Returning the Gaze: Dismantling Patriarchal Narratives of Women's Lives

Perhaps the most surprising fact about the recent Women's Marches is not that they have become an annual event, or that these marches sprung forth all over the globe from Washington, D.C. to Paradise Bay, Antarctica. No, if an alarm should be raised, it's due to the non-committal response of the patriarchy: a grunt from the woods.

Male liberal politicians have offered lip service but spent little political capital pushing comprehensive legislation to eliminate the problems that bedevil women's lives: domestic violence, insufficient health care, and unequal pay. Male conservative operators have predictably been dismissive or patronizing. Media coverage of the marches has consisted of male commentators talking while women are trapped in a small box at the corner of the screen, silenced.

My mother and I are close. She worked in health care for most of my childhood, which is why so much of my own creative work has featured hospitals, clinics, and convalescent spaces as settings. A woman with a genius for storytelling, I have little doubt that my ability to tie a subject to a verb flows directly from her. Yet, I never quite trusted her stories. The males of my house, my father, my older brother, and myself, would sometimes trade knowing looks when she spoke. To this day, she tells a story about how when she was seven, someone lit the dry cleaners next door on fire. I always call this story apocryphal because it came from the woman who warned me to be careful in my telephone conversations since the FBI was probably spying on us. And if you use the restroom in her apartment, be ready to wipe your hands on your pants: she banned hand towels in the nineties.

Of course, someone would verify that my mother's family had to find a new house due to a fire. Any modern microbiologist will tell you that even recently washed towels are a good way to catch MRSA. And, yes, the government is spying on all of us. Only it was the NSA who conducted mass collection of phone data and not a G-man in a black sedan as she might have imagined.

So many of my mother's strange theories have proven true I now understand I should never have just grunted to move along our interactions. I should have listened. After all, her name is Cassandra.

It's possible Janet Dewart Bell, author of Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, had the ignored daughter of King Priam in mind when she decided to collect interviews from the nine women featured in this book and present them in their own words.

"Very few people have interviewed me," Gloria Richardson says. Richardson, the fierce leader of the Cambridge, Maryland, Civil Rights Movement was almost ninety-three at the time of the interview and very conscious that her story had been co-opted by others with their own narratives. Richardson was controversial for rejecting non-violence. She believed in armed self-defense, a stance later groups, such as the Black Panthers, would adopt. Regarding modern-day commentators who play down her contentious stance, "now it looks like they're set. I think they deliberately sanitize stuff."

A theme of Lighting the Fires of Freedom is the distortion of the beliefs and minimization of the contributions of women. Even as late as a program commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, organizers sought to silence women. Myrlie Evers, widow of Medgar, was there. "I remembered the struggle that women had, and how hard they fought to be a part of that program...