Boadicea, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and art

Boadicea, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and art

 

 American Boadiceas

Gloria Steinem (Wiki Commons)

Betty Friedan (Wiki Commons)

Shirley Chisholm (Wiki Commons)

All three were founders of America's National Organization for Women, NOW

Late yesterday, a friend put a question to her Facebook friends: Should men be allowed in the delivery room?

It turned into a very disrespectful discussion, but mainly, I think, because feminism, the sort of feminism that fights for women to be equal with men, has now been degraded into a sort of Hallmark card version in which women prove they are strong by giving all their essence to men, rather than celebrating and reveling in their own unique abilities and demanding respect for those. But that's another issue for another column; indeed, when I'm done painting today, I think I shall take it up either on my own blog, Cafe de Flore, or on my Suite 101 Ethics channel.

However, the whole thing really disturbed my painting rhythm. Why? Because I did spend a lifetime as a journalist, and part of that lifetime as an adjunct professor teaching the logic and rhetoric of writing, before making way for my first love and the study of my 30s, painting.  In yesterday's discussion, one of the commentators was so badly schooled in both logic and rhetoric that she thought the way to make her point was to call me names. She is an American, and worse, she got both her BA and her MA from the same university, an incestuous thing and certainly not designed to broaden a person's field of inquiry or depth of knowledge.

I have never had a child because I didn't want to. I spent decades ensuring there would be no pregnancy. And yet, I believe that the issue, as part of all women's lives, is essential. And, as it happens, it relates both to what I'm painting and to the current political morass in the United States.

***

I am painting a portrait of Queen Boadicea, the Icenii tribe's answer to the Amazon Women of Middle Eastern/Mediterranean mythology. Boadicea was real, a warrior who set out to avenge the rape of her daughters by the Roman invaders of Britain. In the painting, she looks disappointed, as if she knew she would fail.

Note: Celtophiles generally call her Boudicca, although there is no evidence, really, for how it was spelled or said. Various chroniclers spelled it various ways. However, in Latin and in the names of many venerable sculptures, it is Boadicea, and for me, Boadicea it shall remain, being both of the period (although Roman) and more lyrical.

My painting of Boadicea arose from a sketch of a model at Krowji Artists in Redruth, Cornwall, where I go to draw from life models as often as possible. The model that sparked the painting has a facility for portraying emotions, and I suspect she might have been disappointed in something that evening. Maybe the cold. Despite numerous heaters, there was a chill even for those with clothes on--it was right at the beginning of winter--and she draped herself in a feather boa for one pose for a little bit of warmth. It is now a rabbit fur wrap, in the painting.

But I digress: My point is that it is incumbent upon women--in my opinion--to retain for themselves all things that pertain to their essence, and childbirth is certainly one. In the United States at the moment, Congress is doing everything in its martian (and I mean as in warlike) power to pound women into nothingness. It has refused to enact legislation protecting women from rape and beatings; the several states have enacted legislation making it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion without first conducting ultrasounds, other invasive procedures, or both. In short, they are institutionalizing the spiritual and bodily rape of women, and women like my adversary in the Facebook discussion are enabling it through an approach to feminism (in my opinion!) that virtually hands our womanhood to men on a platter, complete with knife and fork. There is no place where a woman's spirituality and physicality are quite so intertwined nor quite so essential as in childbirth, I think. For most women--women who do not labour in the arts or politics, for example, and give birth to other products every day--the labour of childbirth might be one of the few occasions to glory in the unitary essence of creation.

But, said my adversary, that isn't fair to the men in our lives. Really? When they stop forcing themselves on women, as rapists or even selfishly demanding non-rapist partners....When they acknowledge ALL their children in and out of wedlock and support them without the threat of jail time....When they stop enacting laws to ensure their sperm is deathless regardless of what it costs the women they impregnate....then perhaps I'll listen to a chorus about bend-over-backward fairness to the sperm donors. Until then, I think women do all of us a disservice for being so overly concerned about ensuring a male place in the delivery room. If it is a woman's choice that a man be there, that's one thing. But it needs to be an opt-in situation, not an opt-out. As it is now, women and hospitals all expect the father to be present, putting the onus on the woman to create HER birthing experience the way SHE wants it.

So, sleep was difficult. I worry--even though I renounced my US citizenship just over a year ago--about what is to become of American women in the face of all this wimpiness and pseudo-earth-mother-cum-smiling-airheaded helpmeet, a return to a pre-Betty Friedan/Shirley Chisholm/Gloria Steinem way of life that celebrated female servitude by putting men in charge of life--the doctors--and elevating men as sperm donor/partner/whatever to a role that usurps women's power and interrupts her communion with the essence of womanhood in many cases. Again, if a woman wants it that way, it needs to be her decision, not the culture's, not the hospital's, not the government's, not the partner's. And these days, she'd have to fight to make a private birth experience happen in the face of immense societal pressure to let men in on the secret without a second thought.

***

This morning, I finished Boadicea's face. And her wild hair. All that's left is finishing her garments and her extraordinary golden torc...and that particular difficult birth will be complete.

I suspect I shall dedicate the painting to real feminism, and when it sells, shall give a portion of the proceeds to the National Organization for Women in the US, and possibly its counterpart in the UK.