The Chris Moeller Archives

My mother's work

My mother, Joyce Werning-Moeller, died in a car accident in 1983, but she left behind much of her academic research, graciously gathered and delivered by colleagues to her family in the weeks following her death. At the time, she was a 30-year-old pursuing a Masters of Arts in sociology at the Graduate College of the University of Iowa. She taught courses in sociology and women’s studies at Kirkwood Community College. Her master's thesis, published by the school in May, 1982, was titled “Determinants of Egalitarian Sex-Role Attitudes in Men.” She was a married mother of 7-year-old twin boys at the time.

It’s both a treasure trove and a time capsule to look through her notes inside this banker's box-- culled from both classes taken and classes taught. Since her work and study were woven into her personal life, it’s a search for personal tidbits for me as much as it is a window into the global movement for women’s equality in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It feels timely to thumb through it all as FX and Hulu air their Mrs. America mini-series that examines roughly the same period and features characterizations of prominent women of the time-- Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and the early troll of feminism, Phyllis Schlafly. I’ve always recognized my mother to be a second-wave feminist and her papers describe the era that helped make her who she was.

When she left, I was given a bound copy of her thesis. As a kid-- and now too, I liked that she included my name in the acknowledgements, along with my brother and our “light-hearted spirits and ever-smiling faces”-- her words. I’ve been told by her cherished sister that she was trying to raise “two little Alan Aldas.” The manuscript was a dry read though for a teenager, and even now it is. It’s not an online, "click-bait" feature livened with color. It’s academic, naturally. It refers repeatedly to means and standard deviations, and such items as zero-order correlations for socio-demographic, out-of-phase, and enrichment variables. There are charts and detailed descriptions of the methods of her research. It’s a contribution to the world of education. It’s over my head.

Here’s something though. A photo-copied article from Forum magazine, April, 1981-- “Can Women Ejaculate? Yes.” Apparently this was only new scientific understanding in 1981. It seems, this article relates, that we didn’t “rediscover” the clitoris even until the 1950s. There’s a lot here about the Grafenberg Spot… Oh, that’s what the G-spot is.

There are published papers from colleagues included here-- one is upon the topic “The Earnings Attainment of Middle-Aged and Older Women.” There are scissored-out comic strips with feminist and sociology themes-- with tack imprints suggesting they decorated her office. What I’m searching for with these artifacts are hand-written notes, commentary, personal opinion, but where I find it, it tends to be dispassionate. Better are papers that she was grading, where at least she might add an “I agree” or “Yes, yes!” in the margin. A handwriting analysis would be very interesting. It’s incredible to see articles from 1970s periodicals with still-pertinent headlines such as “Invisible Migrant Workers” and “Benign neglect in the U.S.”

There’s a torn-out page from People magazine where an “irreverent California designer” attempts to spruce up the judicial wardrobe of the new-- and first-ever-- female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. A bonus on the flip side of the page is a list of “six formidable fashion fizzles” in celebrity, including Gloria Steinem. The text for Steinem’s outfit: “No one is going to accuse (her) of being a slave to chauvinism-- or to fashion. The 47-year-old feminist leader, who some years ago gave up Estevez gowns for the Cause, seems to have overdone the monochromatic Low Rent style of the seriously political… ‘What a waste,’ chides Eileen Ford, ‘she could be so pretty.”

There’s quite a bit here actually about sexuality, and particularly the one piece I just discovered that not every child will ever possess for his or her mother-- the typed product of a human sexuality assignment entitled “Sexual History” that serves, my mother writes, as her sexual autobiography. It describes her first menstruation, her sexual experiences, and general attitudes. It is what it advertises to be, and one thing notable is there is no lack of physical self-confidence. She was an objectively beautiful woman. I’ll share a passage that I don’t think violates any privacy.

About this time the kids started playing a game which they called ‘teat tag’ which amounted to tagging someone by touching his/her breast. I abhorred the game and usually removed myself from the situation when someone got the idea to start playing it. I personally didn’t get a ‘kick’ out of touching a guy’s breast and it seemed they did enjoy touching a girl’s breast. The whole thing seemed unfair to the girls, like the boys were taking advantage of them. It made me lose respect for both the boys and girls who participated in the silly game. It seemed very childish to me. In retrospect, I think these feelings were the beginning of my feminist orientation. I realized that I could never admire or love anyone who did not treat me with respect and who did not see me as an equal.”

