Between Compassion and Ferocity: Imagining Another Way

Guest blogger, Ellen Meeropol

Coming of age in the 1960’s, I believed that people of courage and vision could do anything. We could end a war of aggression in Southeast Asia, tackle corporate greed and government corruption, heal our country’s shameful legacy of racism and class prejudice, and transform the ways that girls and women were kept from realizing full potential. I believed that women would have equal roles in all of these struggles, and could do this work while loving whomever we chose, building families and sharing the raising of our children.

Oh, I wasn’t totally naïve; I knew that this all would take some years to accomplish. But I figured that the last item in that list—the one about men and women’s equality in work and in raising our children—was so obvious that it would be quickly put into practice.

By the 1970’s, after what felt like a lifetime of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and feminist rabble-rousing, I had learned that despite feminism being self-evident, unambiguous, and potentially benefiting everyone involved, it wasn’t so easy to change patterns. The Powers-That-Be persisted in their message that women could not be both nurturing and successful in the professions or business (read: ball-busters challenging male dominance). “They” preferred that we raise our children and consume their goods, joining the work force only when it would benefit their profit margin. But within my beloved Movement, mothers were sometimes viewed with a different sort of distrust. Why, my comrades wondered, would anyone choose to have babies when we have a revolution to make? I’ll never forget the look of contempt on the face of the woman behind the food table at the socialist-feminist conference in Yellow Springs when I explained that my pregnancy required that I drink milk, in defiance of the milk-for-coffee-only rule at meals.

In 1976, after my second daughter was born, I started thinking about putting my experience into words. I wanted to give voice to our struggles about sharing childcare equally with my husband Robby, about the isolation from my sisters in the movement, about the “ambivalences and tortures and exhilarations of being a feminist and a mother and of trying to fit both of those beings into the rest of my life.” When I read The Mother Knot, Jane Lazarre’s exploration of feminist mothering, I realized that she had written my book. Instead, I wrote a review for Dave Dellinger’s now-defunct magazine Sevendays. “Jane Lazarre,” I said, “has taken the raw material of everyday detail, of specific lives, mundane struggle and bitter arguments and said, yes, this is really important.”

My daughters are grown now but I have a three-year-old granddaughter, so our unfinished business to eliminate barriers to girls’ full lives is every bit as critical to me. And I still hope that eventually people of courage and vision around the world will end wars of aggression, corporate greed, race and class divisions, and yes, patriarchy. Meshing feminism (women accomplishing the things that are important to us as citizens of our world) with raising the next generation (whether by birth, adoption or fostering, or as teachers) continues to be one of the most important jobs I know.

In my own writing, which has turned to fiction, I am often struck by the contradiction between our selves and activist selves, between compassion and ferocity. But doesn’t a lot of our most thoughtful writing come from precisely those difficult places—the contradictions and ambivalences, the tortures and exhilarations? We write to figure it out and to imagine another way. We tell stories to bear witness to our world, to build bridges across chasms, to heal the ruptures and failures, to give voice to our history and yearnings.

Ellen Meeropol is a writer, reader, mother and grandmother. A literary late bloomer, she took early retirement from her pediatric nurse practitioner career in 2006 to work in an independent bookstore and write fiction. She holds an MFA from the Stonecoast creative writing program at the University of Southern Maine; her short stories and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Bridges, Rumpus, Portland Magazine, Off Our Backs, Women’s Times, Dana Sent Me, Pedestal and others. Her debut novel, House Arrest, was published in 2011. Drawing material from her twin passions of medicine and social justice activism, Ellen’s fiction explores characters at the intersection of political turmoil, ethical dilemmas, and family life. She lives with her husband and cats in Western Massachusetts, in the shadow of Mt. Tom.

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