Excerpted from contributions to They Call Us Bossy
I’m Speaking: A Forward
By Kailah Peters and Meg Harris
“The right to work for women has always been an uphill battle. Aside from raising children and domestic responsibilities, which should be considered work itself, women had to fight for a paycheck and we’re still fighting for the equality of that paycheck. Interestingly progress on this front came in times of great suffering.”
During the Civil War, women were eventually accepted into the workforce as combat nurses – some even cut their hair, went full Mulan, and fought themselves. WWI and WWII also saw significant increases in the female workforce. These stages were less progressive than they were given reluctantly out of necessity. Women in the workforce during WWII were marketed to the public as a temporary solution with the expectation that women would return to the home come peacetime. It’s non permanence was the best way to keep it socially acceptable. But there was one thing society didn’t count on… we liked it.
Once entering the workforce and letting the taste of purpose marinate on our tongue, we couldn’t let it go. As much as the 1950s are mocked as the phase of housewives and female domestication, that decade saw a dramatic increase in working women, with heavy restrictions of course.
Along with so much else, we can all thank Gloria Stienum and Ruth Bader Ginsberg for raising our glass ceiling a little higher, cutting through a lot of that red tape. With every passing decade we see a steady increase of female college graduates and the “working woman” as a norm. We’re still working on the stigma, but this is progress.
The problem with this historical picture, as with so many of our context freeze frames, is it does not include women of color. All of the above, is, for the most part, the history of white women in the workforce.
For multiple reasons, be it pay discrimination against men of color, lack of resources, limited government assistance, or societal pressure, minority families have not had the luxury of living off of a single income and they were punished for it. A lot of beauty standards fetishized a women’s small frame and delicate features. The marks of domestication were made synonymous with beauty excluding those that needed to work manual labor jobs. As much as we all love Michelle Obama’s arms now, they would have once been considered unfeminine.
Women of color had to work long before white women started pounding the pavement. In fact, minority women have always had a higher workforce participation rate while simultaneously earning significantly less pay.
Historically, women of color have been employed in low-paying domestic jobs. The irony is that while dominant society devalued Bipoc women as mothers to their own children, they only employed them in the low-wage women’s jobs that involve cooking, cleaning, and caring for white families. You can just smell the hypocrisy.
As the years progressed, women of color have branched out from these types of jobs, but still earn less than their white or male counterparts.
Today, these women are more likely to be employed in low paying ‘essential’ jobs than white women, putting them at a greater risk of encountering Covid-19. This isn’t a coincidence and certainly not anyone’s preference, so why is there such a racial disparity among jobs? Why are more minority women working essential jobs? (Hint: check our education system and hiring practices).
Okay, fine! You wore me down, I’ll just tell you. Due to segregation and lingering effects of systemic racism, women of color have lacked the educational resources needed to progress to higher paying jobs.
Let me rephrase that from higher paying jobs to all around better jobs – because it’s not just about the paycheck. Women of color often lack the workplace benefits that have enriched the lives of others. From maternity leave to overtime pay or simple affordable health care, entering the workforce is about more than a monthly paycheck. It’s about establishing a lifestyle that enables happiness and well-being.
So, as you read this edition, we challenge you to think about how we can progress this feminist movement to include everyone. What must be done to better the lives of working trans women? Women of color? Differently abled women? Women who look like you and women who don’t?
The Poet (after Emerson, 1844)
By Audrey Spina
For all women live under the broken
thumb of violence, desperate
for the loud gash of expression.
Our truth. In love, in politics,
in the pain of our sweating
labor, our breath rips open our raw
secret like a womb. The woman is
only half herself: the other half, spliced
by her tongue, slicing the dawn
air like a serpent.
Doctor’s Office, Gowned and Gagged
By Cara Morgan
I was bossy before I could find my own adjectives. Just another girl: demanding, selfish, superficial. A copied image on a child’s face. So I learned to not be like other girls. Started washing my language in separate colors. What came out of my mouth was cleaner, softer: I think, sort of, kinda, you know what I mean? stain less than the truth.
Now, as I sit in front of this doctor, another doctor who looks at me with // I don’t believe you // eyes, I try to gather my bossy self, bring her home. I imagine her folded arms, pouty lip. I want to take this daydream girl and wear her as a mask, let her use my tongue. The doctor watches me, glances at my hands in their gloves. He says there’s no need for further testing. I can see it on his face: another woman, another imaginary problem.
He peels the daydream girl from my face, puts her in my mouth, and says swallow: here is your medicine. I know he hears me crying when he leaves the room. I waited months to be here. The hope I had for an answer screams sourly from my stomach. The dream girl rises in my throat and I swallow again — habit.
