By Lauren Martin
In our culture, women are seen more as resource than intellectual equal. How we parent (and that we must parent – it is our duty to do so) is essential to man’s survival and affords the male an ability to feel a sense of home while they go out into the world and conquer. This traditional model is still embedded as the cultural norm. In fact, a friend used to tease me that demanding equality seemed to have resulted in most women working and continuing to manage home and parenting needs.
Women were entitled to work once economic strain became great enough and there was a need for two income family systems. The structure shifted because our labor became necessary to help prop up the family’s sustainability and (hoped for) economic mobility. Resource. One could say we were (we are) kept in our place through disproportionate compensation to keep us from straying. Even as women have become more essential and more economically independent, the age-old narratives and push back continue.
When you live in a world that doesn’t tolerate women aging (in spite of the inevitability of this process for all: men age without recrimination); a world that doesn’t eroticize anything but female youth; that doesn’t fund women’s health, and litigates women’s bodies, you end up with a massive part of our culture discarded and deemed irrelevant after a certain age. If you cannot remain eternally youthful – a fetishized object of desire – and if you can no longer meet your primary purpose: to reproduce, then what use are you?
I was raised by a feminist who fought for the marginalized and no, she was not privileged. My mother taught me the principles of unification – history is context and you do not have to agree with all your allies for them to be so – and how the lack of those principles undermines social movements and impacts policy.
But mostly, I was taught reverence – for all the women (all the humans, for that matter) who had come before me, fought the fight, laid the groundwork for me to follow – and how their efforts and their knowledge provides the backdrop for our current fights. These principles underlie much of my poetry in my new collection ‘Night of the Hawk‘, written throughout the years of my journey to become a shaman. There are three poems in this series which make this the clearest.
In My Experience as a Post Menopausal Woman, I wanted to highlight the context mentioned above to younger women who disregard the opinions, and dismiss both the variance, and ultimately, the wisdom of older women. This, to me, is an alignment with the same unconscious bias and patriarchal approach to women as they age.
I wrote Ode pre the Dobbs decision, as I feared Roe would be overturned, and with a frustration that as women’s bodies continue to be litigated, women are unable to discuss their incredibly unique experiences and their personal understanding of choice. Or that they even made a choice around pregnancy. I wish there were space for women to make individual decisions about their bodies and the correct time to parent.
But more than that, I wish there were space for them to discuss their internal experience. This would grant permission for women to discuss their history at the time of an abortion and over time as they reconcile an abortion without external shame. Instead, women are silenced into decisions made for them. I am often stunned by and contemplative about the impact on women of having to quietly hold shame around their emotional experiences.
Osceola was one of the many aliases of Karen Blixen. A strong woman ahead of her time who was determined to carve her own path in the early part of the 1900’s, She deserves tribute. In her book and the subsequent film about her life, she captures both the beauty of Africa and the beauty of her love affair. A love affair with a man who was most certainly drawn to her independence and strength. Blixen was an excellent writer and lover of poetry which was intertwined within her writing.
But Blixen, like so many women who suffer from chronic health issues, was accused of being psychosomatic or attention seeking while struggling with what was likely a chronic form of syphilis, a disease contracted from her philandering husband which left her unable to have children and seeking help for pain she felt was residual to the illness. Her health – and thus, her life – at the mercy of the patriarchal medical system, left her unable to eat; she died in 1962 from malnutrition at the age of 77.
These are some of the stories I tell in my poems that are the most female centric. Women are so varied and diverse in their circumstances and needs and we are finally getting to have a voice. That voice should include all of us.
Lauren Martin is a psychotherapist, poet, and a devoted Ìyânífá. She lives in Oakland, California. In her intensely personal poetry collection, Night of the Hawk, Lauren Martin tells the untold stories of the marginalized, the abused, the ill, the disabled—the different. Inspired by her life’s experiences, including the isolation she has suffered as a result both of living with chronic illness and having devoted herself to a religion outside of the mainstream, these poems explore with raw vulnerability and unflinching honesty what it is to live apart—even as one yearns for connection. But Night of the Hawk is no lament; it is powerful, reverential, sometimes humorous, often defiant and full of wisdom. Visceral and stirring, the poems in this collection touch on vastly disparate subjects but are ultimately unified in a singular quest: to inspire those who read them toward kindness, compassion, and questioning. Learn more at: www.laurenmartin.net and follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
