iconic F: The Fairy Lights of Marie Curie
F is obviously for female and feminine, but also for a woman’s passion for research and discovery as exemplified by the Fairy Lights of Madame Marie Curie.
“One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was a really lovely sight and one always new to us,” –Marie Curie
Uranium ore, thorium, polonium, and radium are all radioactive and the Curies worked with them all, in fact they discovered the last two. Marie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize; she actually won two Nobel Prizes.
For most people Marie Curie is just known as Madam Curie and if they know anything about her, they probably know that she worked with radioactive materials. But that is probably about it.
So here are a few nifty facts.
- Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland which was still part of the Russian Empire in 1867 when she was born. Her family was well educated but women were refused admission into University by law. She attended an underground university in Warsaw. Then she traveled to France to pursue graduate studies at the Sorbonne.
- She was a physicist and a chemist, a wife and a mother. She earned a university degree in 1893, and another in 1894. Marie returned to Poland but found that as a woman she was would not be hired at a university. She returned to Paris. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie. In 1897 she gave birth to a daughter, Irène. She taught at a University. She and Pierre worked in a shed they used as a laboratory behind the university at which he taught.
- She researched and published. Her work began in magnetism, continued into the electrical conductivity of the field of radiation around uranium, and advanced to the isolation of thorium, to which another research beat her to publication, and the discovery of polonium, announced in a paper by the Curies in July 1898, and in December of that same year she announced the discovery of radium. She coined the term radioactive, and advanced the theoretical understanding that radioactive radiation was an atomic level property.
- In 1903 she shared Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband and with physicist Henri Becquerel. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She also conducted medically related research, founded two medical research elements, and created portable x-ray technology.
- The Curie’s second daughter was born in 1904. Pierre died in traffic accident in 1906. IN 1911 scandal erupted when the public found out about her affair with a student of Pierre’s who was estranged from his wife. She was extremely active in the war effort of WWI, monetarily and medically, but received no acknowledgement from the French government for her efforts. She died from aplastic anemia in 1934.
Marie Curie had such a productive, rich life that it seems a wonder that more of her work, and her theoretical, practical, and technological discoveries are not well known.
The Substance
The carrying of radium in pockets, and its placement on night stands, by the Curies in order to admire and use the lovely blue green glow produced by radium certainly shortened Marie’s life. With today’s knowledge of how radiation interacts with living tissue, it is tempting to note the ignorance of the careless researchers. It was not just the Curies who did not understand the harm that could come with exposure to radiation.
I remember watching the hands move ever so slowly around the dial on a manually wound alarm clock numbers in the darkened bedroom where I was supposed to be napping as a little girl. I was too old for naps, but my mom made me lay down and learn to tell time by watching the clock if I did not want to nap. This took place around 1960 or 61, so radium-coated clock faces were still around and available then. Phosphorescent paint is now used.
The use of the illuminating element in paint, and the illness, suffering and death that workers who painted watch and clock faces by hand in the 1920s provides basis of the film, Radium Girls, which will debut April 27th at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Problems from other radioactive materials are relatively common. Water supplies in Arizona, and other uranium mining areas, have been and continue to be contaminated with deadly run-off. And of course there is the problem of nuclear reactor accidents and radioactive waste.
But the fairy lights were magical.