Everything I need to know about sisterhood I learned from my sister.
I was born into sisterhood. My sister, Jeannie, who is ten years older than I am, loves to tell the story of how, in the days before prenatal testing, she told her 4th grade teacher that she was going to have a sister. She already had two brothers, so she was convinced that the baby our mother was carrying – me – would be a girl. She welcomed and delighted in my presence on this earth even before I was born.
My mother was too ill to care for me in the weeks and months immediately after my birth, so I was cared for by a nurse who thought it best not to comfort me when I cried. But when she could, my tender-hearted sister would sneak into the room where I lay in my bassinette, hold me, and soothe my tears. Even as an adult, in the moments of my deepest grief and pain, the body memories of my sister picking me up and consoling me would flood me with relief.
When I was young, Jeannie was my brother’s and my best babysitter and playmate. The fun maker – she would make Fox and Geese tracks and chase us in the snow, take us ice skating in the winter and swimming in the summer, and play endless rounds of “Spit” and “Yahtzee.” I loved the special times on vacation when we kids had a cabin all to ourselves, and she’d make us hot cocoa and play Black Jack with us using round pieces of black licorice for chips.
Jeannie left for college when I was only eight, but came home when her husband went to Vietnam when I was in high school. It was then that she became my best friend. She was always the one with whom I’d share my troubles and secret joys, the first one I’d call when something awful or wonderful happened, the one I could always count on to be there. In the years I was waiting for my transplant, she and her family would travel from Ohio to Minnesota every year for Christmas, and she spent weeks of her summers helping me take care of my young son when my life was too precarious to be left on my own. In the weeks after my transplant, she gave up precious PTO from her job as a teacher to be my caregiver and support person in the Twin Cities, while my husband stayed home with our young son.
Though we live a thousand miles apart, letters, emails, phone calls, and texts have kept us connected. We’ve never gone a year without seeing each other, and our times together now are precious. Jeannie has shown me the best of sisterhood – affirming and supporting me in all of my endeavors, giving me a trusted confidante with whom I could share the truths of my life, showing up when I have needed extra care and support, celebrating the moments of joy and triumph, understanding me in a way that few have. So, when I came into feminism in my twenties, I was deeply drawn to the feminist ideal of sisterhood.
I first found nascent notions of the feminist concept of sisterhood when studying early nineteenth century feminists. For Sarah Grimké[i], who closed each of her “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” with, “Thine in the bonds of sisterhood,” those bonds were primarily of shared oppression. She regarded men’s oppression of women to be universal, knowing no boundaries of race, class, or culture, and wrote at length of the oppressed condition of women in the U.S., Asia, Africa, and Europe. In her abolitionist work she condemned the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of enslaved females and called on white women to act in solidarity with their enslaved sisters, and refuse their complicity in such abuse.
Grimké’s contemporary, Margaret Fuller[ii], emphasized the positive bonding of women. Rejecting the notion that women should mistrust and compete with one another, she asserted instead that women may indeed love one another. She urged women to respect themselves, to trust in their own intellects and impulses, to believe in the capacity of their own souls. She sought to develop communities of support among women in their common search for the essence of womanhood, as well as in the daily activities of life, suggesting communal kitchen, laundries, and childcare to free up women’s time for other pursuits. “I believe that, at present, women are the best helpers of one another” (Woman, 205).
“Sisterhood is powerful” became the rallying cry of Second Wave feminism -- a sisterhood of “the shared primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world” (Morgan, Sisterhood, xxxv ), as well as mutual love and support often discovered in consciousness-raising groups. However, this notion of sisterhood came under two critiques: first, that women often oppress other women, and second, that white middle-class feminists narrowly conceived the notion of ‘sisterhood’ around their own issues in ways exclusive of other women. In her essay, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Among Women,” bell hooks highlighted racism, classism, and sexism toward other women (in the forms of trashing, disregard, and professional and competitive violence) as ways women continue to oppress other women. In addition, women in wealthy, developed countries are complicit in the oppression of women of the global South through imperialism, violence and war, and patterns of consumption and energy use.
Hooks also questioned the idea of a “fundamentally common female experience” (Talking Back, 23), as did Audre Lorde, who saw “sisterhood” used as a pretense of a homogeneity of experience that was actually only white women’s. Critics have argued that the notions of sisterhood, as mythologized by white feminists, was based in an organic and affectional bonding that masks pressures of conformity and erasure of difference. Lynet Uttal described feminist sisterhood as “protecting ourselves from any differences, maintaining at all costs an image of solidarity” (318). However, building on the wisdom of Lorde who wrote, “it is not our differences which separate women but our reluctance to recognize those differences” (Sister, 122), feminists envisioned a different idea of sisterhood that values a solidarity built on the strengths of difference and plurality. Womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher has referred to this revised notion of “sisterhood” as sisterist -- womanist yet in solidarity with diverse types of women. As hooks wrote, “We can be sisters united by shared interests and beliefs, united in our appreciation for diversity, united in our struggle to end sexist oppression, united in political solidarity” (Feminist, 165).
