Berenice Fisher and Linda Nathan Marks

These two ladies kindly allowed us to infiltrate their New York apartment to devour Indian food and discuss life successes. Enamoured with their lifestyle, a strong loving lesbian couple devoted to the amazing projects of their careers, the entire class listened intently to their questions and advice given to us in a wise and intellectual manner.

Linda Nathan Marks is the founder of a project called The Crystal Quilt that begun in 1981 based within the women’s movement. She was looking to begin a project that was reflective of the title she chose; “crystal for clarity, light, healing, for multifaceted truth; quilt for warmth, connections between women, for making a beautiful whole out of the pieces of our lives.” (Dear Women newsletter, Spring 1997) The Crystal quilt became a non-profit organization that brought women together in a supportive environment fighting racism, homophobia, ageism and more, allowing the women of the group to grow stronger in their activist pursuits for women’s rights.

Berenice Fisher is a retired professor of Philosophy from New York University and is a published scholar on the experiences of women and other minorities in a phallocentric society. She has worked with the Crystal Quilt and has pursued similar themes in her own way through academics.

Talking to the ladies left me in a state of awe. Though I have grandparents, I have never received advice from any of them and listening to the wise words of two mid seventies feminist lesbians, I felt the generational connection that is often missing in my academic studies. I often have discussions with emerging feminists around my age and mid career feminists who often have a different focus in their interactions with me, but I am missing the wisdom of the older generation. These ladies had decided to focus on the ideas of success and what success means to us, giving us a perspective that we may never have seen before. There is something interesting about talking to someone who has lived a large percentage of their life already; as a young lady it is hard to not perceive life as a hopeful blank slate with many possibilities. These two ladies have already lived their possibilities and were very successful at it in terms of their effect on others.

In gendered exploration of the space, there was a definite feminist theme to our discussions, James being the only man in the room and many of our projects being based in Women’s Studies. The atmosphere was comfortable and feminist; no doubt a reflection of their years of work with The Crystal Quilt working with groups of women like us, which left me inspired and hopeful for my future. Though it was feminine, it didn’t feel exclusive of masculinity, only of patriarchy.

As for the sexuality of the space, the opportunity to enter their home created a wonderful outlook on lesbian life; they have been together for over 25 years and I have never met a long term couple. Seeing that homosexuality that was based in true love (you could see it in their eyes) in the same way I have been exposed to in long term heterosexual couples gave me a different view on lesbian lives. Its not that I didn’t think it possible, it just seemed like a fairy tale because I had not encountered it before.

Linda and Berenice, Thank You.

The Brooklyn Bridge

Learning about the Brooklyn Bridge, We were given information about how the bridge was made and the involvement of the engineers in its construction. The first engineer was male, and upon his death his son continued the project, but under a lot of stress he relinquished a lot of his duties to his wife, Emily Warren Roebling. She slowly took over, first being a messenger of instruction from her husband who refused to leave the house, allowing her opinions to be respected by the crew until she began to take over the supervision of the construction herself.

The story of Emily Roebling is an early story of feminist power, a strong and decisive woman in the late 1800’s, creating one of the oldest and largest bridges still standing today. Her role in the bridge is recognized to a small degree; while she is recognized in some museums and on Wikipedia, the bridge itself holds a plaque made much after the bridges opening in 1883 that omits Emily’s name from the list of engineers which include her husband, Washington Roebling and his father John A. Roebling. In fact, she is not mentioned at all, reflecting the patriarchal ghosting of essential women existing before the suffrage. The work force of the day also made the construction team male, but the bridge has become genderless in its interaction with the public on a daily basis. It seems strange that a bridge that otherwise seems genderless is so phallocentric in its construction, from its engineers to its workers that now allows thousands of people to cross daily.

I am appalled by the fact that Emily has been left out of the plaque that tells the public of the construction of the bridge. Her contribution has been erased from the awareness of the people crossing the bridge stopping to read the history of the magnificent monument. These small details are the things that define patriarchal dominance, allowing the men to be remembered but the women to be forgotten. This trend is mimicked in art history textbooks, the men being remembered and recorded, while the women disappear in the shadows of the men of their time.

Arrival

I arrived after a long and dragged out flight, hours late and exhausted but ready to start looking at the gendered spaces of the city.

I took notice of the flight and airplanes and the gendering I saw within. Mostly the airports are gender neutral, but on my second flight I noticed a slight masculine dominance, not because of the flight or atmosphere, but because I noticed the male passengers assuming the ‘male’ pose – legs spread wide and both arms using the arm rests while the female passengers sat cross legged attempting to take up less space in the crowded airplane space.

So far I haven’t seen any of New York except from a window, and the space we are in is a university space, I find it similar to University of Saskatchewan in the way that it is gender neutral. The bare rooms are canvases for gender and as you see, our rooms have become feminized. There are 9 women on this trip and one male, so our gendered presence will lean towards feminine. Tomorrow we head out to do a walk with Ellen Moffat and will get to see some of the public space of New York including the park that looks over Manhattan. I cannot wait to be exploring the usual tourist locations with an eye for the constructed gender within them.