Tori Murden McClure
The following speech was delivered by Tori Murden McClure at The Woman’s Club of Louisville, September 12, 2018 to celebrate the Kentucky Historical Society marker honoring Susan Look Avery:
Thirty years ago, I skied 750 miles across Antarctica to the geographical South Pole. There were two "older men” on the expedition. One was 54 and the other was 58. They were SO OLD!
Today is my birthday. I am 56. So, it is my delight to be here, not in Antarctica, to celebrate Susan Look Avery who did not begin her serious rabble rousing until she was in her late 60s. She lived to be 97. So, I still have a few years to get my act together.
Mrs. Avery was in her seventies in 1890 when (for the first gathering of women who would form The Woman's Club of Louisville) Susan Look Avery wrote:
Ladies, you have been invited here today for a great purpose. I have felt for a long time that women should not just sit back and talk about what should be done for the welfare of our country, but should get together and do something about it.
Why did she make such a late start?
It is my premise that the history of women, and the stories of women's lives, have been curtailed by myth and legend for much of human history.
The problem goes back as far as Eve.
I went to divinity school, and I went to law school. So, I can tell you... EVE WAS FRAMED!
Margaret Thatcher once said, "If you want something said, choose a man. If you want something done, choose a woman." The devil wanted something done so he chose Eve and not Adam.
What was Eve's crime? She ate from the tree of knowledge, and women been getting into trouble for seeking knowledge ever since! And we still get into trouble for it.
In some circles of mythology, the first woman was not Eve. The first woman was a lady named Pandora. I am sure you have heard the nasty gossip about some box she was supposed to have opened and all the evils of the world being released.
I am here to set the record straight. It was not a box. It was a jar.
In ancient myth a jar often symbolized the female womb. The jar, the vessel, the womb, was opened and all the evils of the world flew out except for hope which remained inside.
This is the hope of future generations that remains inside. I am here to point out that Pandora did not open that "box" all by herself!
So, as a student of religion and theology. I find it interesting that Susan Look Avery grew up in the Baptist tradition. The Looks were Baptists in New England. People who were born into privilege in New England were Anglicans and Episcopalians. When privileged people in New England went rogue they became Unitarians, not Baptists.
The Baptist Church in New England had a reputation for being a little low brow. They were extremely egalitarian. Black people could become Baptists. Indians could become Baptists. The Baptist Church even allowed, on occasion, they allowed women to speak. They allowed women to speak from the Pulpit.
I was raised Presbyterian. Just a few years ago I was invited to speak at an educational institution that is associated with the Presbyterian Church of America. The College used my book, A Pearl in the Storm, as a book in common. I was not permitted to speak from the podium. I had to speak from the floor. I am tall... people still saw me just fine.
Anyway, the point is: Susan Look was born into a religious tradition that tended to view people as equal in the eyes of God.
Baptists were traditionally against the consumption of liquor. And they were against the practice of Slavery.
Susan Look was in her late 20's when she married Benjamin Avery. From that the moment she married her life tends to be depicted as one of privilege. However, if you read the history of Benjamin Avery's life (a history in which his wife is not usually mentioned) things went from difficult to extremely difficult until about a decade after the Civil War.
So, it took Susan 20 or 30 years to reach the life of relative security. There is no doubt that her late life was one of privilege.
Some scholars like to indulge in the shallow sophistication of diminishing people like Susan Look Avery because of their power and privilege. I feel the need to point out that the majority of people who gain power and privilege work very hard to keep it for themselves. They do not work as hard as Susan Look Avery did to share it with others. Susan Look Avery took a different path. By choice.
One scholar seemed baffled by the fact the Susan began her activism late in life. I do not find this baffling in the least. The mythology and cultism that restrains the success of women tends to run out when we reach our later lives.
An example is required.
In 1966, Barbara Welter coined the phrase, “the Cult of True Womanhood” to refer to women like Susan Look Avery. Roughly speaking, this phrase referenced the Victorian era. Women who subscribed the Cult of True Womanhood were personifications of purity, piousness, submissiveness, and domesticity.
My name IS Victoria. I can sometimes manage purity and piousness. (who is laughing) I may not be good at submissiveness, but I am quite domestic. Just ask my husband, I sleep indoors most nights.
I have a longstanding theory that when the lives of women are no longer constrained by conventional scripts they are free to be themselves.
Older women know this to be true.
When they are freed from the expectations of wife, mother, helpmate, even earth mother goddess, mature women can gain a sense of themselves as individuals. My older friends are autonomous, self-accepting, honest, courageous, transcendent, and whole. Even in literature which has seldom been kind to our gender, the older woman is often depicted as a sage.
Isaak Dinesen wrote:
Women, when old enough to have done with the business of being women and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the world.
Dorothy Sayers wrote:
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Susan Look Avery shows us that all that is required for us to claim our freedom is to recognize that things-as-they-are is not how they have to be.
