Conference turris::womannotes-v1

    Something said in the previous note got me wondering - is isolation
    (or distance) from a person different if that person is of the same
    sex or of the opposite sex ? Is isolation between women different
    from isolation between women and men ? 

    Do you feel closer to a person of the same sex with whom you share
    limited goals and ambitions, or, do you feel closer to a person
    of the opposite sex with whom you have more goals in common ?
    

    I feel close based almost entirely on shared goals, interests, and
    values.  The gender or race of the person involved are not very
    important to me.
    
    --bonnie    

    Re: 794.14 (Bonnie Randall, 794.15
    
    I got a similar impression from Bonnie's note.  I thought about
    how having a "goal" of canning 20 quarts of peas wasn't unlike
    many of the "goals" we have during the course of our jobs.  And
    it just maybe lots more satisfying, as well.
    
    On a more personal note and as an aside, when someone tells me that
    "you are just like so-and-so", I almost always take that to mean
    the positive points of that person.  I wouldn't mind having the
    positive aspects of my mom (try raising 3 kids under the age of
    4 by yourself because your husband died when you were only 25!).
    That's got to be harder work than any job I've ever had or am likely
    to have.

    

re:  796.1

>   .............................Is isolation between women different
>   from isolation between women and men ? 
>
>   Do you feel closer to a person of the same sex...or, do you feel closer
>   to a person of the opposite sex...? 

    Dana, until you asked this question I'd been feeling like
    this particular topic wasn't really relevant to me.  For what
    it's worth, ever since I discovered boys in high school, my
    best friends have always been my boyfriends or (male) lovers.
    I have typically had few friendships outside my primary
    friendship/love affair of the moment, and the "secondary"
    friendships never seemed too important.  The "secondary"
    friendships have almost always been with women, not men. 

    So to answer your question from a strictly personal point of
    view, I'd say there's a big difference in isolation between
    men and women versus isolation between women.  My isolation
    from men is that I've rarely had male friends who were
    "casual" friends and not also lovers; my isolation from women
    is that I rarely take my friendships with women as seriously
    as my friendship with the central man in my life.

    -- Linda

RE. Note 795.37                 Women and Isolation: FWO                    
VIA::RANDALL "back in the notes life again"          
    
>    The work of keeping a house and raising children provides
>    tremendous amounts of immediate gratification.  You cook a good
>    meal with a pretty cake at the end and everybody heaps praise and
>    love on you; you take your children to the playground and you
>    get to see the radiance on their faces and listen to their
>    shreiks of laughter.
>    
>    It's a slow, mellow, rich life; you go with the flow of the
>    sesasons -- in summer you barbecue on the deck and in the winter
>    you slide in the snow on the hill in back of your house.
   
>    But what happened to my mother, and what happened to me when I was
>    home with Kat, and what had happened to the dozens of housewives I
>    counselled when I was working with my university's program to help
>    older women reentering school, was that they depended so heavily
>    on the immediate feedback and rewards that they lost the skills
>    involved in long-term planning and delayed gratification.  
    
>    And it wouldn't bother me so damned much if I didn't love her
>    so damned much.
    
Bonnie, the above sounds to me as if you understand both the good and bad
points of the 'traditional' role. In more 'traditional' times, thinking
'long-term' was largely the male domain, while the short-term was the
province of women (he worried about the mortgage and his career, she
tended house and kids). Having an abundance of short-term feedback and
gratification makes the long view less important. Taking the long view 
means foregoing some of the immediate rewards. 

Your mother seems to function well in the present, while you have found
in yourself the ability and the desire to think further ahead. But it's
plain that you miss some of that immediate gratification. Do you
think that maybe you secretly are a touch jealous of your mother ? 
(I am - that ability to live in the present would make my own lack of 
long-term goals seem less painful.And I suspect other men might feel
the same lack in their lives, taken from them by that same tradition.) 

Maybe you feel some regret for giving up what has 'traditionally' been 
a woman's birthright ? 

If men and women ever really get together, hopefully they'll be able
to share the short and long-term, both gaining gratification in the
present, and working toward a future together as well.

Dana

    re: .5
    
    Dana, you might be onto something about the jealousy.  I'll have
    to think about that.  The violence with which my mind said,
    "Jealous?  What on earth of?" leads me to think you might be at
    least partly right. 
    
    But I never thought of her as a happy woman.  Brave, yes. Good at
    finding satisfaction in the midst of misery.  Happy, no.  Some of
    my earliest memories are of sitting on her lap while she brushed
    my hair, watching the way her mouth curls in on itself and
    thinking that I hoped that I was never THAT unhappy in my life. 
    
    The other thing is I don't think a person who has only one kind of
    goals is a fully satisfied human being.  The person who has only
    long-range goals loses out on a lot of day to day satisfactions.
    (Stop and smell the roses, I think is the cliche?  A lot of truth
    to it.)  But the person who never set a goal and worked toward it,
    who just goes with the flow, doesn't have the satisfactions of
    having set a goal and worked for it.
    
    I think that's what bothers my mother -- that she never had
    a chance to try her wings.  It wasn't a choice at all.
    
    --bonnie