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Author:
Heather
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Date Posted: 12:57:24 05/26/01 Sat
My Women's Studies course at Queen's University changed my life by opening my eyes to a world of awful injustice. The following is an *exerpt* from one of four papers I wrote for that class during the course of my freshman year. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend reading Cy-Thea Sand. Her eloquent truths made me cry.
Working Class Women: The Silence of Low Self-Esteem
By Heather Kloosterman
***It is easy to see how attitudes about race, class and gender work together to limit access and opportunity; although I am focusing solely on the poverty of women, poverty in all its forms is an ongoing epidemic and there is much outside the scope of this paper that must not be ignored.***
I am poor, and I am silenced.
As a daughter of post-war Dutch immigrants, I know how quickly dreams can turn to dust. My grandparents and parents struggled with the loss, upon entering Canada, of what few and precious benefits they had enjoyed in Holland. They were treated as though they had fled economic oppression, as though forced Canadian farm labour was something for which they should be grateful, even though they had previously enjoyed relative economic security and had come to Canada with propagandized dreams of freedom and greater opportunity. As non- English speaking pilgrims in a land so very different from home, their ambitions became limited and they spiralled into poverty and disillusion.
My own upbringing on a large but low-income dairy farm in Eastern Ontario was delightfully old-fashioned. My four siblings and I attended school and church in a small Dutch hamlet ten minutes east of our home, formerly called Farmersville; its name was ironically changed to Athens in an attempt, I suppose, to give a sense of merit to a weary rural village with a population of under a thousand.
The freedom I had associated with rural life became ironically constrictive because of our working-class lifestyle. I was reminded daily of our lack of money, our lack of opportunity, our lack of freedom. Trips to the grocery store were almost always transformed into an embarrassing parade of our low-income lifestyle. My mother pushed a shopping cart filled to the top with groceries payed for by the bank or a butchered cow, five happy but homely children trailing behind her. Old women would touch my mother's arm gently, saying, "Bless you," with a smile of sympathy and perhaps even of pity--for it was no secret that we were a working-class family, clunking through the store with bandaged knees and rubber boots. Worse still were those who gazed at us with a look of disbelief or of scorn, as if they were thinking, "If she had some self-control, she wouldn't be so poor." I sensed my mother's shame, and felt it acutely myself.
I spilt my share of hidden tears behind stall doors in school washrooms, hoping to silence the snickering voices and sighs of pity of teachers, of peers, of old women in the grocery store, that so shamed me and reminded me day after day of the poverty of my family. I could not avoid those voices; my own voice was perpetually lost within a tangled web of shame and self-loathing. These feelings followed me like a sinister spectre through high school and are with me today, intensified now because I am fenced in as the proverbial black sheep in a primarily elite university environment. I am not meant to be here. I am not meant to break free of my working-class background; I am denying my role as a working class girl in "battling a system designed for only a few escapees" (Sand, 15). I am a farmer, and I know that there is no greater feeling than working with and for the land that I adore. Yet there is a whole world that looks down upon me as "dirty," as a dumb, working-class hick with no hope for a future beyond the manure pit. There is a whole world that says, "Who do you think you are, getting all this education and trying to be one of [us]?" (Sand, 17). And so, without hope of recourse, my voice has been silenced by shame, self-hatred and ultimately, by poverty.
Cy-Thea Sand writes of the "dynamic link between 'self' and 'class'" (Sand, 87). The self- hatred that is commonly experienced by working-class women is the result of a voice silenced by shame and unworthiness. The self and societal devaluation of our lives is the result of oppressive social systems and above all, of the negative stereotypes and attitudes toward working-class women. Just as victims of abuse learn to blame themselves and not the abuser, so we learn to blame ourselves for our economic situations--even if, as in the cases of Cy-Thea Sand and myself, it is an "inherited" poverty--and are silenced by guilt. We are reminded of our working-class lifestyles every moment of every day, from the "subtle self-deprecation. . .of ill- fitting clothes" (Arnott, 18) to the stigmas associated with the working-class woman--particularly the single mother--in every social arena, including and especially the educational. Some have argued that this can be counterbalanced by instilling within school children a high sense of self-esteem. But when your shoes don't fit and you are expected to fail within an educational system that caters to the well-groomed children of upper-class families, the vicious cycle of poverty becomes one of self-loathing and misplaced identity as well.
Almost as damaging as the self-hatred we experience is the ideology of meritocracy, and the people who never seem to tire of telling us that our poverty is our own fault for having too many children or not enough education. Just as many people tend to deny their racism by blaming those who recognize their racist comments, attitudes, etc. for what they are, so do many middle-class people shift the blame that belongs to societal systems unto the innocent victims of poverty, particularly those on welfare. Society generally blames the poor for being poor with attitudes such as, "if they didn't have so many children..." or "if only they'd stayed in high school..." or even, "if only they would work harder..." While the title "working-class" suggests that our jobs are more physically strenuous than those of the other classes, there is a certain stigma associated with the poor that suggests otherwise. It is often assumed that we are too lazy to hold down a steady job, and that we are living off of the benefits of the government and the hard-working tax-payer. We are associated with dirtiness, stupidity and laziness, and are perceived to be cheating the middle class of its hard-earned benefits. We begin to feel guilty, believing that these stereotypes are in some ways true.
