Freedom Out West

When I was growing up, I read a lot of books. I voraciously read just about anything I could put my hands on--the back of cereal boxes, newspapers, my Mom’s Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and dime novels I picked up at garage sales. About 1972, I started straying from the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys section and meandered over to the adult section. I read great books on crime figures in history, learned ancient civilizations, and I found a love of mysteries the day I discovered Ellery Queen novels. I checked out albums and discovered big band music. I went to the art section and discovered Van Gogh. It was so cool that books had played an important part in my mom’s life, because as she dragged us along on her many trips to the library, my sister and I both embraced the experience and have carried it through our lives. Being raised in a small city in the Midwest, I didn’t have a ton of opportunities to see the world, so it was a wonderful thing to me that the library could do what a 12 year old without a driver’s license could not.

 

It was the early 70s and things were happening all over the place for women. I loved reading Ms Magazine when it s voice was young. Women were burning their bras at the same time I was just beginning to think about wearing one for the first time. Billie Jean King was kicking some major ass, yet my mom was still not able to get a credit card that didn’t say, “Mrs. John Doe.” I attached myself each summer to my Girl Scout camp counselors who were all sandal-wearing, bra disdaining, feminist college students fighting the good fight, so I could learn more about this world that had not yet opened up to me.

 

Sometimes, my straying to the adult section (with my newly earned adult section library card, which was blue, not the orange only good for the kid’s section) got me in trouble. Janis Joplin had died in 1970 and one of her Bohemian lovers had written a steamy biography of her, published in 1973. I barely knew who Janis was at the time, but the whole San Francisco hippie-rock-dare-to-be-different thing appealed to my fevered 12-year-old imagination like nobody’s business. It was a great book, and actually made me believe that I would never get involved with drugs, because the lives of the people in the book seemed so sad because of them. But, the passion, and the adventure, and the “screw you, I can do what I want” thing was so grand and epic in my mind, I knew one day I would have that too, well, sometime after I had finished my chores for sure. So, I read the book, my head filled with hippies, peace, and love, and put it up on the shelf to be returned to the library as was our practice in my house.

 

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table when I got home from school the next day with the book in her hand. She slowly opened to the first page, where I knew one of the most salacious openers in the history of literature could be found. The blood drained from my face as the knowledge of what was to come spun through my head. She just looked at me and said, “Let me have your adult library card. Obviously, you can’t handle the responsibility.” What a let-down! No lecture, no yelling, no argument. Getting in trouble was nothing new to me, but it usually meant a mere grounding, not taking away my lifeline to the bright, beautiful world outside of Iowa. I begged, I wept, I made promises I had no intention of keeping, but to no avail. I was in deep shit. San Francisco would obviously have to wait a while longer. I put my training bra on and began plotting the day I would finally get to that shining beacon of freedom out West.

 

Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women's issues. 
~Charlotte Bunch

Published on: May 10, 2006