Because today would have been Barbara’s 65th Birthday,
I celebrate Badass women. Who are these women and why should they be celebrated?
Badass women are tough and uncompromising about the essentials of life…that family should forgive one another, that a woman must first love and forgive herself, that men do not possess innate supremacy, that a woman should speak her mind without deference to religious beliefs or fear of the others’ wrath. Barbara learned all of this from a life that began in teenage, alcohol-fueled rebellion and ended as elder experience-fueled modeling of strength, resilience, durability.
We need 1,000,000 times the women that Barbara was.
I believe that women pass the culture they uphold to the next generation. Men hold majority power in judicial, government, and corporate executive seats; but women choose the men who hold that power, choose how the culture their men thrive in is learned and lived in progeny. For every man that sits as CEO or Senator, there are 1,000,000 children influenced by their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, teachers, and caretakers. Rare is the man who administrates a profitable corporation or religious organization or government body without a wife who maintains his home, teaches his children, listens to his grievances and plans, meets his needs both public and private. She decides how the home is run, when to obey and when to dissent and by how much. She is the majority in Christian churches, tithing and supporting the church leaders, withholding or spreading gossip, preserving or rewriting the curriculum. She can make or break an election. She writes the books that she reads to her children at bedtime. She manipulates to have her way, or designs to make the way better, or sacrifices to make peace.
Does her ability to impart culture reveal that women hold greater power than do their men?
I do not know. I have known women over the years since I was a child in the 1950s, 1960s who voluntarily limited their ambitions, restricted their movements, suppressed their desires so that peace in the family and the church prevails. I’ve known women who were ostracized for contesting the status quo, disputing the men’s interpretations…debating and fomenting debates where everyone else wanted untroubled, calm compliance. Women are trained how to behave appropriately, how to win a man, how to prevent rape or domestic violence…how to submit to power.
Unless a young woman is raised in multiple foster homes or on the streets or by parents who teach their daughters well, she has few lessons in how to use her voice to be heard, how to stand up to bullies, how to question, what to do with doubt or distrust, how to challenge and fight back, how to recognize cult leaders and shysters and serial predators. Women’s vulnerabilities seem just as real today as they were one hundred years ago. Much has changed; little has changed. If women held great power, would not their inadequacies, vulnerabilities, unequal status, willful ignorance, and collective obsequiousness to male power be visibly and palpably less than it was in the past?
Instead, there is a resurgence in the USA and Europe of right-wing extremism led by men. I interpret this reality in different ways: women willfully remain weak and servile and permit the ‘strongman’ fanatic to rise, or women’s opposition to systemic racism and misogyny and their defiant push for greater power has emboldened men’s repulsion and readiness to defend their supremacy at all costs. What seems like an either/or is a both/and. On the right, women willfully defend their men’s supremacy. In the middle and on the left, women act in opposition to men’s supremacy. The change grows but too slowly to measure.
Yet.
Men like Putin, Trump, McConnell, Fred Drummond, and ad infinitum on the political, religious right flex their boldness but cannot hide their cowardice. They earn power through intimidation, propaganda, wealth…but must continually recycle their image because their reality is pathetic. Men like them would have no place at the table unless women liked them. But those women are fewer in number than ever before. The women who like the ‘strongman’ type, who support white male supremacy are losing ground. This explains the resurrection of right-wing obstruction and violence, from truck convoy and resistance to public health mandates during a pandemic to the invasion of sovereign countries like the Ukraine. From disingenuous, false grievances like school curriculum (CRT, US history), vaccines, immigrant caravans to unreasonable, despicable obstruction of legislation on voting rights, healthcare, and social services. The right-wing is enraged.
Women are pushing back, not only with their votes, but also with their voices. They are using a wide range of weapons that will influence culture: poetry, stories, journalism, executive decision, ministerial unction, science, education, political influence, adjudication, monetary donation, activism. The change is happening.
Barbara did influence her nieces – to balance badass with helpful. Her nieces saw a flawed aunt who grew into a caring, unselfish, honest, straight-talking, independent woman. She balanced a badass demeanor with her decisive, gentle caring for the luckless and the exploited.
Barbara Jane Vinson Hull died on July 25, 2021. May we be as brave as she.