Battle-Axes in the Mirror

As I sit trying to organize my thoughts for these notes, it is cold and overcast outside – it is the dreariest part of winter. Still, I am warm and cheerful. I just finished talking to our daughter in New York and was reminded of how proud I am of how well she has turned out (despite the less than perfect parenting skills of her parents). No matter where or when, there are always difficulties involved in growing up, but these difficulties have become more and more complex. From adolescence on, one is expected to make important decisions about what one should do for a living, where to live, when or whether to marry and have children, all with the sense that these decisions will contribute to the success or failure of one’s life project. Because it is difficult to decide on a life project at adolescence, and equally hard to measure the success or failure of such an abstract concept at any age, I would like to think that my life could serve as a story that might help her as she travels through the stations of life. If she is to learn from my life, however, I should also tell her the things that cause me doubt and fear, but that I keep inside.

Still, I doubt that she would think the ups and downs of her mother’s story very relevant. Unlike the culture in which I grew up, this culture’s emphasis on youth means that experiences coming with age no longer make old people wise in the eyes of our youth. Unless we die early, we will all get old, so I want my daughter to see in my life that aging is not to be feared. Why, then, do I look at the mirror and cringe when I see the natural result of that process? Why do I buy the promise in fancy bottles of super restorative, multi-intensive, organic night cream? Because I want to look my best; but also because everywhere I turn, I am confronted with the social message that says female beauty means youth. I am always aware that no matter what makeup I buy or what clothes I wear or how many miles I put in on the treadmill, I no longer fit those images. I no longer see ‘me’ in the mirror of mass culture. I should warn her that one day she, too, will no longer have a reflection in that mirror.

It is easy to overlook the pervasive impact that mass culture has on how we feel about ourselves and our bodies. Take, for example, the most common ‘delivery system’ of mass culture: television. On average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day, or half their leisure time, to watching television. At this rate, someone who lives to be 75 would have spent nine years in front of the tube. But it does not take that long to have the effect I am talking about. Since Western television arrived in the Pacific island of Fiji in 1995, the cultural idea that gaining weight was a sign of health and attractiveness has undergone a dramatic shift. Directors of a Harvard Eating Disorders Center study, which spans 1995-98, report that girls who watched television three or more nights a week were 50% more likely to say they were “too big or fat,” and 30% likelier to diet than those who did not. Fiji has only one television station and among the Western programs it shows are Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, and Seinfeld. How much stronger is that message for a girl who has had 160 channels available to her since she was old enough to sit up in front of the TV screen?

Social pressure to look and behave in certain ways is to be expected, but the strength that mass culture exerts on universal age-related biological experiences of women is astonishing. In Better Than Well (2003), Carl Elliott discusses the debate about hormone replacement therapy, which doctors used to prescribe routinely to postmenopausal women. Although there are questions about whether hormone replacement therapy actually prevents age-related diseases or whether the benefits outweigh the risks, most clinicians agree that it does eliminate unpleasant menopause symptoms. One of the most common of these symptoms is hot flashes, which may occur in as many as 85 percent of American women. Hot flashes, however, are not universally experienced as problems, let alone medical problems, by women of all cultures. For her book Encounters with Aging (1993), anthropologist Margaret Lock conducted 105 interviews with Japanese women ranging in age from forty-five to fifty-five. Only 12 of these women mention symptoms that could be interpreted as hot flashes. Moreover, not a single Japanese woman reported suffering from any of the most common symptoms experienced by North American women, such as sleep disturbance or night sweats. Lock argues that the most important influences accounting for these dramatic differences are cultural. Japanese women do not fear or dread menopause the way that North American women do. For a woman to be getting older in Japan means that she is advancing in a social hierarchy, and this is accompanied by more responsibility and greater recognition of her maturity and wisdom. Contrast this view of a woman’s middle years with our own, where menopause is associated with lack of sexuality and a slow, downward decline into debilitating old age, and you begin to see why mass cultural messages can exert such power.

I do not fear growing older, but I fear the marginalization that comes with it. Valued cultural space for women, apart from being objects of attraction, is lacking. And in America, women must be young, or give the semblance of being young, to be attractive. In China where I grew up there was such a space for women. My grandmother personified the older woman who could, with her accumulated wisdom and experience, command the attention of any company of adults and cause apprehension in the hearts of misbehaving children. Apparently America once had space for this kind of woman. In Southern Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), Florence King notes that older Southern women filled a similar role. King goes on to say that “A country without a tradition of redoubtable battle-axes is a country that does not offer its young women any positive images for female old age.” Surely it is time for women, who will one day be grandmothers, to create such an image to reflect in the mirror of mass culture. It is time for us to talk out loud about our inner fears and doubts. I adored my grand-mother and, even at the risk of being called a ‘battle-axe,’ want to be like her. I may never be able to explain everything I feel to my daughter, but I can pass on a positive image of an older woman to her.

