relate in any detail, that I learned all about gender in adolescence, even as I moved against gender distinctions and refused to accept gender limitations.
Plunged into a coeducational high school at fourteen, I soon caught on that there were tremendous liabilities to being a girl. There was no such thing as gender equality. No one had yet spoken the word "feminism," and my view of life soon involved negotiating my way through a minefield in which "good girls" could be destroyed. A raft of activities could result in one losing one's reputation, and at the very worst, one could get pregnant, have to give up the baby for adoption, or one's entire life might be destroyed.
In this rigid Catholic world, "going steady" with one boyfriend was a mortal sin. It was a case of deliberately putting oneself into the occasion of sin, and that was sin. My mind revolted against this, but I couldn't come up with satisfactory or enduring principles. Any kissing was a mortal sin.
One might play something of a game with a boy involving only venial sin, but this was dangerous, as well as being socially necessary if one was to have any boyfriend at all.
Rock-and-roll music took this little world by storm, and it was tolerated at our Catholic school dances, but much frowned upon by the priests and the nuns. Elvis Presley was regarded with rank suspicion, and it did seem finally that to be a successful American teenager, one had to walk a moral tightrope, with Hellfire beneath it, and no net.
I didn't like all this. I didn't like being a teenager any more than I liked being a child. I deeply resented that "a girl" could get a bad reputation because of the way she dressed. I thought this was inane and unjust. Just about all the rules that pertained to gender struck confusion in me, and none really converted me to any view that penalized a woman at the expense of a man in a pure moral sense.
In sum, the society seemed confused. I didn't become confused.
The teenage state was, if anything, less desirable than that of a child. There was an even greater criminal taint attached to it apparently in the eyes of adults. And it seemed to me that most of what I heard about "youth" from adults was entirely negative, and to a large extent unconvincing and hypocritical.
I was told repeatedly, for example, that "youth was wasted on the young," but I retained the obdurate conclusion that my youth was not wasted on me at all, but was wasted on older people around me. I still believe this.
I passed through these adolescent years, with considerable misery, and with some happy experiences, but the lessons -
that girls were responsible for keeping boys in line sexually, that good girls never gave in until the marriage night, that brides, pure as lilies, ought to want husbands who had acquired a little experience, that housework was noble and important, that marriage was to be desired over the single state, that one should have as many children as God chose to send to one - these lessons made little or no lasting impression on me. I remained a person in rebellion, and continued to gravitate to subjects beyond my immediate milieu.
I needn't linger on the blunders or trials of this period, except to say that religion became mixed up with it.
I think I lost my intimate conversation with God during this period. I think I stopped talking to Him and looking to Him to help me - long before I lost my faith.
It became almost impossibly difficult to disentangle the moral teachings of my church from all the "teachings" of the blue-collar class in which I was brought up as to what a
"good girl" represented. I spent far too much mental energy trying to distinguish class values from core Catholic values, class traditions from genuine Christian truths. And I didn't achieve any success.
But never in my mind did God Himself become connected with gender, or the gender morass in which I found myself.
Never was I convinced that Jesus Christ, Our Lord, wanted me to be a certain kind of good blue-collar-class girl. My deepest convictions transcended gender. The God in whom I believed transcended gender. Reason and conscience and heart told me these things. Yes, God was He, but He was infinitely bigger than a man. God belonged to the wild and rambunctious female saints as surely as He belonged to the male saints.