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PASSGES, a series of workshops, readings, performances, and other related art events took place in a context of feminist research, group support, and cooperate activity. It extended the definition of an art event to include consciousness raising and the possibilities of cultural transformation. It was an event in which group process and relationships deriving from it were the central achievements.
As one of the requirements for the participation in PASSAGES, women were asked to be willing re-examine their own--and society's--attitudes concerning sex and race, especially as portrayed in the arts and the media. The idea behind such investigations was that the women could then transform and share their findings with the community at large in an art/cultural event.
Denna Stevenson
Creator of Metis
PASSAGES: Women and Their Work
Creator of Metis
PASSAGES: Women and Their Work
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| Women and Their Work participants: Theresa Macias, Kit Fontaine, Debbie Dew, Deanna Stevenson, Glee Ingram, Delores Carkuff, Helen Cox, Teresa Anderson, Dorothy Charles Banks, Rita Starpattern, Carol Ivey, Peg Runnels, Olive Spitzmiller, Orena Dennis. photo by Millie Wilson |
The sisterhood of minds consisted of poets, authors, performers, artists, and women who just wanted to verbally tell their stories. We were encouraged to submit some of our work for a magazine, in which our works would be published. As a poet I submitted a number of poems, five of which were accepted. I smiled as I read the poems I submitted. I remember the sassy language that popped in my head as I wrote the poems, especially "pavlov's dog" and "you . . , who is not hipped at all". "pavlov's dog" was inspired by a discussion in a psychology class.
Virgin and whore are states of mind. Virgins and whores are incomplete women: women who need men for identity, women afraid to be whole, women who haven't come to terms with their sexuality.
a faint impression
A couple of days ago I was searching for a particular book in my small library when I pulled out PASSAGES after all these years. One author wrote about her fascination with laundry. She combined her life experience in poems and a historical essay. Another interesting piece caught my attention was the poem, Virgin Whore, written by Peg Runnels and Susan Shaw in photo below. The poem tells of the journey that all girls go through on their way to womanhood only to end up being called a "Bitch! followed by "Woman!"
VIRGIN WHORE
by Peg Runnels and Susan Shaw
I am the first
and the last
and the last
Iam the honored one
and the scorned one
and the scorned one
I am the whore
and the Holy One
I am the wife
and the virgin
I am the barren one
and many are her children
I am the silence
that is incomprehensible
I am the utterance
of My NAME
Text, Cnostic Gospel
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| photo by Delores Gunter sitting Peg Runnels and Susan Shaw |
I was raised to make some man a wonderful wife. Of course that meant being a virgin.
"MEN NEVER MARRY THE GIRLS THEY SLEEP WITH."
I was taught to know my place and to keep it clean.
I wanted to be like Mother and Grandma and like Aunt Cora who always wore a girdle, even in the summer.
"DON'T LAUGH SO LOUD. DON'T WIGGLE. DON'T GET DIRTY. AND FOR HEAVEN'S SAKES, KEEP YOUR KNEES TOGETHER."
I lived in terror of getting caught playing doctor with the boy next door. I knew about "bad girls."
"BOYS WILL BE BOYS. IT'S UP TO YOU TO SAY NO."
The worst thing about being about Being a Sweet Thing was the waiting. Always waiting. Waiting to be noticed. Waiting to be asked. I smile a lot. I would think, I'm not pretty enough. So I smiled more.
"YOUNG LADY, THAT SKIRT IS TOO SHORT. MARCH BACK IN THERE AND WIPE OFF THAT MASCARA."
I cleaned my body until I squeaked. I sprayed, I softened, I deodorized. I made my body desirable, so they would notice me. And they did. They always noticed the PARTS.
"LOOK AT THE TITS ON THAT ONE." "I"M A LEG MAN, MYSELF."
Tits, thighs, ass, boobs, jugs, jugs, knockers, cunt, bunny, beaver . . . is this the virgin?
"DON'T BE SO UPTIGHT; I'M NOT GOING TO HURT YOU." "IF YOU REALLY LOVED ME, YOU'D PROVE IT. COME ON. TRY IT; YOU'LL LIKE IT."
I married at eighteen. Marriage has its boundaries, too.
"DON'T STAND TO NEAR THE WASHER REPAIRMAN; HE MIGHT GET THE WRONG IDEA. PRETEND YOU DON'T SEE HIM EYEING YOUR BREASTS. IF A MAN STOPS BY WHEN YOUR HUSBAND ISN'T HOME, TALK THROUGH THE SCREEN.
Don't be too clever.
