The Sacred Lineage of Women: What I Inherit, What I Carry

I always promised myself I would do it differently.

I would not lose myself in the work of looking after everyone else. I would not simply inherit the expectations placed on the women who came before me. I would build a life in which my own interests, needs and ambitions had room to exist.

But my life has not unfolded as neatly as that promise. In fact, it's been rather messy with my undiagnosed ADHD playing an oversized role in management of my life.

Our dear mother, a journalist with a way with words, instilled in me a strong sense of justice and an awareness of inequality between the sexes from an early age. In my first year of studying law in 1991, I picked up a copy of Ms. Magazine. It was the first, and remains, the only magazine I read cover to cover. My feminist convictions are long held and strongly felt. So is the mental and emotional load I have found myself carrying. The two exist together, and I know I am not the only woman who knows that contradiction.

This is not a story about having resolved it. It is about the women who have helped me understand it, the ideas that continue to interest me, and the things I have come to value, reassess and accept (or not) along the way.

I think of those connections as a lineage. Some are inherited. Some are chosen. Some reach me through words written by a woman I have never met.

When I call that lineage sacred, I mean it personally. I mean these connections matter deeply to me. Not that all women share one history, or that there is one correct way to be a woman. But there are echoes of a collective knowing.

The women who gave me language

Gloria Steinem had a profound influence on my young life. My regard for her belongs in this story because feminism is not a decorative detail in who I am. It has shaped the way I look at the world and have raised my three wonderful sons.

It has helped me question whose work is recognised, whose experience is taken seriously and whose needs are expected to wait.

It is powerful about encountering a woman’s voice and finding that it helps you understand your own. Not because you must agree with every sentence, but because ideas can give form to something you have already felt. Gloria Steinem gave me a solid platform from which to learn more about the interplay of womanhood and patriarchy, to ask questions that don't always have a clear answer and to better understand our social construct.

That is part of what feminist theory has meant to me: an invitation to look more closely at arrangements that might otherwise be presented as natural, inevitable or simply the way things are.

Who decided that? Who benefits from it? What does it cost the person expected to keep accommodating it? 

These are questions I carry. They do not disappear because I love my family, highly value caring for others or enjoy making a home beautiful. 

Image via Click Americana

The promise, and the life

When I was younger, I imagined that knowing what I did not want to repeat would help me avoid repeating it. I watched my Mum and her peer group struggle and I knew I wanted to do things differently. Yet I have still found myself carrying the mental and emotional weight of family life. As women do.

That gap between intention and experience is not easy to describe. It can feel as though you have let down the younger version of yourself who was so certain she would find another way.

But I do not think the answer is to make that younger woman another person whose expectations I have failed to meet. Awareness does not make us immune to the structures we live within. Love, habit, expectations and practical needs can pull us towards familiar roles even when we recognise them.

For me, patriarchy is not only an abstract word in a book. It is also a way of questioning the assumption that women’s attention and care will always be available, and that our own lives can be fitted around whatever remains. I can challenge that assumption and still find myself living inside it.

My mother’s advice

My mum always said, “Find good women, they will keep you married.”

I have carried that advice through my life. But her comment was not about marriage per se. It was about women helping women. The female friends who know us intimately. Who remember us beyond the responsibilities we fill and the relationships through which we are introduced.

Not only somebody’s wife. Not only somebody’s mother or daughter.

Ourselves.

In my mum’s words, I hear an understanding that we need people who know who we are when the demands of life threaten to crowd that person out.

As we get older, through transitions, challenges and loss, those friendships can become profoundly soulful, sustaining and satiating. A good friend does not only admire your ability to keep going. She will notice what keeping going is costing you.

She can remember what makes you laugh, what interests you, what you care about and what you have not had room to say. She recognises the idealistic and hopeful 17 year old in you still. Most importantly, she sees a whole person, not simply a reliable source of care.

Our beautiful Mum, Marion, holding a posy of dandelions. This image was taken for a self-published book she wrote about her double lung transplant in 2009.

