Badass Middle Age Women, Part Two: Jane Jacobs

Why isn’t Jane Jacobs a household name?  How many people think of Robert Moses as a towering figure in our city’s history, but have no clue that Jane Jacobs was our savior?  I had no idea either, until I saw the documentary Citizen, which is not a very good film, but managed in spite of itself to tell the story we should all already know.

Washington Square Park would have been a sprawling expressway and most of Manhattan would be a thruway from Westchester to Long Island if it hadn’t been for Jane Jacobs.

And if she had been a big fat man who smoked cigars and intimidated other not so big, just as fat men, we might have had far fewer large, desolate housing projects and many more mixed income communities throughout the city.

She was never accorded the true avenger status she deserved—in fact, the press treated her like a novelty: a cute little middle-aged housewife making noise and wielding protest signs. But she taught herself to be a first-class organizer and masterfully manipulated the media to shed light on Moses’ systematic destruction of New York.

Jane Jacobs wrote The Life and Death of American Cities at the same time that Rachel Carson published The Silent Spring and Betty Friedan unleashed The Feminine Mystique.

We have been doing this work— this shifting of entrenched paradigms, dismantling of male power structures, organizing of badass women to save our cities, our planet, and ourselves—for centuries.  Sometimes it seems like there is no progress at all; sometimes it seems like two steps forward, one step back.  So when I think about what Jane, Rachel and Betty accomplished through their words and actions, and what our world might look like without them, I get re-inspired.  I’m taking my middle aged, grey-haired, tire- around-the-tummy self and jumping into the fray. I’m all in. Thanks, Jane.

Badass Middle Age Women, Part One: Grace Paley

Grace Paley

 1922-2007

I’m reading the newly released A Grace Paley Reader, which was just released by FSG. Wow.

You know how you think you know a lot about an author you admire, and then you find out you didn’t really know jack?   Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Little Disturbances of Man hit me hard in my 20s.  I can’t remember a single plot line, but I still carry those books in my heart. Through her characters’ every day lives, she reached out to say, yes—I know how you are feeling. You are not alone.  This is just a part of what it means to be human. You will be scarred, but not broken.

  I knew she was a fierce West Village activist in her day. I pictured a little old grey haired lady handing out flyers on the corner of 6th Avenue and Waverly.

But now that I have read (maybe re-read? Signs of my own grey haired lady-ness creeping in) her essays, I realize how profound and powerful her voice was at the time. She was a brilliant, badass woman who saw the world through a clear, fierce, feminist lens, and forever changed the world for the rest of us.

In Illegal Days, she shares her own experience of getting an illegal abortion. It’s one of the best essays I have ever read about abortion. She puts the fight to control our lives, our bodies, and our sexual choices into historical context and makes an eloquent, irrefutable case for abortion rights.

If you want to read about some of the women whose shoulders we stand on, read Six Days: Some Remembering, The Seneca Stories: Tales from the Women’s Peace Encampment, and Of Poetry and Women in the World.  

 Grace Paley’s work reminds us that while the Women’s March was a great day, the real work happens every day—in poetry, in essays, in jail cells, on courthouse steps, and on corners like 6th Avenue and Waverly Place.