Never Walked In High Heels

There are few stories told today about women. An inspirational story has to have someone such as Sandra Bullock in it in order to sell, and even then there is something about these female characters which seem either glossy or angular; a rough mock up of what a woman might possibly look like. Recently, I’ve been looking for a fictional female character that I wanted to emulate. This meant finding a woman who was strong in the face of adventure and gentle in the eyes of loved ones. This is how I rediscovered Mrs. Kay Miniver.

Mrs. Miniver was a film produced in 1942 and follows one woman’s adventures during the opening of the Second World War. What would no doubt be looked down upon as being “a common housewife” by many today, provides the heroine ample opportunity for courage, grace, grief, and even humor within an ordinary backdrop which produces a most extraordinary life. Between the open communication she shared with her husband to her fierceness in finding the joys in life even in difficult times, we watch a rare sight in the unfolding of this movie. We see a woman in the fullest sense of the word.

We are bombarded by images of two types of women today. Surprisingly, I’m not talking about the vixens and the angels, which you’ll hear feminist academics drive on about at intellectual conferences. Rather, I see the two poles of femininity today as being victimized or being controlling. She must either have no strength left within her that she must depend on someone else to be happy, or, she must be steely and cold, demanding that someone else make her happy. Neither makes for a particularly stable or happy individual.

Today I think we see the controlling woman as the standard rather than the other. A woman must have her life put together and have a goal beyond her family which, she will, come hell or high water, succeed with. I’m a career woman myself and I’m not saying that a housewife is somehow superior. But the grace of a woman, I think, comes from fully facing the challenges which are in front of her… all of them. What makes Mrs. Miniver so special is that she can be facing a German gunman in one moment, and overjoyed at the return of her husband the next. For her, there is no point in fantasizing how life ought to be, when there is so much to discover within how life is.

In the movie, there are no sex scenes or cleavage shown, nor is there any room for a damsel in distress fainting at the most climatic moment. In this way, Kay Miniver’s story is remarkably modern. Oddly enough, I think hers is a life which most women have in front of them, were we not so preoccupied with fairytale endings and Hollywood love scenes. What we learn from Mrs. Miniver is that it is not in making things how they ought to appear which leads to a life of beauty, but in accepting things as they are. Or in the words of another admirer of Kay Miniver, “: What goes to make a rose, ma’am, is breeding… and budding… and horse-manure, if you’ll pardon the expression. And that’s where you come in…”

No doubt about it, Susan Boyle’s singing performance last week was impeccable. It was one of those acts that can only come from years of calloused hands, broken dreams, the refusal to believe you’re above cleaning toilets, and an incredible fire, which will not let you back down in the face of rejection. And, she showed her talent successfully with one of the most overdone songs in musical theatre. Young singers mostly lack the depth sing honestly, without “performing”, and drama school students are often too idealistic in what the profession “ought to be” to even bother trying to be that open. I know those looks of dread from the judges; I have seen them in auditions and in drama school. The refusal of the teachers to admit that one is talented - the insistence that she be handed a tambourine when she can compose a concerto - is exactly why I dropped out of training. Pre-judging is the standard of my industry. 

In the aftermath of the shock, Youtube, blogs, and chatrooms have lit up talking about her performance. “We were wrong,” they say. “She is amazing”… The praise goes on in the type of circular talks, found only in our modern cyber communications. And then I saw a post on a disability-related message board which disturbed me. The title was “Susan Boyle: is she one of us?” It then explained the numerous ways that Ms. Boyle could be seen as disabled, how she was affected by prejudice, and how this triumph was a call to arms for disability arts. By the end of the post, I marveled that the singer could even get out bed in the morning, she sounded so deformed. Then came the torrent of replies and threads: “yes she is disabled,” “no she’s not disabled enough,” “I’m more disabled than she is, and I can sing better, why wasn’t I on?” Again, I am reminded how much I am disturbed to see people choose to crawl on their bellies when they can still remain upright with some dignity. 

Here’s a thought: She is one of us. She’s human. 

What this situation highlights is everyone else’s discrimination that occurred after she opened her mouth to sing the first note. In my mind this hindsight discrimination is even worse than the discrimination which occurred before she sang. She is qualified to hold her own among the best, yet the people who posted such responses choose to see her only in terms of what she is not, rather than what she is. In addition to such practice of logic being bad scholarship, it flies in the face of equality and liberty.  You cannot be a mainstream success by focusing on what you cannot do. This is why “disability art” will forever be on life support from the government. It is not the conditions into which you were born that define who you are. In fact, they don’t even make you interesting. Instead, your actions make you who you are. Ms. Boyle could have captured disability culture if she said, “Oh well, this is the best I’ll be. Let me define myself as disabled and sell a few records off the sympathy of others.” She could have compromised her vision and had it much easier. But she didn’t.

She captured the world instead.