Among the words I dislike, schoolmarm has got to be near the top of the list. The word reeks of insult. It is physically pejorative, conjuring up the image of a stupid, prissy, badly dressed, plain-faced martinet; it belittles both a vocation and a gender.
Of course, in the larger picture, schoolmarm is no worse than, say, fishwife, because, God knows, no one admires a woman who rolls up her sleeves, raises her voice, and carries heavy loads. Just as bad is the dreadful poetess, with her fluffy hair and weak mind and sentimental palaver.
By way of these three words, I could sketch a dreadful portrait of my life. It's a good thing that my pencil has an excellent eraser.
8 comments:
There is the rather spunky "schoolmarm" in Butch Cassidy and one of my songwriter friends has a rather charming song about a "Fish lady". But I totally agree about the word poetess; horrid word.
Whatever we do best also exposes us to ridicule, dear Dawn. How easy it is to mock a poet for being foolish, or an athlete for being just a jock, or even worse a jockess -- or a gifted politician for being just a florid mouth, a mother for wrecking her own boys, or a lover for making his girl a goddess — and even the girl is very likely to overthrow the lover one day and tell the world he loved her much too much and wouldn't let her grow.
You can't do anything really well without being vulnerable as well, and that means also suffering the envy of those who would be just like you but would never dare to try.
And of course all those criticisms are valid too, on another level, and we have to bow our heads and cry.
Christopher
Christopher
Never fond of any of those words, and I would add spinster, too. Any words that tend to be reductive and dismissive are, in my mind, destructive and harmful, just as metonymic "body parts" words that are used as insults are.
While we are on this (ranting) I hate forms that ask for "race" and I tend to write HUMAN in the blank now. Ethnicity is better; "race" is also incredibly patronizing, and, quite often, harmful in its intent.
Ida called me a "schoolmarm" just the other day. I asked why she would insult me by comparing me to a woman.
You read my mind!
But there's all sorts of reverse stereotyping going on here too, isn't there? As if we're only perfect if we're indefinable, like bar-codes, or angels?
I've had a superb education all the way, yet the best teacher I ever had, the one who gave me the most and, I suspect, sealed my fate in deciding to become a teacher myself, was my very first one — and how the name lights up my mind, “Miss Stanley!”
Her full name was Nellie Nutting Stanley, if you don’t think I know, and she was from Marblehead, Massachusetts — I didn't know where that was living as I did in New Jersey, but it filled me with pride to have a teacher from that far away, and then later when I learned about whaling? Can you imagine?
Short, plain and dumpy, Miss Stanley’s hair was tied back in such a fierce little bun it popped her eyes out behind her glasses, which she never took off as I remember. She stood up very straight before me with her chest pumped out and demanded perfect cleanliness, perfect spelling and perfect penmanship, and in between recited Whittier and Longfellow as if from the pulpit. Indeed, she gave me a taste for being more than myself from which I’ve never recovered.
And what a gift!
So what's wrong with being an Inuit man, let's say, or a Hispanic woman -- and boy I'd love to be either one of those, but even more so a Philippina, I'd be so proud. Why, I could do anything if I were a Philippina, whereas as a white protestant male I have so many things I can't do or, to be honest, wouldn't dare!
God save us from the p.c. factory that produces just one product and, you fierce women, please don’t take Miss Stanley away!
Christopher
Beginning My Studies
by Walt Whitman
Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
It's not just nostalgia by any means, Bill. Miss Stanley taught me to be afraid and at the same time not to be afraid of anything, including her. She taught me also how to be angry and selfless at the same time -- sometimes called "pedagogical anger," it’s an alchemical trick all great teachers know. But above all she taught me to respect myself up to here, and that included the permission to be too big for my own boots too.
Dawn feels I write poetry without knowing enough about craft. Miss Stanley taught me not just to write poetry anytime but to sail out to sea in a little boat with all my children without any training in navigation, and I did, for 3 years.
And then I published my first poem at 52 in The Kenyon Review, and here I am at 74 still really serious about getting my first book published.
I shall dedicate it to Miss Stanley, and not if but when I do!
C.
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