Don't dance too close.
Don't hold a man's gaze too long.
Don't go out late at night alone.
Don't challenge.
That's enough "don'ts." Isn't it about time to stop playing Virgina and Whore?
I want my own life, my own sexuality.
Even though we're not whole yet, I think we're getting closer. Don't you?
I suppose. Last week a man called me an Amazon, and I felt proud.
Really? last week a man called me salty.
Virgin!
Whore!
Lady!
Tramp!
Snow White!
Rose Red!
Spinster!
Madam!
Nice!
Good!
Protected!
Experienced!
Martyr!
Bitch!
WOMAN!
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poem by dorothy charles banks
you . . . who is not hipped at all
you try to impress me
with your hip
bullshit talk
while
at the same time
try to turn
me on
with your slick
tight pants
showing
of your manhood
I look at you
and smile to myself
when i go sister
and jump loud on you
you get embarrassed
and pretend
to blow
your nose
i laugh
as you stand
in front of me
your pretend
manhood
draining from you
African nose
your curse at me under
your scotch and water breath
as you reach for
your glass to leave
i'm glad you caught
the hint
(C)
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THE HISTORY OF LAUNDRY PASSAGE
by Frieda Werden
I must admit that I have always been fascinated with laundry. Some of my earliest memories involve laying a sheet in the middle of the living room floor, covering it with dirty clothes, and tying it into a bundle, to be picked up by the laundry service. Or, I remember my mother kneeling beside the bathtub doing the wash by hand at a time when we had no laundry service or washing machine. To me the laundry is intimately connected with poetry. One of my earliest memories of writing a poem is of myself at the dining room table of my parents' home. I was in high school, and literature was a means of transcending fate. The poem I was writing went in part:
The wild wind hurls into the street
Old overalls with patched-up seats;
But undershirt and pantaloon
Hanging docilely from noon to moon
Til plucked in haste by weary wives
With hair contrived to make it curl.
No matter how much each one strives,
This is the essence of their lives:
The moon and sun on wash unfurled
Upon the clothesline of the world.
With the magic of poem making, the control of rhythm, assonance, rhyme and other devices. I hoped to exorcise the demonic vision of an adulthood I would shorty enter.
In looking at women's history, I am struck by the fact that women's accomplishments have taken place against the background of the daily tasks that no one did unless it was the women. The laundry is exemplary. Heroic deeds have been formulated around it: the first recorded strike by women laborers in Texas was a laundresses' strike in 1873.
It was generally Black women who did the laundry in the early days of what is now Texas--often free women of color who had come to the area because Mexico's anti-slavery constitution made it possible for them to exist here. When the Republic was formed and the new laws of the Republic--founded as much as anything to permit slavery--made free women of color a nonexistent class, each woman had to petition the legislature for special dispensation to remain the state. In the Texas Archives, there are a number of these petitions signed by upstanding male citizens of Galveston, the husbands, perhaps, of their clients. on behalf of well-known laundresses such as Zilpha and Zelia Husk.
Around the Mexican border, Mexican and Mexican American women also got into the laundry business. An oral history of an elderly El Paso woman reports that her sister once worked in the El Paso Laundry, a giant commercial laundry on the edge of Chihuahita--the poorest Mexican neighborhood in the city, located on a bend of the Rio Grande. There women slaved in the heat without fans through the hot summers, washing, feeding the sheets into the mangle (known as "el mango" to the workers)--a machine that could mangle hands as well as sheets. After a long day, the women could come home exhausted, wringing with sweat.
After the ideas of the Mexican Revolution made their way north of the border, a 1911 laundry workers' strike in El Paso increased the wages of laundresses to $1.50 a day. White women in El Paso complained because maids would no longer do housework for less than the $1.50, they could make at the laundries; the strike had raised the wage floor of women in the city.
One of the best documented laundry stories, and the one I told in detail in the performance of my passage, is the story of the Belton Sanctificationists who started taking in washing in order to build a self-supporting women's religious and economic community.
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poem by dorothy charles banks
Pavlov's Pog
like one of Pavlov's
experimental dogs
your mouth waters
as your trembling
hands travel to
toy with the
diamond filled
pyramid lying
between my
right &
left thighs
I hear your breath
rushing from
you in short gasps
I hear you panting
in labored agony
when I ask if
you are one of
Pavlov's dogs
you hurriedly say
"Yes" and ask
"Who is he"?
I knock your hand &
face away
turning on my side
sliding out of bed
leaving you
panting alone
I was not raised to
make love to
Experimental Dogs
(C)