A lineage beyond the family tree

That is why lineage, for me, is not confined to a maternal family tree. My mother belongs to it. So do the thinkers whose work has influenced me. So do the women whose friendship has reminded me of myself.

I do not want to make this into a sentimental claim that women are always kind to one another, or that every family offers a nurturing inheritance. That would leave too many experiences outside the story.

What I am describing is something I value and want to cultivate: women taking one another seriously. Making room for one another. Recognising that another woman’s interior life matters, even when she is very good at attending to everybody else’s.

Sisterhood, as I understand it, does not require us to be the same. It asks us to see one another as people.

The beauty women made room for

My love of vintage objects sits within this way of looking at life.

I am drawn to the care involved in making a home, the judgement of choosing something beautiful and the creativity of bringing ordinary objects into relation with one another.

Domestic artistry matters to me. A table, a textile, a carefully arranged room or a familiar serving dish can be part of how someone gives expression to her taste and imagination.

I do not want to dismiss that creativity simply because it happens in a domestic setting. Equally, I do not want to romanticise restrictions by suggesting the home was always where women freely chose to place their ambitions. I can admire what a woman created and still ask what else she might have wanted the opportunity to do. 

This is one of the reasons beautiful old things hold my attention. They make me curious about the lives around them. I often wonder about the hopes and aspirations my Grandmothers and Great Aunts had to forgo once they married. For context, my matriarchs came of age in the 1920s and married in the 1930s. They were all intelligent, capable and practical women. Two of maternal Great Aunts were very fortunate to receive a tertiary education and became teachers, but could not then work upon marriage.

Growing up, I spent considerable time in the homes of my maternal Nan and one of my Great Aunts. My sister and I loved pottering around their beautiful bone china tea sets and harlequin glassware. My Nan loved to smoke cigarettes and had a stunning hand blown art glass ashtray. We still have it. My Great Aunt had many pieces of Depression Glass. I was always enamoured by it and, as I write this, I am sitting beside one of her amber depression glass bowls. It is one of my greatest treasures: It's value is not monetary, it is in it's connection to a beloved gentle soul.

Our Great Aunty Mysie in her cap and gown on the day of her graduation from university in the 1920s.

What I want to keep and preserve

I used to think my legal background was a lifetime away from The Timeless Edit, but I realise now it’s all a piece of the same puzzle. What my sister and I do here is a quiet rebellion. By fiercely encouraging the reuse of these incredible pre-loved treasures, we are doing something deeply sustainable for our climate. But even more than that, we are honouring a lineage of women. These objects were loved so beautifully by the women who came before us that they survived to be here today. When we care for them, we honour those hands. Think of it like a handshake between generations.

I want to keep and honour my mum’s words, and my high regard for the women whose ideas helped me think more freely.

I want to keep the friendships in which I can exist without first being useful.

But I do not want to preserve every expectation attached to those inheritances. I can honour women’s generosity without believing that their highest purpose was to give until nothing remained.

I can love something passed down and still question the conditions surrounding it. I am conscious that the some of the items we now consider collectible and desirable were the same objects that isolated women in their homes with the promise of domestic efficiency.

And I can wish to live differently while admitting that I have not always managed to do so. I am still a work in progress and I suspect I may never find the answers to  many of my questions or manager to change the status quo in my own sphere of influence.

A life that remains our own

Perhaps that is what feels sacred to me about this lineage. It is not a perfect chain of wise women passing down uncomplicated truths. It is made of conversations, contradictions, things remembered and things reconsidered. 

I once promised myself I would do it differently. I still care about that promise, even though my life has not followed it neatly.I do not want to disappear into the roles I fill. Nor do I want to pretend those roles contain no love, honour, meaning or beauty.

I want room for both: the care I give and the person I am. That is what my mother’s words bring me back to. Find good women. Women who remember you, and whom you remember in return. Not because we have all found a way to do life perfectly. Because we should not have to lose ourselves while we are living it.