Sylvia's Journal

Simmons’ College’s Center for Gender in Organizations puts on wonderful programs and whenever I am in the country I try to attend these sessions. And so yesterday, with a couple of colleagues, we traipsed off to the school of management over lunch time.

We were treated to a wonderful experiential session about the multiplicity of identities and power we hold by taking a closer look at ourselves and the dominant identities we have taken on or were born into.

Usually the narrative about women is about subordination. What I had not realized is that we, women and men, have so many identities, some we were born into (race, skin color, size and body type, sometimes religion), some we become automatically (older) and some we acquire (education, sometimes religion). The first task was to write down, without thinking too much, the identities we have and then see which jump out, and make them bold. Just realizing that this one is a dominant or subordinate one can be startling.

I wrote: grey-haired white female of Dutch descent, married, mother, nearly grandmother and then some smaller identities. The grey-haired jumped out and I got to explore a bit more about why it did.

In an paired sharing with someone we didn’t know we were asked to talk about an identity (or bundle of identities) that is/are dominant, how we felt when we didn’t get the entitlement we deserved, when we were called on being dominant. It brought back some painful but life changing experiences from an NTL course many years ago. And from my partner, a tall black man I learned something about profiling.

The exercise was both refreshing and a little sobering. As women (or any other minority) we are used to emphasize our subordinate identity. The presenters made a surprising statement: no matter how subordinate you feel in your life, everyone has at least one dominant identity – an abused wife still has dominance in her relationship with her kids when the husband is not around for example.

After work and picking up Axel we drove to Newburyport to see our friends Anne and Chuck who returned from a 5 week tour of friends, many of them Peace Corps buddies. It was their homage to 50 years of Peace Corps.

We attended a small fundraising event for a scholarship fund for Mexican kids and I ‘won’ a gift certificate for the restaurant in which the auction was held, which we used right away.

Our friends run a B&B in Newburyport and we got to stay in the Sorrento room, looking out over the Merrimack River.