The effect of mass culture, commercialism, and art on women’s health issues runs much deeper than the few examples I give here, but a good place to investigate it further is the Inside Out Loud exhibit showing January to April at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University. The Center for the Humanities, in conjunction with the exhibition, has invited two poets whose work is strongly linked to women’s health, to contribute to this inter-disciplinary event celebrating Women’s Month.

Jian Leng, Assistant Director
The Center for the Humanities

The Center for the Humanities is proud to present two of America’s leading poets, Marilyn Hacker and Rafael Campo, as part of its SmartSet Series: Where Great Writers Read. Hacker and Campo will give readings at Washington University in March and April, as part of a St. Louis-wide programming effort on the subject of women’s health. Ms. Hacker’s reading is also co-sponsored by Washington University’s Creative Writing Program.

These readings are a collaboration between the Center for the Humanities and WU’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in programming around a major new exhibition project this spring: Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women’s Health in Contemporary Art. Inside Out Loud is the first significant survey of contemporary American art to explore critical issues relating to women’s health. The 51 artworks from across the country represent such topics as breast cancer, AIDS, reproductive rights and technology, beauty and aging, paralleling the rise in awareness of Women’s Health as a distinct category in the medical profession and in the community at large.

Marilyn Hacker will read from her work on Friday, March 18. A prominent lesbian activist, influential literary editor, and a gifted translator as well as a winner of the National Book Award, her work has appeared in many anthologies of gay and lesbian poetry, and poetry dealing with AIDS and women’s illness. As editor of The Kenyon Review from 1990-94, Hacker encouraged emerging voices of queer, women, and minority writers. Her own struggle with breast cancer and the illness and death of close friends are material for much of her work. While others trying to comprehend their experience of serious illness have credited Hacker’s poetry with healing power, she is pragmatic:

" Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about. But the fact that writers are dealing with essential issues, that some are themselves implicated as HIV-positive or writing with cancer or AIDS, or as healthcare-givers, legal advisors, teachers, outreach workers, witnesses - I think that’s a necessary integration of literary writing with what’s actually going on in our world."

Marilyn Hacker divides her time between New York, where she teaches at City College and CUNY, and Paris. Her most recent book of poetry is Desesperanto (2003).

Another poet in the front line of real-world health crises is Rafael Campo, who will read on Friday, April 15. A practicing physician as well as a poet and essayist, he teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His medical practice serves mostly Latinos, gay and lesbian patients, and people with HIV/AIDS.

Campo has published seven volumes of poetry and essays, receiving various honors including a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest work is The Healing Art: a Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry (2003). As a Cuban-American and a gay poet, Campo’s work has featured in collections of queer and Latino verse as well as poetry dealing with the experiences of illness and healing, notably Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1996, with Marilyn Hacker) and Gay Men at the Millennium (1997).

" …it would be hubris to suggest…writing poetry could somehow cure cancer or AIDS. Yet in my own particular work as a doctor and poet, I do encounter areas of overlap that make me believe that the origins of poetry and our attraction to it run very deep within us…Poetry is the lifeblood of community; by fostering empathic connections among people, it may indeed remind each of us of our own ongoing process of being alive, of how and why we live."

Both readings will take place at 7:00pm in Steinberg Auditorium, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, with receptions to follow.

Washington University faculty and staff are cordially invited to submit original poems to a new journal that will showcase our creative efforts. Whether you’ve published or not, please consider sending your work—from haiku to epic—in any form or style that you choose. Our hope is to provide a congenial outlet for faculty and staff poets of all stripes, and to produce a journal that will represent a broad spectrum of poetic inspiration—for better or verse!

Poems can be emailed as an attachment to cenhumartsci.wustl.edu or can be sent as hard copy to:

Poetry Journal
The Center for the Humanities
Washington University in St. Louis
Campus Box 1071
St. Louis MO 63130-4899

Deadline: March 31, 2005

Please submit no more than THREE poems or a maximum of FIVE pages.
The Center for the Humanities is pleased to support Washington University faculty Marvin H. Marcus (Associate Professor of Japanese Language & Literature) and Fatemeh Keshavarz (Associate Professor of Persian Language & Literature and Jewish and Near Eastern Studies; Director CSISC) in their efforts to launch this publication.

The Center for the Humanities Advisory Board 2005-2006