We Are All Equal (response article)

Many of the lessons my father taught me emerged in conversations during my drive to school in the mornings, and one of the most significant ones was delivered with the following words: “Always remember that you are not better than anyone else in the world, and that no one is better than you. We are all of equal value, regardless of the position we might hold in life.”

His lesson was one that I not only heard, but lived. I developed in the richness of a large extended family and engaged Latino community in Puerto Rico where women were valued just as much as men. I experienced my family as typical, although I am sure there were variations, as in any culture, and I often thought to myself that women “wore the pants” in our family, because much of the meaning making that I observed was done by mothers, sisters, aunts, and daughters. The men in my family participated in decision making, but women always seemed to have a strong voice, both in their homes and in their communities.

During my adolescence, my parents chose to migrate to the U.S. and as I entered that critical period of identity formation I was faced with the contrast between what I had learned about womanhood in my native cultural context and what I experienced as a young Puerto Rican female living in a white, working-class community. My 12-year-old female peers were overly concerned with their appearance, with fitting in. They seemed fragile and primarily focused on efforts to attract the attention of boys. While it was difficult to articulate to myself, some of what I observed showed a

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striking contrast. I felt different from my female peers, but not demoralized—in my mind, I knew I had it right: I was not any better than anyone else, but no one was better than me. My voice counted, although it was certainly silenced in that its value seemed to have diminished in my new cultural context.

I chose autonomy, and it did bring with it some isolation. The cost of giving myself up to a culture of deprecation of women was too great. I observed how this new culture limited my female peers, their self-esteem, their self-efficacy, their assertiveness, their motivations, their ability to be themselves and to love themselves. The experience of being different became quite intense. However, the isolation I experienced was in some ways quite empowering. I did not want to become a “typical” American woman as I understood her, and my rejection of the gender norms I observed gave me the freedom to be myself and to value the person I was becoming.

I was lucky later to find a life partner who experienced me as an equal, even when his family did not. We experienced some challenges around gender norms as our relationship developed, but we seemed to have the willingness to listen to each other, to see our relationship from multiple perspectives, and I imagine this was essential for our success in maintaining a strong commitment to our marriage.

Interestingly it was later, during my graduate training in clinical psychology that I again had to reflect carefully on the tension between self-actualization and self-effacing experience. I remember clearly a moment of conversation about the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) item that asks whether one has ever wished to be of the opposite sex. I was astounded to learn that when women answer this question in the negative (when they report they have not ever wished to be of the opposite sex), the response is considered deviant. I thought, how could this be? I had never wished to be a man…ever!

I was flooded with many of the feelings I had experienced during my early acculturation, feelings of sadness and loss for the many women in our American and Latino cultures who have at some point had to feel this sense of self-deprecation. While I had certainly wished that I lived in a world where equality was not an illusion, where women and men were similarly valued and equally empowered, I had never wished to be anything but my female self. In my mind, there was absolutely no reason to wish to be a man

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other than to have the privilege that our social context ascribes to men. I felt sad and frustrated to see that the response to this social injustice centered more often on self-deprecation than on social reconstruction. My feelings of sadness and frustration were so significant, that they inspired my dissertation, which turned out to be an exploration of gender role attitudes in Anglo and Latino Americans. The topic of my dissertation, “Latino Gender Roles and their Relationship to Acculturation, Self-esteem, and Life Satisfaction” (2001), was also inspired by my strong sense of disagreement with much of what had been written at the time about Latino gender roles, which were often described as highly traditional.

This simply had not been my experience, and the contrast again speaks to Marilyn Charles’s point about perspective: “What we have learned from oppressed minorities strikingly reveals how information can be visible to those who are cast to the side and marginalized that may be largely invisible from within the frame of the dominant culture.” My husband and I have four adolescent children: two boys and two girls. I do fear for them because they were not privileged to live in a culture more like my native one. However, I do hope that our family has been a place where each of us feels equally valued, from the moment we take our first breath, until the last. Although changing social structures is certainly very slow work, the gift of parenthood provides an opportunity for us to empower our sons and daughters to love and to value equally.

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