Seventeen

It was hard not to cry while watching the Republic Convention. Behind the scenes Sarah Palin chose to conduct only private meetings with a handful of her closest advisors, including with the world’s most prominent anti-feminist, Phyllis Schafley. Among Schafley’s past quotes are “Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions,” and “Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women.”

The most agonizing television moments were shots of Bristol Palin in the VIP box, seventeen, pregnant, her name tattooed on her fiance’s finger and watching her mother describe how she will unravel what the women’s movement has woven, barracuda-style.

My mother was seventeen when she became pregnant. Nobody celebrated. On the day she told the school nurse my mother was escorted first to the principal’s office, next to her locker, and then taken by both of them to the edge of campus. She stood for a bit outside the school gate on Sixth Avenue in South Tucson, a broke and dusty township where the poor were forcibly relocated after the city decided it wanted to use downtown for a convention hall. My mother tried going home but my grandmother wouldn’t let her in, so she walked a few miles more, clutching only useless schoolbooks and a handbag, and moved in to my father’s house.

That was the end of the government’s obligation to educate my mother. I was her third teenage pregnancy. It wasn’t until I turned seventeen, in 1978, that the Congress finally passed a law that forbid the kind of pregnancy discrimination that allowed a South Tucson high school to discard my mother. It took years for that law to begin to take hold, and even today pregnant teens face monumental obstacles in getting an equal education.

Millions of other teen women were kicked out school due to pregnancy. Nobody officially tracked their numbers but it’s probable that by 1978 more than 60 million pregnant teens in the United States had been cast out or maneuvered out of the educational system.

I think they should get restitution. Money would be nice but even a national apology would be a good start.

All of them deserve it. We should apologize to all the women who were denied an education due to pregnancy and then stigmatized and marginalized, forced to struggle financially in low paying jobs for decades and now, in their retirement ages, work as cashiers at Cracker Barrel to stay afloat. In addition to restitution, I think that her high school ought to grant my mother an honorary degree. So should the rest of the schools who, arrogantly, bolstered by an all-male Supreme Court, not only kicked girls out of school but threw stigma and shame at their backsides like rotted wedding rice as they stepped off campus.

As for Bristol Palin, it is not her personally nor her sexual history that effects me. It is the image of Bristol Palin honored played in a splitscreen with my mothers indignities that kills me. Our entire national discourse about women and reproduction should not be only about sex education and abortion. Sometimes it has to be about dignity, education, and opportunity. Because the Palin/Schafley agenda is not only about hammering a woman’s right to choose, it is also the reinforcement of widely discarded stereotypes about women and society.

I can’t begin to assume what resolve seeped into my mother’s core during her walk through South Tucson on her last day of high school. What I do know is that she made sure to teach her kids about survival. Once she took her bundle of kids to the Y to teach us how to swim. She began by showing us how to bob across the pool, which means that you sink to the very bottom and then push up hard with your feet so that your head bobs above the water, where you quickly take a breath before sinking again. If you project forward and upward with every push you will eventually make it to the other side. Her instinct, before teaching us how to swim, was to teach us how not to drown.

The twin currents of survival and success are the story arc of the disenfranchised. You’ve got to be tough, which is why my Republican convention rage turning to tears was such a personal let-down. I hated when Pat Schroeder cried as she announced that she was dropping her bid for the Presidency in 1987. My preteen daughter holds back her tears until she’s safely in the shower, and I hate that instead she doesn’t just burst into tears in the kitchen. I hate that Palin and McCain brought me to this precipice as though crying on my couch would invite even the smallest white flag of defeat.

The nation is firmly on the side of real teen pregnancy prevention, however much noise the chastity proponents generate. But for those teens like Bristol Palin who have moved beyond the prevention debate, where are we, so many years after my mother stood in her shoes? The Republican party messaging cures the shame of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy by putting her engagement on display. Not one mention yet about her prospects as a pregnant student who maintains her right to a good education but instead audible heaves of relief that she will soon be not just a mom but a respectable,married mom. It is an admirable coup for this Republican convention to both make history by declaring that a woman is qualified to be President and to simultaneously reinforce the values of “virtuous” women.

Sarah and Bristol Palin both stand on the shoulders of my mother, whose generation waded through sex and pregnancy, work and family, ambition and stigma, all without a government that recognized their humanity. They were marched out of high schools everywhere and thrown into the streets. Their lonely walk to whoever would take them in wasn’t a march on Washington, but it was a movement nonetheless. These disenfranchised women did their part to dismantle social stigma by pushing on. Some of us have taken to the streets for women’s rights but we are blinded by ego if for one minute we fail to recognize that we are marching on well-treaded paths of resistance created by those who will never be recognized on a podium or in a VIP box. Sometimes you don’t have to unfurl a banner to blaze a trail, you simply need to have the ostentatious, stubborn resolve to survive.