In praise of strong, independent women

Like pretty much everyone else over the past two months, I’ve been sheltering-in-place-of-living. During this period of forced hibernation, the TV has become my most intimate (very easy to turn on) and constant friend. I used to spend a lot of time watching cable news programs, but then I started having nightmares where Tony Fauci would be telling Sanjay Gupta that all Americans could finally stop wearing masks except that ugly chick in Delco, so I switched to streaming. Hulu is my favorite, probably because I can’t remember my Netflix password.

Because of this, I happened across the original Hulu/FX series “Mrs. America,” about the fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. I was a kid during the time period depicted in the show, which profiles a different historic figure in each episode. In particular, I love the depiction of Phyllis Schlafly, the founder of the Eagle Forum and formidable foe of the ERA. While I understand that some conservatives, including members of Schlafly’s own family are unhappy with the characterization, my expectations are so low that I always think a non-liberal woman will be “Palinized” and ridiculed the way Delco’s own “Mean Girl” Tina Fey destroyed the former governor of Alaska.

But this column isn’t a review of “Mrs. America.” I hope you see it, and I hope you appreciate the acting, production value and groovy fashion.

This column is less about women, and more about a woman: My mother, Lucy Flowers. I want to praise women like her, women who lived in the shadow of a movement they neither accepted, supported, or understood but who were as fierce and historically significant as Gloria, Betty, Bella and Shirley.

They made the earth shake, but they did it from their kitchens, schoolhouses, or diner counters. They raised people like me, who look back and realize that the strongest, fiercest most independent women are the ones who don’t tell us they are strong, fierce and independent. They simply live their lives looking outward, not inward. They don’t obsess over what they don’t have. They create, for themselves and those they love, lives of genuine grace.

My own mother was the first in her family to get a high school diploma, West Catholic Girls 1956. She could have gone to college -- she had the brain and the passion -- but she went to work to help her family. In 1960, she married my father and continued working to put him through college and then law school. Along the way, between 1961 and 1971, she had five kids. We all ended up loving her more than any other creature in the world, as it should be. My mother, our mother, was a lioness.

When my father died of cancer in 1981, four months after his 43rd birthday, she took a deep breath and moved forward. She was the firewall between five grieving siblings and despair. She kept us together.

And she did it alone, never remarrying. She neither needed nor wanted a wing man. This was her life, and she was going to live it the way she wanted and needed: Tethered only by the desire to give her children the life she and my father had intended. Only, she did it while shouldering a burden that should not have been hers alone to bear.

Lucy Flowers, beloved as she is to me, is not unique. There are thousands of women like her, those who sublimate their own egos and desires to give form and substance to other people’s dreams. I’m certain that every person reading this knows, or has known, someone like that. I’ve known many: Grandmothers, teachers, nuns, nurses, counselors.

I find it ironic that I, a woman who has never had a child, was given the great example of a warrior mother. In some ways, it seems a waste that the lessons I learned from Lucy are destined to remain with me in memory, but not in practice.

But then, I watch this show about the early feminists and their angst and wrangling, their competitiveness and their frustration, their semi-victories and partial defeats, and I realize that Lucy’s lessons don’t need me as a conduit. They are universal, and they will continue to be studied and appreciated whenever a woman, feminist or not, angry or content, flamboyant or humble, Gloria or Phyllis, chooses to be about something greater than herself, her needs and her “rights.”

And in the end, they didn’t need that stupid amendment anyway. Mothers aren’t equal to anyone.

They reign supreme.