Protofeminism

It’s my blog and I post what I want to…

Sixties pop idol, Lesley Gore, was considered a ‘protofeminist’. Singer, songwriter, actor, and activist, Wikipedia noted in addition that her NYT obituary described her as a “teenage and feminist anthemist”. “Feminist”. I’m guessing “Anthemist” to mean, in this context, someone whose songs capture the heart, soul, and beat of a certain demographic of the national population.

Lesley Gore 1967

When I learned of Gore’s death, it was one of those occasions when I felt that I had been personally touched. Nothing profound, mostly the result of having been contemporaries, and a growing sensitivity to aging and standing considerably closer to death than birth. We shared a particular social, political, and cultural climate that pervaded the nation. We breathed the same ether contemporaneously.

Upon her death I learned that we had a few things in common: We were born the same year; we graduated high school and college in the same years (admittedly not profound, since age predetermines, barring hiccups, the chronological markers of our formal education). Less likely to occur is that we both attended prestigious colleges. Oh, Gore was also a lesbian. Similarities stop there. Gore graduated from Sarah Lawrence, a private (former women’s) liberal arts college where she was likely among classmates of the same economic and social provenance. I graduated from U.C. Berkeley where I was one of more than twenty-six thousand coed undergraduates and three handfuls of African Americans.

Although I don’t exactly look heavenward wondering about the whereabouts of her soul as I did with my brother, my parents, and dear departed friends, my life has not often been ornamented with such moments of having bonded with someone whom I’ve never actually met. I recall feeling a greater personal loss when Carl Sagan transitioned. I was and remain enamored of science, and Sagan’s ability to transfer the inexplicable wonder of it all bought him a place in my heart in perpetuity. I’m certain I will feel a greater loss when the inimitable, incomparable Leontyne Price departs this realm. My one true idol, the sublime beauty and mastery of her vocal aesthetic can awaken one’s entire humanity to the magnificence of existence. Science and art often serve the same purpose of humbling us before that which is far greater than ourselves.

Had Gore and I grown up together, I don’t believe we would have ever bonded.  I went to school with west coast cookie-cutter versions of Gore. They and I lived in overlapping parallel universes. Some encounters with them left keloids of sore memories, emotional baggage with all sorts of potential, depending on one’s nature. So our lives were necessarily worlds apart from birth and were accordingly, should anyone have found it necessary to “go there”, conferred disparate worth or value.

Gore was from a Jewish family with money. I’m from a black working class family, two divergent branches of a nation’s pedigree. I didn’t know anything about her when I was a junior in high school. Yet the drudgery of everyday life that was my mid-teens transformed into a world of daydreaming whenever her popular hit tune, “It’s My Party and I cry if I want to” was broadcast. It was upbeat, yet it told a heartbreaking story, the stuff of teenage angst. I was beamed into her world of make-believe.

Recognized as a voice for the feminist cause, Gore was eventually labeled a protofeminist.  It appears this was in large measure due to her iconic popular song of 1964, “You Don’t Own Me”. Feminism at its lowest common denominator is a woman claiming her autonomy, her agency, her right to self-determine. I was a young woman in the late sixties, early seventies, when the Gloria Steinems of the era blew up larger than life with an in-your-face progressive brand of feminism that called for sweeping reforms to the status of women, rendering the Phyllis Schlaflys hot and bothered. I could not whole-heartedly be swept along by this “second wave” of feminism—or Women’s Liberation. I was anchored by the bonds of racism to a place that did not allow me to fully indulge in the flow of that particular movement.

Although Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” became the anthem of the feminist movement in nineteen-seventy-two, Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” preceded it by at least eight years, gaining new meaning retroactively in the dust that would condense into the feminist movement of the seventies. A movement that itself was an explosion born in the froth and wake of other social forces. It fed off and followed on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Flower Power movement against the Vietnam war, all of which served as ‘movement-making matter’. Freedom was the intoxicant of the day.

The www.thefreedictionary.com (and en.wikipedia.org) cites protofeminist as

…a term used to define women in a philosophical tradition that anticipated modern feminist concepts, yet lived in a time when the term ‘feminist’ was unknown, that is, prior o the 20^th century. The precise use of the term is disputed, 18^th century feminism and 19^th century feminism being also subsumed under ‘feminism’ proper”.

It goes on to say that

…the utility of the term protofeminist is rejected by some modern scholars as some do postfeminist.

I consulted various other online dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Not wanting to rely solely on online resources, I dusted off my 1978 edition of the New College Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (which I likely purchased in 1978). I found this definition of feminism:

1. A doctrine that advocates or demands for women the same rights granted men, as in political or economic status. 2. The movement in support of such a doctrine.

What I didn’t find was a definition of protofeminism which would have been inserted between “Proto-Eastern-Algonquin” and “Proto-Germanic.

‘Protofeminism’ appears to function like the term ‘prequel’. It represents something preceding something else that had already been established in relation to itself at the time of its acknowledgment.

“You don’t own me” was eclipsed only by the Beatles’ hit, “I want to hold her hand” which was number one on the charts followed by her wildly popular hit as number two.

R.I.P. Lesley Gore