Lineage

The women who spat out the gag so we could eventually speak.

I know so little about the female family history of either side of my family.

I have an ancestry tree that I really went nuts on a few years ago and constantly came across women who had no identity prior to their marriage certificate. No way of knowing who they were before ‘wife’ when they lost one identity and were given another.

I do remember my grandmother, in her declining years, telling me a story about her family. She was talking about meeting my grandfather (the boy across the road) as teenagers and how she set her sights on him. That was it for her. In the middle of the conversation, she said that one of the things she liked best about him was that he didn’t drink. She said her father was a drunk and “used to smack my mother around”. It was said so matter-of-factly that it stood out. I know my grandfather wasn’t a drunk and never hit her, but that’s not the only form of abuse. She didn’t have any money of her own or anything in her name. She never knew how much he made; she was just given housekeeping money each week that had to cover everything for the household and the children. But that conversation was the only time we ever had a conversation as women, and that’s because by then, she didn’t know who I was.

She was nicer to me, not knowing, than she’d ever been before. I found myself talking to Joan, not Nan, and I often wonder, if our society had been as it was centuries ago when matriarchs were revered, listened to and passed their knowledge down to the grandchildren, whether we would have been friends. She had a lot of misdirected fire in her personality.

I wonder who she could have been.

It feels strange to reach this point in life still carrying the same feeling of the unknown and to wonder if she felt it too.

There are so few of us that would say we feel settled. Whole. Just as we hit a new milestone, the old patterns return in our head, and we hear it. Can I do this? Our grandmothers couldn’t. Part of it is somehow linked to deservedness, as growing up in patriarchy will no doubt teach you that you only deserve what is granted to you, not what you earn. What you are ‘allowed’ to have or want versus getting it just because you want it.

That’s not very feminine.

Particularly if you don’t seem grateful. Stepping out of line is still dangerous, and I keep thinking – for fuck’s sake, it’s 2026! How much worse it was for those who came before us, yet it is on their shoulders we stand, and in their eye we spit when shrinking.

The shining examples of womanhood that are shoved in our faces, our grandmothers smiling in their aprons with matronly shoes and flour dusting their forearms after baking yet another pie, conceal the reality of a woman that has no money or legal standing, no ability to earn a living, have a bank account, get a loan, sign a contract or, indeed, keep her identity in any way other than the granted title of wife and mother. This is after resigning the title of ‘daughter.’ Property transferred. Our grandmothers.

Women, please, please, please look into the traditional meaning of ‘being given away’ by your father at your wedding. Please, I beg you. We as women have to look tradition in the eye, and remake it into something just as romanticised, that doesn’t slap the faces of the brides of our lineage for whom this was the absolute truth.

The very reason that women have the public platform to denounce feminism and spruik traditional values is DUE TO FEMINISM. The irony that is missed by those who decry it freely, that they have the right to do so BECAUSE OF IT, breaks my heart a little.

Why has it been weaponised when all it is asking for is equal human rights? What is the fear?

Softness is not weakness. Strength is not toughness. Subjugation by control is not cleverness but fear wrapped up in righteousness. Rather than unpacking how women are weaker and therefore need controlling, why not unpack the weakness of a psyche that only feels powerful when oppressing others?

When big tough men go off to war, if women really were weak and unable to function without direction, how do those left behind survive? Who took over the “man’s” work and kept industry running? Man’s need to conquer and control, when on the world stage in theatres such as war, ensured that women on the home front were required to step up and step into previously denied arenas, and they thrived and delivered.

So, step back and look at the big picture here. Men created this conundrum. In order to slake their thirst for dominance, they left a gaping hole that was filled by those previously dominated.

So feminism is a direct result of men’s need to control. Any way you look at it. For centuries they dominated with brute force. But they opened a door. And our amazing and courageous ancestresses stepped through and said, "More of this, please” and the fuse was lit.

Are we really going to be the generation who blows it out?

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