It was both in my experience working with feminist organizations in this community and later, in my study of these organizations[iii], that I lived that sistering and sisterhood. Creating and working within Women’s Studies both locally and nationally has been a continual and often challenging process of listening, learning, growing, and befriending together as we have worked through and woven together the threads of difference and change. I had some of the deepest experiences of sistering across difference of sexual orientation through the Northcountry Women’s Coffeehouse – bonding through music, celebration, laughter, and shared sorrows and fears. One particular moment was the night when Rosie Rocco talked about the death threats many in the lesbian community were receiving when the City Council was considering passage of the Human Rights Ordinance. As she began to sing Holly Near’s “Singing For Our Lives,” we all rose, linked arms, and began singing together. And never have I known such community as the night of my cardiac arrest there, when they kept my heart pumping and their breath filled my lungs, and then followed me to the hospital and stayed outside the CCU the rest of the night and supported my family and me through the trials ahead. I would later come to know such sistering working with water protectors to stop the Sandpiper and Line 3 and being welcomed so warmly into the indigenous women’s community and the circle formed by my Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Trauma therapy cohort.
One of the things that struck me while researching the history of grassroots feminism in the Twin Ports was the number of actual sisters involved in creating feminist organizations here – Shirley Oberg and Jill Abernathy, Tina Olson and Madeleine Tjaden, Michelle LeBeau and Lindy Askelin – but even more, the chosen “sisters” – Tina Welsh and Rosie Rocco, Ellen Pence and Shirley Oberg, Tina Olson and Liz LaPrairie and Jenny James, Bilin Tsai and Mary Zimmerman, and so many more. It was especially when interviewing Marvella Davis and Babette Sandman about their time in DAIP’s Women’s Action Group that I heard of the kind of mutual respect, empowerment, and sisterhood that resonated with my own experience with my sister. Marvella recalled how her ex-husband showed up at the group, pounding on the window demanding she come out, but the women surrounded her and kept her safe till he went away. “That was the beautiful thing back then,” said Babette, “we were actually sisters.” In the group they learned about horizontal hostility among women -- women fighting with each other, often over men -- and learned instead that other women were their sisters. Each of them had “a piece of the truth no matter what.” ”It felt like a jewel inside of us that we didn’t even know we had. . . We were so upheld.” Babette, who had joined the group after coming out of an abusive relationship said, “I didn’t even know I was a human being I was so dehumanized . . . . And to have someone treat me like that . . . and to discover that women are my sisters. . . . It was not just words. We felt that. We were believed. We were valued. We had wisdom. We had a piece of the truth. We were carrying around a gem. People were interested in us. And we had sisters.”
This is the best of feminist sisterhood. As Baker-Fletcher noted, sisterhood is not always perfect, but “sistering and sisterist allow for open-ended but committed relationships, in which there is plenty of room for learning, growth, and the love that develops from ongoing talk, listening, work, and play with one another” (Sisters, 9). I have been fortunate to experience this sistering of uplifting the dignity, truths, and value of each other, of learning and growing together in building a Women’s Studies program, in Women’s Studies classrooms, in consciousness-raising groups, in the local feminist community, and especially in friendships. It all began with my sister, my friend.
Happy 80th birthday, my beloved sister. Thank you beyond measure for seventy years of sisterhood.
Notes
Baker-Fletcher, Karen. Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.
Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. Liberty, Equality, Sorority: The Origins and Interpretation of American Feminist Thought: Frances Wright, Sarah Grimké, and Margaret Fuller. New York: Carlson Publishing, 1994.
______. Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior. Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016.
______. Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Davis, Marvella and Babette Sandman. Personal Interview. December 11, 2014.
Grimké, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Others Essays. Ed. and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1988.
Hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1989.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.
Ossoli, Margaret Fuller. Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties of Woman. Ed. Arthur B. Fuller, Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855.
Uttal, Lynet. “Nods That Silence.” In Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras/Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990: 317-320.
[i] Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) was an abolitionist speaker and feminist who wrote a series of letters on the condition of women to Mary Parker, president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in the New England Spectator in 1838, initially begun in response to a Pastoral Letter from the Council of Congregationalist Ministers of Massachusetts who denounced her and her sister’s behavior of speaking in public as unwomanly and unchristian. William Lloyd Garrison printed the letters in his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, and Grimké eventually published them in a single tract, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes.
[ii] Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a journalist and editor of the Transcendentalist publication, The Dial. Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (p. 1845) was considered one of the major feminist works of her time. She died tragically in a shipwreck off of Fire Island, New York, at the age of 40.
[iii] See my Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior.