As She Walks On By

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As I watched one of my best friends from college open the 26 gifts she received at her kitchen bridal shower, I also watched the sun burn a hole into the sky, smelled the shoulder of a deer being smoked by the neighbors and felt my stomach tense each time the wrapping paper of a new gift was torn in two. What a waste—of perfectly good paper and of a smart young woman. My friend was the editor of the campus newspaper back when we were in college and sharing a house. She landed a high-paying job in finance after college and is now giving it all away: her career, her financial independence, her apartment, her friends and her last name. In exchange, she got cafeteria-grade baking sheets, matching mixing bowls, a lemon zester and a muffin tin.

At first, I was envious. As a maid to the bride, I was the runner of gifts, bringing them to her and then taking them away once they were squealed at with delight and photographed. I catalogued my thoughts as they ebbed and flowed with reaction. “Hmm, I’d like to get a new food processor; it would be nice if I had matching plates and a half gallon of Mediterranean Sea salt. Is that really what I want? Wait a minute, I can buy my own damn hand mixer, but would that really make me happy?”

So there we were, a room full of college-educated women on a Saturday afternoon sharing recipes such as “Better-Than-Sex Cake” and tips on how to iron the cloth coasters and keep them white. Emma Goldman, in her essay on love and marriage, talks about how woman’s role becomes useless, both individually and socially, when she becomes married. Sitting in a circle, we could have been discussing the hardships of marriage instead of covering them up with pewter serving platters and a salad spinner. Or we could have talked about the worrisome increase in breast cancer, how to best support our local economy or organize a group to petition for seatbelts on public school buses.

Goldman, a feminist and anarchist from the early 1900s, said, “The woman considers her position as worker transitory, to be thrown aside for the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely harder to organize women than men. She learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task.”