Scandalous Women
May. 19th, 2015 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moominmuppetWith all the talk about identity recently, somehow I missed one of the very central categories for me, although plenty of the characters I discussed fall into it in some way or another.
Scandalous Women. Oh, hell yes.
This is my sense of familial history, why I don't feel like a black sheep.
Great-Grandma was the first woman in DC with a driver's license, and an active suffragist.
One of my great-great-whatever-aunts was one of the first botanists to collect wildflowers in Yellowstone, and her collection used to be in the Smithsonian, from what I understand. She was apparently known for riding (in pants and astride) up into the Park at first thaw, and not coming back 'til autumn (she had an assistant who brought her flower presses down and got supplies, from how the family stories tell it).
Grandma hung with Georgia O'Keefe, ran from the FBI, and taught me how to deal with tear gas.
Mom has been cheerfully scandalizing small-town america as a minister's wife for 40 years.
And since scandalous queers and scandalous women gotta stick together, I'm counting Uncle Walt, too. Walt Whitman is a great-great-something-uncle, and although I can't currently find the old post about how my middle name being "Whitman" changed my life, it most certainly did.
I definitely, and proudly, define myself as a scandalous woman. Not a "use my feminine wiles to get my way" sort of scandalous (not my thing), but in all the ways autonomous women who don't play by the rules still to the day get tagged with that label. I'll take it.
Scandalous Women. Oh, hell yes.
This is my sense of familial history, why I don't feel like a black sheep.
Great-Grandma was the first woman in DC with a driver's license, and an active suffragist.
One of my great-great-whatever-aunts was one of the first botanists to collect wildflowers in Yellowstone, and her collection used to be in the Smithsonian, from what I understand. She was apparently known for riding (in pants and astride) up into the Park at first thaw, and not coming back 'til autumn (she had an assistant who brought her flower presses down and got supplies, from how the family stories tell it).
Grandma hung with Georgia O'Keefe, ran from the FBI, and taught me how to deal with tear gas.
Mom has been cheerfully scandalizing small-town america as a minister's wife for 40 years.
And since scandalous queers and scandalous women gotta stick together, I'm counting Uncle Walt, too. Walt Whitman is a great-great-something-uncle, and although I can't currently find the old post about how my middle name being "Whitman" changed my life, it most certainly did.
I definitely, and proudly, define myself as a scandalous woman. Not a "use my feminine wiles to get my way" sort of scandalous (not my thing), but in all the ways autonomous women who don't play by the rules still to the day get tagged with that label. I'll take it.
