My Matriarchal Roots

A grew up in a matriarchal family. I really did. This is not because the men were not there - my grandparents and parents stayed together, and in what appeared to be good relationships between equals. This wasn't even because the women were the primary breadwinners of the families. Rather, my family understood that women were people, and expected women to be just as successful as men.

I grew up in rural America; I grew up the older of two daughters. My mom is an educated professional, and my dad is a farmer. I was born on my dad's 36th birthday, in the Wisconsin summer, not in the nearest hospital to where my parents lives, but the one with a chair to allow my mom to sit up as she gave birth.

I grew up being expected to work when I got old enough. I grew up weeding gardens, picking up apples, picking raspberries, shoveling snow and later loading hay, feeding cows, and lifting heavy things. My parents expected it of me, and I saw it in the people around me. My grandmother worked hard, and loved it. And nobody got out of tasks for their gender.

On my mother's side, my grandmother was a typical housewife and my grandfather worked in construction. But my grandmother emigrated from Germany as a single woman. When her parents expressed concern, before she left, that she would go to America and become a prostitute, my grandmother threw it right back in their faces. She asked them if they thought that they had raised her so badly, that she would, in the late 1920's, think that prostitution was a viable life path. They didn't, and she didn't, so she took her brother's advice and moved to America.

There, she met my grandfather, but due to the depression, they did not marry - they possibly didn't even have sex - until about 1940. They then had four kids. They assumed they were done at three kids, but that fourth pregnancy, my mother, caught them by surprise. Of course, there are no mistakes in a Catholic family. Because they already had two girls, my mom was supposed to be a boy, oops. All of the kids went on to get education. The first became a nurse and married at 25. My uncle went to Vietnam and then used the GI Bill to go to college. He married in 1986 or 87, as I remember. My mom's other older sister went through a great degree of soul searching, even a stint in the convent, before really moving out on her own, but not without a great deal of fuss from her parents. Now she is a cultured and educated professional. Finally, my mother, the baby of the family, used the roads paved by her sisters to not get married right away, and lived during her 20's. She went to college and got a BS, then decided to go to graduate school and get a Master's degree.

Without being a typical consciousness-raising, bra-burning feminist, my mother was strikingly independent. One of her favorite stories is of the year she saved her money to buy a summer pass to the local pool, only to learn from her mother that she needed to stay home to cook lunch for her father. After putting up with that for a while, she finally put her foot down and told her dad to make his own damn lunch and went off to enjoy the fruits of her own labor and planning. Another story regarding my grandpa was the time his wife left him instructions to cook dinner, but she neglected to tell him to either turn on the oven or put the bird (chicken?) in the oven, so he didn't. What may have been a protest on his part about having to actually do something for the family turned into a funny story about my grandpa's ignorance.

But I did not grow up with those relatives - oh, I visited them a lot, but my mom had moved 12 hours away, to rural Wisconsin, and met my father, who was living with his family after his stint in the Navy and 5 semesters at UW Madison. I was closer to that family, and that was the true matriarchal family. And the matriarch of the family was my dad's mother. She was the youngest of 10 kids, and she was a daddy's girl. Her life was about work, everyone appreciated it, and she gave the orders.

She had a degree from a teaching college, but her career was as a farmer and a mother. She taught all 12 of her kids how to read and write before they went to school. She sold raspberries primarily, but also sweet corn, tomatoes, currants, strawberries, and apples every summer. She and her husband raised cows, pigs, and chickens, managed the biggest farm in the township, and ran a successful small business. She made cider, soap, bread, quilts, doughnuts, and she did her laundry with an old ringer washer. I don't know if there was anything my grandma couldn't do.

And she loved us. She loved everyone, and she gave. She did what needed to be done, and she accepted everyone. She was scary as hell, and she wasn't afraid of anything. She raised a generation of strong people, and even with their faults, they managed to raise my generation, and we're doing well. We're strong men and women, and we'll always remember where we came from. We carry the spirit of my grandmother - a woman who wasn't a feminist only because she didn't really need the movement to tell her that women could, should, and would work like men. I said it twice before she died, but I can never say it enough - Thank you Grandma, for everything.

Nine of my grandmother's 12 kids were girls, but only four of those girls went on to have kids of their own. Two of the remaining five never married - not to mention my mom's sister that never married. But unlike the patriarchal fear mongering, these three women are all still wildly successful. All three are home owners, and one owns about three houses - at least three - including the house where she grew up, the farm.

Most of my aunts and female cousins are successful professionals, including two nurses, three teachers, a high ranking army officer, and a firefighter. Many are married, and along with the three mentioned before, I have a couple of older female cousins that aren't married either. I grew up watching these women, and importantly, so did my male relatives. The men of the family behaved as if women were people - they knew their place beside women, not in front of or behind.

My matriarchal family did not berate women and girls for being women and girls - nor did it berate men and boys for being men and boys. The family did not expect anyone to not work because of her gender. If anything, my matriarchal family taught everyone that women and men could, would, and should work, and hard too. So I grew up knowing that I could do for myself. My dad doesn't think we should get married until we are thirty, and he is highly critical of the men my sister and my cousins do bring home. One cousin recently had a baby, and my dad isn't sure if her husband is up to the responsibility of being a father. I'm so glad that my family raised everyone to be an adult - a fully functioning, independent adult, male and female.