While waiting for our movie to start at the theatre around the corner, I picked it up off a shelf at Mercer Street Books: The Kitchen Readings: Untold Stories of Hunter S. Thompson.
I’m reading it in order to learn more about my dad. Hunter lived in Aspen when my dad did and they were acquaintances if not friends.
However, I’m over half way through and haven’t seen my dad’s name pop up yet, so they were probably just the former. But one of the book’s authors, Bob Braudis, was at my dad’s funeral when news of Hunter’s suicide shook the snow off Buttermilk.1 They all ran (skied?) in the same circles, hard not to do in Aspen of the late 60s and early 70s when the town was smaller, tighter, humble, and more rebellious.
My dad’s name didn’t surface, but what did were indications of that era’s sexism. Women in the book are mostly referred to in regard to their looks and roles in supporting the men of Aspen or tolerating and mitigating their bad behavior.
“Deanna Gay rolled into Aspen in the sixties. A hot, sixteen-year old ski racer, she took one look around and instantly knew that she was home. Everyone called her DeDe. Back then in Aspen a lot of the streets were still dirt and there were few stoplights; there were no rules, all victimless “crimes” seemed legal, love was in the air, and no one’s dictionary contained the term statutory rape. In some ways, it was paradise.”
Paradise? For men, maybe. And this:
“An example of the very worst kind of guest one might bring by the kitchen would be litigious women. Hunter really hated it when someone invaded his space and then sued him.”
Litigious women. What a way to twist the narrative. Maybe Hunter shouldn’t have committed acts that “litigious women” might sue him over. If knowing your legal rights and standing up for them in court earns a woman the label litigious, count me in.2
Bob came to Aspen seeking the life of a ski bum, but the ski bum life is that of a single man.
All of this makes me curious about the state of female affairs in the late 60s and early 70s. What rights did women have back then? And more importantly, what rights did they lack?3 My mother was born on May 12, 1928, so in her 30s during this pivotal period know as Second-Wave Feminism.4
The woman is not needed to do man's work. She is not needed to think man's thoughts. She need not fear that the masculine mind, almost universally dominant, will fail to take care of its own. Her mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities.
To think that all of this happened just outside the boundaries of my lifetime. And certainly within my sisters’. It was not that long ago and makes me realize that the struggles I’ve experienced as a woman in design and tech are mere extensions of all this. Spasms of denial by a society that still does not treat women equally. That still wants us, especially in places of power, to be secondary and subjugated. That still sputters, chokes, and gaslights when a woman lifts her hand and says “Excuse me. There are laws on the books for decades now that forbid you from doing that thing you just did. Here. Let me show you.” Because men either don’t or won’t show other men the things they shouldn’t do.
I’ve taken the baton that my mother held loose in her hand when I last saw her in a coffin at a funeral home. The baton of freedom and independence. The demand to be recognized and respected and heard. The liberty to live her life as she wanted to live it. One of my greatest regrets is that I never got to interact with her as an adult. To leverage her life lessons as spoken from her own lips.
But I’m carrying your torch now, Mom. At least from what I know about you, I think I am.
I read more Kerouac, The Dharma Bums my favourite, and then I read Cassady and Ginsberg and Burroughs. I loved the beat generation and the men in it. I loved how they shared themselves with each other and their readers, generously. But I always had, and still have, the sneaking and sinking suspicion that there would have been no place for me in that world. There were no Scarlett O’Haras in the beat world. There were women, certainly, but they felt like cardboard cut-outs, something to move around, admire, shift gently out of the way when necessary. In fact, the only women Kerouac and Ginsberg seemed to genuinely respect were their mothers.
I looked. I looked hard. I read female beat writers Carolyn Cassady, Edie Parker and Hettie Jones and they felt more like watchers than participants; muses perhaps, facilitators maybe, but not respected equals. These talented women, some of whom wrote incredible and revolutionary prose, were “the wives”, barely acknowledged by their male peers. They wrote about their identities in relation to the men around them and I wanted more than that – I wanted to read them as writers. And I wanted them to write women. I found the beat women as outsiders in offside compendiums, as afterthoughts and even instigators, but rarely as the orchestrators and creators of their own place in literature.
– Lynnette Lounsbury, I loved the beat generation. Then I realised it has no place for women
Things That Nourished My Writing: October 2022 - March 10, 2023
FOOD
Learning how food affects my body via Zoe.
Spoonfuls of white kimchi for breakfast.
LITERARY
I finally started reading Annie Ernaux.
This week I am attending my first AWP Conference.
MUSIC
Cliché, but of course this song in honor of International Women’s Day.
PLACES
Taos, New Mexico, where Bria and I went for our annual birthday ski.
ACTIVITIES
Working. And building a house. And working. And building a house. But we are almost done.
My 20-something nephew told my sister he was afraid of me because I am litigious. I have been in the past, fighting for my daughter’s and granddaughter’s rights mostly, with a good track record in the courtroom. But I have nothing to apologize for and he is right to be scared, as are any men who try to take advantage of women by violating their civil rights.
Beautiful and poignant as ever, my friend! Your writing is lyrical.