We Are Volcanoes
By Anne Fricke
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
I was told once that I ‘take up space’
as if I were an old leather sofa stashed
away in the corner stamped
with the age of time,
reluctant memories clinging to my
sun-ripened flesh as I wait to be
hauled out with the trash
I take up space, meaning
I talk too much
I often dominate conversations
I over-share
Yes, since I was a child in kindergarten and my
report cards scolded and labeled me as
one who “talks excessively”
I have known that I take up space
that the things I need and want to say
bubble over with erectification beyond my control
I have apologized, and self-chastised, and
finally, after 30 something years
I have learned to accept and appreciate
this part of myself
my stories are for anyone to hear
I believe it is through the telling of our stories
the sharing of our truths,
that we make connections,
come to know ourselves
and allow others to see us as we truly are so
they can decide if our mountains
are worth the climb
I will not apologize for taking up space—
I will claim it for every woman
who has ever been silenced,
for every mother who wanted to speak
the truth of her experience,
for every little girl who just needed
someone to hear her suffering—
for every woman who was ever told
her story is not important,
the details don’t matter,
her pain just her sensitivity,
her anguish a denial of her duty in the world,
her complaints an inability to appreciate what she has—
for every female who was taught history
and questioned its reality,
its factuality,
I claim the space for them.
With our history of violence,
in this culture of silence,
to be a woman who takes up space
is a fucking blessing
a god damned compliment
a reason to keep on talking
I am a woman who takes up space,
and I claim it proudly!
call it ego,
call it insecurity,
(it’s a bit of both)
call it what you will
but for too long women have given over
their space and their voice to others,
have emulated, as she was one called,
the ‘angel in the house’—
But, I see new mountains forming on the horizon,
we are angels no longer.
Call Us Bossy
By Natosha Locken
They call me Bossy. They call me Nasty. They call me Mean. I don’t give a fuck anymore. I wear each of these monikers. They are my badges of honor, bestowed upon me for being a difficult woman. For misbehaving. For being the very thing which threatens their fragile egos. I am bossy, nasty, mean, difficult, and I am more.
I am rage.
I am vengeance because justice has failed.
I am the righteous anger borne of a thousand tears shed by those who mourn their victims. The blood of the witches you couldn’t burn flows through my veins. My heart beats in time with my ancestors standing beside me.
They call us Lonely. They call us Weak.
They are desperate to ignore that we stand, bruised and bloody, together as one. Pain does not stop us. Loss does not stop us. We step forward, we carry those who cannot walk anymore. We are harbingers of change, as if we are the embodiments of the moon herself. They know they cannot fight us. They cannot stop the tide’s changing. They throw words which fall, useless at our feet. They cry and scream, they assure themselves that their god will save them from us.
But we know better. We are know the old gods and the new. We hear the songs sung by our great grandmothers, our grandmothers, our mothers, and our siblings. We raise our voices to join them.
They call us Bossy, their attempt to assassinate our leadership, our ability to organize. To march. To continue the work of those who came before us. And to ensure that the work continues at our lives’ ends.
They call us Nasty. They are afraid of who we truly are. They fear the true power found in every single one of us who does not think, feel, or act as they deem appropriate. They have chained us to their primitive ideals for too long, and they now find that they can no longer contain us. We are too much for them. We always have been. We always will be.
They call us Mean. When my sibling is attacked, I destroy their attacker. I bare my teeth and I rip into the tender flesh of their enemies without regard for safety. I am grizzly. I am ruthless. The idea of being “mean” is almost comedic; they have no concept of what we truly are. We are ferocious, unyielding, and our efforts will not fall. They wish we were mean. If we were mean we would be simple, petulant, easy to dismiss. We are complex, we are Boudicca avenging the lives of husband and her daughters, standing against Rome, a sole force against a seemingly unstoppable army.
They call us names because their weapons fail against us.
They see their end on the horizon.
We are their end incarnate.
“Go ahead,” We smile knowingly. “Call us ‘Bossy’.”
They Call Us is a literary magazine created by powerful womxn wanting to empower other womxn. Using media, art, and literature as a means to inspire, They Call Us wants to tell the everyday struggles of womxn from around the world. The purpose of art is to create change, so They Call Us works to unite womxn and artists to tell the stories of those that are normally silenced. Our goal is to ignite conversation and encourage womxn of all ages, race, sexuality, nationality, ability, and the like to share their stories. They Call Us wishes to diversify the messages we see online and change the dialogue to give credibility to all of us womxn who have felt helpless and lacking a credible voice. Feminist | They Call Us zine