In a passage about sexual fantasies, she alludes to a film about homosexuality that was screened in one of her classes, and she writes these words,

I found myself fascinated with the sensitivity portrayed by the two gay men… I thought it was almost refreshing to see two men expressing such warmth, tenderness and sensitivity to one another. I seemed not to focus on the fact that they were homosexual but rather on the general intimacy that they were expressing-- it just happened to be sexual. 

Shockingly forward-thinking for November of 1981, and for someone who confesses to have mostly learned about the sexual act from the animals on the farm and who says she was taught about sex in the home in a way that was “very condescending and judgmental about girls or boys who had bad reputations or who (worse yet!) ‘had to get married.’” It’s a most personal document, to be sure, but probably the best existing one to illustrate what a self-actualized life she was leading. She was a very happy woman. As nearly all of them are in the archives, this was an “A” paper.

Another one submitted for evaluation is on the subject of the personality development of twins, which sparks my immediate interest. She describes the choices she faced personally as our mother as we established our identities-- whether to give us matching names, whether to dress Aaron and me alike, and how to give us separate experiences and time apart. What would be the impact of the extra “twin attention,” she questions provocatively? She provides an anecdote about the time, when we were a year old, when our rivalry manifested as an argument as to which one of us actually belonged to our mother, and which one should go find his own mother. She describes the double work load for her and our father, as well as our idioglossia, or “twin speech,” which included mimicking each other even of incorrect word usage and pronunciation. More:

My own experience supports the notion that differences and similarities are constantly being reported to the twins and their families by "interested" spectators of the twin phenomenon. We rarely go out in public when someone does not remark about the similarity of difference of our boys. Comments such as, "I believe one is a little taller," and "One has a little longer face," are typical examples. Questions like "Is one more aggressive?" or "How do you tell them apart?" seem to me to have an even greater potentially negative effect because they suggest that we, as parents, attempt to label our children publicly as the "quiet one" or the "aggressive one." This type of labeling could easily lead to a type of self-fulfilling prophecy in which they live up to our expectations and perceptions of them.”

For the record, the names they chose for us were not at all similar, as you have surely pieced together for yourself, and for which I’m grateful. And just for the academic record, I should point out that Mom cites the simple “observation technique” as one that has created quite varying conclusions in twin study, and she says there has been too little cross-questioning, retesting, and too few large samples to deliver reliability. I’m the one that’s landing so hard on her anecdotal experience as a parent of twins. Twin research was lacking at that time, and the birth of multiples was much less common than it is today. In a separate paper dedicated specifically to the subject of the verbal development of her then-two-year-old twins, in the instructor’s summary evaluation she has written to Joyce, “This has been one of the most interesting entries I’ve ever read.”

My memory of my mother’s career at that time is pretty limited. Sometimes I feel as if I’m only remembering the act of remembering. But I would say that I have as much memory of her working and studying as I do anything else about her. We were a constant part of it. I recall visiting her office and meeting her colleagues, exploring freely the university’s natural history museum nearby (where my brother later interned when he attended the school as an undergrad). I remember participating those times in her long and difficult commute from the farm to the university. What is now almost all four-lane highway was entirely a two-lane excursion then. And of course I remember her working long hours at home on the typewriter at the dining room table. She would swear at times when she had to reach for the Wite-Out bottle-- that comic scene stays with me, and once she came into the den and turned off the television when Daisy Duke was in a swimsuit competition on The Dukes of Hazzard. She didn’t just turn it off though. She bothered to explain why she was doing it-- Daisy’s beauty was defined instead by her accomplishments.

Since that terrible night when her life ended and ours were all flipped upside down, there are a million world events about which I would love to hear her opinion. The issue of women’s health has evolved. Women’s self-empowerment has evolved. Many of the old charades have disappeared and for the better. The Miss America pageant ditched bathing suit competitions the likes of Daisy’s just two years ago, and the overwhelming majority of Americans supported the move. Yet it’s hard to imagine beauty pageants still existing at all in a world where men and women truly wish to be valued equally. Maybe some of the old charades are actually still here and have also evolved. Harassment and violence against women are topics at last cast into the limelight, and yet they’re still here. So is unequal pay. Everything has changed, and nothing much has. Mom would have turned 68 years old today.

posted by CM @ 7:11 PM