"I can't write about class without confronting my self-hatred. I am suffering from internalised oppression. I grew up poor in a society where poverty is "your own fault." I believe inside myself that I was (am) a bad person because I was (am) poor. I know better in my head. I have a perfectly rational analysis of oppressive societal structures. But in my guts I'm poor and bad, poor and ashamed, poor and guilty, poor and powerless, poor and silenced. And where shall I go to deal with my self hatred? A middle-class therapist at $60/hr perhaps?" (Hughes, 84).
Statistics have shown that a good education is the best way to avoid poverty, but "women need more of it to keep up with men" (Albelda and Tilly, 26). Low-income secondary school girls experience "indifferent instruction" which smothers academic achievement so thoroughly that even graduation becomes a nearly unattainable goal (Orenstein, 144). Perhaps Cy-Thea Sand says it best when she writes of the limitations of working-class women in the educational arena: " Women. . .were made to feel stupid. . .were expected to fail within an educational system which systematically limited our choices before we even began to read" (Sand, 88).
Robert Granfield wrote an article in which he addressed the results of a research conducted on working-class university law students. He speaks of the "sense of differentness and marginality" experienced by these students as a result of their family background and suggests that these things combined result in a "crisis in competency" and is worth quoting at length:
Incoming working-class students reported significantly higher levels of personal stress than did their counterparts with more elite backgrounds. Much of this anxiety came from fears of academic inadequacy. Despite generally excellent college grades and their success in gaining admission to a nationally ranked law school, these students often worried that they did not measure up to the school's high standards. . .this lack of confidence is a "hidden injury of class" (Granfield, 75).
Granfield concludes that because of low self-confidence and perpetual fear of failure, working class students learn that concealing or downplaying a working-class background by mimicking upper-class students is the only way to "get ahead" in the employment sector.
Randy Albelda and Chris Tilly write of the "demonization of the poor," especially welfare recipients (Albelda and Tilly, 96). From the use of welfare as a "political football" in conservative campaigns to the negative portrayals of the poor in the media ("The poor in this country [the United States] are the biggest piglets at the mother pig and her nipples," quipped Rush Limbaugh), "we have seen the 1960's War on Poverty evolve into a war on the poor" (Albelda and Tilly, 96). Single mothers, often branded "bad mothers," are particularly affected. It is often single motherhood that is blamed for the staggering number of Canadian poor (13.9%) when the reverse is true: poverty is the problem. Ridiculous myths about teen pregnancy and welfare recipients persist; it is generally held that teen motherhood is an epidemic, although research shows that it is on the decline, and that lowering welfare benefits will reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancy, which significant research has also debunked (Albelda and Tilly, 69). While struggling to survive, it seems preposterous that these women should have to defend themselves against such self-damaging stigmas.
Society has long distinguished between the deserving poor and the non-deserving poor. Typically, the non-deserving poor are single mothers on welfare; even so, this arbitrary discrimination affects us all. Sympathy for the poor is juxtaposed by resentment and disdain for "freeloaders," and hope for policy changes clashes with "cynicism about the willingness or ability of government to accomplish anything constructive" (Albelda and Tilly, 177). There is even a strong sense of ineffectiveness among feminists; the plight of Canada's working woman takes a distant backseat to issues of race and gender.* We are silenced.
I am silenced by the government every time its anti-poverty campaigns are withdrawn due to public criticism; by the public when it criticizes anti-poverty campaigns; in the classroom when the working-class poor are referred to as "they," as if a university student couldn't possibly have come from a home in which the broken couch rests on an old tractor tire and rinsed-out yogurt containers serve as drinking cups; by the church when it declares, "Blessed are the poor" while passing around the collection plate. My face is permanently flushed with apology for intruding, for existing, and I am ashamed of my lower-class presence invading the classroom, the coffee shop, the laundromat. I have been made to feel unworthy and incapable, sabotaging my own expensive and impossible dream of higher education. I have learned to elude compliment and qualify praise. I downplay my intelligence, my talents, my value as a scholar and as a woman in this world. I am bound by poverty and gagged by shame in a society in which I do not belong, or even exist.
So I will never forgive the system that takes so much, that gives hollow promises, that forces us to wait and pray and work so hard, hoping for a reward that is not forthcoming. I will never forgive the system that holds the lives of women and children in a vice-grip while giving billions to prospective Olympic athletes. I will never forgive the system that locks doors and makes listless slaves out of women once full of possibility. I will never forgive the system that transforms church-going dads into bitter alcoholics and forces mums to skip meals to keep their babies' bellies full. I will never, ever, for as long as I live, forgive the system that has stolen my confidence, my faith and my voice and given me nothing in return.
* This is not to suggest that issues of race and gender are not also vitally important; I am only pointing out that, as the three systems of oppression are connected and in some cases inseparable, to ignore class as a legitimate form of oppression is to invalidate the other two as well.
Works Cited
Albelda, Randy and Chris Tilly. Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women's Work, Women's Poverty. Boston: South End Press, 1997.
Arnott, Joanne. "in my dance class." WMNS100A and X: Introduction to Women's Studies. Kingston: CanCopy, 2001. 18.
Hughes, Nym. Why I Can't Write About Class. WMNS100A and X: Introduction to Women's Studies. Kingston: CanCopy, 2001. 83-84.
Sand, Cy-Thea. "A Question of Identity." WMNS100A and X: Introduction to Women's Studies. Kingston: CanCopy, 2001. 14-18.
Sand, Cy-Thea. "Editorials." (From "Fireweed") WMNS100A and X: Introduction to Women's Studies. Kingston: CanCopy, 2001. 86-87.
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