Guest Blog by Carolyn Lee Arnold
What does it mean for women to be brave?
In her song, Brave, Sara Bareilles sings, “I wonder what would happen if you say what you wanna say. And let the words fall out. Honestly, I wanna see you be brave!”
Memoirists know what it means to be brave. To publish a memoir, we have to “let the words fall out” about our own lives and then stand behind them, embrace and sometimes defend them. We can be praised or attacked, not just for our writing, but for what we actually did in our lives. We must bravely face the judgement of others. For women, being brave often means going against the standard societal expectations for women and against those people, whether strangers or family, who are upholding those expectations.
In each of these recent memoirs or biographies, women challenged how they were expected to behave, and in some cases, took a lot of flack for it. They had to be brave.
In Anarchy in High Heels, Denise Larsen tells the tale of starting a feminist comedy theatre troupe from scratch in the 1970s and not only bravely challenging traditional resistance to women in comedy, but flying in the face of the feminist approved sense of humor at the time. Running on pure chutzpah, the scrappy, irreverent group of eight persevered for 13 years despite a lack of mainstream success, illuminating what women and feminists were up against.
In Butterfly Awakening: A Memoir of Transformation Through Grief, Meg Nocero writes about leaving a lucrative legal career to pursue one of speaking and inspiring women, even though she was still developing her own bravery to do that for others in the midst of grief about losing her mother. She invoked her mentors – Elizabeth Gilbert and Oprah – and literally willed herself onto the stage with them to get their support for her journey and show herself that she could do anything she tried. Her bravery was one of changing the expectations for herself, and stepping fully into her dream, even before she had realized it.
In Crash: How I Became a Reluctant Caregiver, Rachel Michelberg finds bravery she didn’t know she had after her husband was severely disabled in a plane crash. She was able to not just carry on, which she likened to Dorey’s “Just keep swimming” advice in Finding Nemo, but to make a brave but unpopular choice for her husband’s long-term care needs so that she and their children could live complete lives. Such decisions are never easy, and Michelberg had to bravely face the backlash to her decision from friends and foes with courage and resolve.
In the biography, Blooming in Winter: The Story of a Remarkable Twentieth-Century Woman, Pam Valois introduces us to Jacomena Maybeck, daughter in law of the famous architect. She attended UC Berkeley as one of few women in the 1920s, and then started a life of balancing the demands of being a wife and mother in a famous family that expected everyone to participate in the designing and inhabiting of their houses with her own need for a private life. Her ability to insist on living separately from her in-laws and even her husband as a young mother and devoting more time to her art as she grew older and ‘bloomed’ in old age, was a brave challenge to the status quo. As an early 20th century woman who defied the expectations for women in that era, Jacomena ended up with a rich and satisfying life.
In my memoir, Fifty First Dates after Fifty, I write not only about dating when I’m older—my dating journey was enjoyable and resulted in the perfect partner for me—but about being sexual while dating. In doing so, I had to be brave in several ways. First, it’s brave for older women to date at all—many societal messages discourage us from searching for the right partner. And still we date, because we want to be in a loving relationship with the right person. It’s also brave for women of any age, let alone women over fifty, to admit that we are sexual while we are dating. And many of us are, whether we talk about it or not. And finally, it is brave to write openly about dating and sexuality as an older woman—it challenges cultural stereotypes of the asexual older women, and invites direct criticism of not only the lifestyle, but the writing about it.
Being brave for me means standing behind my words that are now falling out into the world. It means leaning into what I’ve written and being proud to share it with the world, even if some people are not comfortable with it. I know that many women need to hear my words just like I needed to hear Sara Bareilles’s. Knowing that there are women like Sara who honestly want me to be brave, and that other women are brave, like the women mentioned here, makes me braver.
Carolyn Lee Arnold is a writer, hiker, relationship workshop assistant, and former educational researcher. She holds graduate degrees in women’s studies, statistics, and educational research and has studied creative nonfiction with many teachers. Fifty First Dates after Fifty is her first book. She is working on her second memoir, about her eighteen years identifying as a lesbian feminist in the 1970s and ’80s. Still a feminist, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner, one of her fifty dates. For more information, including dating resources, visit her at carolynleearnold.com.
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