Sarah Smith Blog 5: Scandalous Women

It's a familiar refrain that most of our history has been written by men. Speaking as a woman, it is a shame. Speaking as a realist, it's just the way things were. Women were rarely the major players in history, so it makes sense that they don't play into history to the extent that men do. For Anderson, women take a backseat role in the formation of a nation. Anderson mentions the genealogy of Jesus according to Matthew, and it's important to note that women are in fact included in this genealogy: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Uriah's wife (Bathsheba), and Mary. It is primarily men, but five women are a part of this history. They are often forgotten in the midst of all of the men--and that is true in history across the board. The women who do make it into the genealogy of Jesus are notable: Tamar disguised herself as a prostitute and tricked her father-in-law into having sex with her after her husband died, Rahab was a prostitute, Ruth was a widow whose story is shrouded in mystery and sexual euphemism, Bathsheba was an adulteress, and Mary claimed to be a virgin despite giving birth to a son. They made history because their stories were exceptional--or, a better word: scandalous.

For all people, but particularly for women, scandal sells. Women make history because they broke out of gender norms, or norms of proper decorum. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (and later Marilyn Monroe and Eleanor Roosevelt) said, "Well-behaved women seldom make history." As I considered the role of women in the films we've watched, I saw truth in this. Several of my classmates have already mentioned the woman with the egg in Colored Museum as well as Diouanna in Black Girl. In both cases, there was scandal. The girl with the egg professes to her mother shutting her up in a dark room for her pregnancy, hiding some dark secret. Diouanna goes to France in hope of luxury and glamour, and ends up slitting her own throat in the bathtub as a final attempt to let the subaltern speak. These women stand out because they are scandalous, they oppose the norm. They are not "well-behaved" as the saying goes.

I wanted to focus, too, on women who did not break out of norms. For me, the woman who I was most moved by, challenged by, and who most penetrated my thoughts was in fact Diouanna's mistress. She is by no means the subaltern speaking, but there was something about her that struck me. Perhaps it was the fact that she is oppressed in being the oppressor: to maintain her social standing she oppresses Diouanna. She is not happy, though. Her dissatisfaction is very different from Diouanna's, and I think it is because, at its heart, her dissatisfaction is self-imposed. Diounna needs to work. She needs a job. We know from the many maids waiting on the corner that jobs were hard to come by. For Diouanna, work meant necessary oppression. Her only other option was the uncertainty of hoping for a better job and facing unemployment. Diouanna's mistress, on the other hand, does not have to be the oppressor. Her livelihood does not depend on oppressing Diouanna. She doesn't have to oppress Diouanna. The mistress is in effect choosing to be oppressed by being Diouanna's oppressor. What a mess. It makes me very sad for the mistress, who is so blinded by her vision of what success ought to look like that she chooses misery over joy, and in the process makes others miserable. In the end, though, history paints her as the oppressor. Her own oppression is nothing compared to that of Diouanna, and history, as always, favors the scandal: Diouanna's scandal is the heart of the story, and the woman is painted as little more than selfish and cold. If Diouanna had not killed herself, but returned to Dakar, who would I feel worse for? That is the question I'm left with. The woman has created her own state of misery, and I don't envy that.

In the creation of a nation, women have typically played a small role. In the films we have watched, it is the women tied to scandal whose stories are printed most firmly in our memories. I think of Vincent Chin's mother, and the sadness I felt as I watched her sob at her son's grave. Perhaps the general role of women in the creation of nation has been to stir men's hearts to action: the death of Diouanna calls the master of the house to recognize his failings; Vincent Chin's mother pulls on the heartstrings of racial activists; the flight attendant in Colored Museum gave me the chills as she walked through African American history. It will be interesting to watch and see whether this role shifts as women continue to strive toward a world status equivalent to that of men.