At Our Core - Softcover

Martz, Sandra

3.85

13 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1576010074 ISBN 13: 9781576010075

Publisher: Papier-Mache Press, 2010

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Sandra Haldeman Martz

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From the Publisher:

Millions of women want and need to understand their own power. At Our Core is filled with stories, poems, and photographs by 62 contributors from around the nation whose breathtakingly honest and courageous voices articulate the awesome breadth and subtlety of what power means to women.

Readers will recognize their own lives on these pages. This important collection provides women the opportunity to validate, honor, and ultimately define what power means to them. The searing beauty of these intimately familiar stories will bring both tears and rejoicing.

Selected from over 4,000 submissions, At Our Core represents a diverse group of women writing about their intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual experiences with power. Acknowledging this wide spectrum of voices, Publishers Weekly says: "Martz has made an industry out of editing and publishing affirming anthologies geared toward baby-boomer feminists....At its strongest, Martz's collection will interest readers by virtue of its very eclecticism."

The preface includes an essay from feminist media critic and professor of communications at Adelphi University, Elayne Rapping, who describes how women have been depicted in the media. The writers and photographers in this collection challenge the stereotypes, and according to the Bay Guardian, "Their definitions of power are rich and diverse....It's a book that needs reading and re-reading, and that should prompt women of all ages to think and talk with one another."

From the Author:

Raised in rural Texas, I grew up surrounded by strong, dependable, solid women: my mother and grandmothers, other farm wives, teachers. In their lives, power was a silent adjective, known but never talked about. Power as a nounsomething that could be usedwas held by the men: bankers, preachers, school principals, fathers.

Like most of my peers, I looked not to the real people in my life for inspiration but to the images found on television and in movies, books, and magazines. Early on I wanted to be Heidi or Laura in Little House on the Prairie. By the age of twelve, perfection looked like Loretta Young, sweeping down a spiral staircase to greet a room full of loving children. As I entered my teen years, I dreamed of Marlon Brando carrying me away on the back of a Harley. By the time I reached my twenties, I was a single mother, one paycheck away from welfare, and identified more with Janis Joplin's "women is losers." When the 1970s came along, I traded Janis in for Helen Reddy and Gloria Steinem, Ms. magazine and "Maude." Thinking consciously about power for the first time (the term consciousness raising was not accidental), I considered access to education, job opportunities, money, the right to live without fear from abusive mates, and control over my own life.

Throughout the next twenty-five years, enormous change swept through society and individual lives. Newspapers dropped gender classification of jobs. Companies established open job posting systems. Women's leadership was acknowledged at work, in the community, in government. Sexual harassment in the work place was barred and sexual abuse at home was "outed" for the heinous crime it is. Women gained control over their own reproductive systems. Some even accomplished a more balanced division of responsibilities at home. And new media images appeared regularly to show women how powerful we could be.

Several years ago, however, my internal barometer, still fed by the media, began to pick up strange signals. Television sitcoms featured sexual liaisons at the office, illustrating how one party (usually the woman) could use their "power" in these situations to manipulate others. A popular book encouraged married women to give up their jobs and stay home since their incomes didn't significantly exceed the added expenses of child care. Treating others respectfully was transformed into "political correctness," and being PC assured one disdain from colleagues. Women's breasts, mother-in-laws, and blondes once again became fair game for comedians. On the hard news side, newspaper reporting on women's issues and female public figures began to decline, and a fifteen-year trend narrowing the gap between median earnings for men and women was reversed.

Such signs of the erosion of women's power inspired this project. I wanted to know what other women thought about power, how they defined it. Did they feel powerful now and how had that changed over time? Did they want more power in their lives and, if so, what would they be willing to do to get it? How would they use that power?

After two years of readingmore than 4,000 submissions including philosophical observations in the accompanying cover letters and feedback from my network of women friends and colleaguesI don't have definitive answers but I am more intrigued than ever with the questions.

From these sources, I learned that many women (far too many) do not feel powerful in their personal lives. Their solutions to the imbalance of power in their relationships often involve ending the relationship and sometimes include violence, real or imagined, especially in reaction to physical abuse. The sheer volume of writing about abusive male/female relationships was almost overwhelming. A few women spoke of power struggles with other women, but they were much more likely to cite the support they received from other women.

Women often tied power to learning and education. Several wrote of power achieved through overcoming difficult circumstances; many saw themselves on the brink of becoming more powerful and acknowledged the freedom of closing "old doors" in order to open up new ones of opportunity. They saw self-reliance as a path to increased power, but they also celebrated the power of women in community. Many envisioned using their power to do more for others. Intuition, the ability to nurture and heal, and creativity were often cited as examples of women's power. Most women expected to grow more powerful with age, but spiritual power seemed important to women in all age groups. A surprising number of the writers used fantasy and magical realism to depict women in more powerful positions.

Few women addressed public or political power: economic power, control over systems and resources, power over others, or organized resistance to abusive power systems. Women more often talked about ways to work around the system rather than using direct confrontation. Those who did focus on political power tended to be activists, veterans of the '70s feminist movement, or both.

Narrowing the material down to a book-length collection was, as always, very difficult. In the selections, women's power is sometimes an overt player, as in Sharon Nelson's look at women writers in "Silencing"; sometimes it is more subtle as in Mary Kelly's "The Long Night" where the power of friendship transcends even death. Sexuality is explored as both a source of power as in Janice Eidus's "Gypsy Lore," and a source of potential abuse as in May-lee Chai's "The Dancing Girl's Story." There's laughter (feminists do have a sense of humor) in Joan Zimmerman's look at "Eve," resolution of anger in "The Glass Smashing Wall" by Pam Burris (sorry readers, it's a fictional wall that should exist somewhere but doesn't yet), and spiritual celebration in Judy Lightwater's "winter solstice." Fifty-six stories and poems and fifteen photographs paint a compelling tale, rich and complex with images that will stay with you for a long time.

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