A few years ago I attended the funeral of a venerable Charleston grande dame whom I knew well. I respected her because she was a woman so sure of herself that, despite being a legatee of the old south, she was also, early on, fiercely committed to, among other things: civil rights and, later, the ERA amendment, and later than that, the end of domestic abuse, the war in Iraq, etc.. For those specific reasons, my respect for her was immovable, despite her notorious complacency (and arrogance) that often resulted in comments like the one she made, in an off-hand way, to me: "When you first showed up as an adult, W., we just did not know what to think of the Yankee ways you had picked up, but now.... well, now, we've decided that you are just too amusing to find fault with."  I was piqued by that judgment (even though it was intended to be a stamp of qualified approval in a back-handed way) not only because it was quintessentially Charlestonian in its certainty of divine right to withhold or confer approval, but also because it showed not a shred of recognition that, in fact, I was attempting to follow -- though probably not succeeding in following -- her politically causal footsteps.  

So it was only later that I felt empathy, as well as respect for her  -- almost fifteen years after her dispensation, to be precise. Because only then could I finally see that though she was a grande dame -- a real presence in the place and the era in which she operated -- she was also like my own more discreet southern mother, in that she had been taught from birth to place a higher value on an ability to make regular contributions of "light and bright" witty repartee than to value her many contributions of substance. 

And so I sat in church (one of three beautiful churches in Charleston in which local movers and shakers are baptized, married and buried) and listened in disbelief, and sorrow, as one person after another lauded this amazing woman as "a good wife and mother" (trust me; I know her children, and I know that she was not) and "a woman of gentle mien" (trust me; she was truly terrifying) and as "a woman who sacrificed herself to work tirelessly for the community" (No; every stand she took flew in the face of the accepted local order).....blah, blah, blah.  

As person after person spoke, I wondered why there was such a yawning discrepancy between who she was, and the falsehoods that were being promulgated, insistently, as her personal legacy -- falsehoods which negated her as an individual, in favor of supporting cultural myth that defines, as one-size-fits-all, what a good woman does and says.

The answer, I think, has little to do with the South -- although the pressure for women to conform to stereotype may be particularly intense there, even now. But I think it really has more to do, maybe even everything to do with die-hard opinions about women -- opinions that are no less corrupting, and damaging to the cohesiveness of our future, than are mythic paeans to "a free market economy" and "less governmental regulation."

Our world does not need women to devote their energies to being the consummate "Angel in the House" as Virginia Woolf so passionately, if savagely, depicted. Our world needs women who speak their minds and hearts --- even if, from time to time, their tone is piss angry about something. Our world will be better off when more men, as well as retro-minded women, are willing to hear us -- because we know something, a thing or two, about what matters, whether for ourselves, or for the generations to come.