Vagina World

As I walked into the feminist art exhibit last week, there was a painting of people entering an art show through a giant psychedelic vagina. As you walked further down the hall, there was a huge piece of red fabric resembling the vulva and clitoris. This was Vagina World.

My son Trevor and husband Kevin were not really digging the exhibit. "I guess I can't really relate to it," they both chimed in together. Well, they could still support female power even if they weren't female.

My parents Ruth and Phil considered themselves liberated feminists. They had a couples women's lib party. They thumbtacked slogans written on cardboard on the groovy corkboard wall in our living room. The only saying I recall was, "Herstory not History." I remember my mother wearing a purple psychedelic dress and holding a gin and tonic.

My mother Ruth was a feminist and a rebel. In the 1950's, when most married women were home raising their children, Ruth was a police reporter, covering the notorious Sam Sheppard trial. Sheppard was a doctor accused of murdering his wife near Cleveland, Ohio. My mother interviewed him in prison when she was pregnant with my sister Wanda.

Ruth covered politics and crime, and hung around with scrappy hard drinking men. She married one of these men, a fellow reporter in Cleveland. He turned out to be an alcoholic and he left her with a two-year-old daughter to raise alone. Ruth was a working single mother before it was fashionable, and her parents helped raise her daughter Lolli.

Ruth then met another reporter, my father Phil. He was five years younger than this strong feisty woman and fell madly in love. She continued to work as a journalist, but eventually stayed home for a time to raise her three daughters. She resented being home with her children, and always talked about her glory days of police reporting and running into burning buildings.

She was a fiercely intelligent woman, but, at home, she waited on my father hand and foot. He would sit in his Lazy Boy pleather recliner and clink his glass of ice for a refill and expect dinner on the table every night when he got home from work. I never quite understood her resentment and their fighting and stress until recently, when I realized what she gave up to marry my father and raise her children. She left Ohio, where she had a flourishing career. In New Jersey, she worked briefly for a newspaper and later, in marketing, which she hated.

Do I have a liberated marriage? Hardly. My husband Kevin and I have fallen into traditional roles, with Kevin working full time as a television producer and writer while I have stayed home to raise our two children. That arrangement was fine for a while, but for the past few years, I have been bored and would welcome a more intellectually challenging career. I have thought about going to medical school, but know it would be difficult with a small child at home. I'm about to go back to work as an early childhood teacher, a traditional career that I chose after leaving public relations and advertising.

Now that I have a daughter, I think more about my role as a woman and how my daughter will see me as a role model. Three-year-old Esther has just started saying, "I want to be a mommy when I grow up." I hope that she pursues a challenging and creative career, and can move beyond what I've chosen. She is strong and feisty, just like my mother Ruth. I have the utmost faith that she'll go out into the world as a strong female, maybe even stronger than myself.