Allow me to paraphrase her words:
"The first desire of every cultivated mind is to take part in the great work of government. When I think of present conditions, not only In South Africa (read Latin America) and the Philippines (read North Korea), but in our own nominally Christian (read vaguely religious) land, I am appalled by the apathy and indifference of intelligent and in some ways thoughtful women. If they could be awakened to their possibilities, opportunities and duties. If they could but realize the fact that they are one-half of the people; that they citizens and that 'the right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged.' I am sure that the world's housekeeping would be improved."
By the world's housekeeping, I am confident she was not talking about vacuum cleaners.
She embraced her power and gained self-assurance enough to share it with others.
"Since the position of white women in the General Federation and elsewhere is assured, and cannot be compromised by the admission of colored women," she wrote in the January 1902. " ... our only question would seem to be, Can we be helpful to them? ...In what lies the essence of character? Is it in the physical organism, is it the color of the skin, or in the spirit, the soul which animates the whole being?"
The Holy Grail is often depicted as a cup with a sword on it. The cup, the jar, Pandora's Box, a symbol of the feminine; the sword is a symbol of the masculine. Together they suggest a unified whole: powerful, nurturing, creative, thoughtful, intuitive, wise and compassionate.
We must cherish women like Susan Look Avery who walk freedom's path and who invite others to join them on that path. The object freedom is not to reduce us all to the same dull patterns, all signing the same songs and listening to our ateries hardening, instead it must be to affirm the richness and variety offered by true diversity.
We must free one another to go everywhere. We must do everything. We must not "mince along timidly." We must eat the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We must affirm ourselves and we must affirm our sisters, we may even affirm our brothers who sing in the choir.
I will give the last word to Susan Look Avery. One of her favorite aphorisms is reported to have been:
"It is bad for the ignorant and vicious to do ill, but it is worse for the educated and honest to do nothing.'"
Thirty years ago, I skied 750 miles across Antarctica to the geographical South Pole. There were two "older men” on the expedition. One was 54 and the other was 58. They were SO OLD!
Today is my birthday. I am 56. So, it is my delight to be here, not in Antarctica, to celebrate Susan Look Avery who did not begin her serious rabble rousing until she was in her late 60s. She lived to be 97. So, I still have a few years to get my act together.
Mrs. Avery was in her seventies in 1890 when (for the first gathering of women who would form The Woman's Club of Louisville) Susan Look Avery wrote:
Ladies, you have been invited here today for a great purpose. I have felt for a long time that women should not just sit back and talk about what should be done for the welfare of our country, but should get together and do something about it.
Why did she make such a late start?
It is my premise that the history of women, and the stories of women's lives, have been curtailed by myth and legend for much of human history.
The problem goes back as far as Eve.
I went to divinity school, and I went to law school. So, I can tell you... EVE WAS FRAMED!
Margaret Thatcher once said, "If you want something said, choose a man. If you want something done, choose a woman." The devil wanted something done so he chose Eve and not Adam.
What was Eve's crime? She ate from the tree of knowledge, and women been getting into trouble for seeking knowledge ever since! And we still get into trouble for it.
In some circles of mythology, the first woman was not Eve. The first woman was a lady named Pandora. I am sure you have heard the nasty gossip about some box she was supposed to have opened and all the evils of the world being released.
I am here to set the record straight. It was not a box. It was a jar.
In ancient myth a jar often symbolized the female womb. The jar, the vessel, the womb, was opened and all the evils of the world flew out except for hope which remained inside.
This is the hope of future generations that remains inside. I am here to point out that Pandora did not open that "box" all by herself!
So, as a student of religion and theology. I find it interesting that Susan Look Avery grew up in the Baptist tradition. The Looks were Baptists in New England. People who were born into privilege in New England were Anglicans and Episcopalians. When privileged people in New England went rogue they became Unitarians, not Baptists.
The Baptist Church in New England had a reputation for being a little low brow. They were extremely egalitarian. Black people could become Baptists. Indians could become Baptists. The Baptist Church even allowed, on occasion, they allowed women to speak. They allowed women to speak from the Pulpit.
I was raised Presbyterian. Just a few years ago I was invited to speak at an educational institution that is associated with the Presbyterian Church of America. The College used my book, A Pearl in the Storm, as a book in common. I was not permitted to speak from the podium. I had to speak from the floor. I am tall... people still saw me just fine.
Anyway, the point is: Susan Look was born into a religious tradition that tended to view people as equal in the eyes of God.
Baptists were traditionally against the consumption of liquor. And they were against the practice of Slavery.
Susan Look was in her late 20's when she married Benjamin Avery. From that the moment she married her life tends to be depicted as one of privilege. However, if you read the history of Benjamin Avery's life (a history in which his wife is not usually mentioned) things went from difficult to extremely difficult until about a decade after the Civil War.
So, it took Susan 20 or 30 years to reach the life of relative security. There is no doubt that her late life was one of privilege.
Some scholars like to indulge in the shallow sophistication of diminishing people like Susan Look Avery because of their power and privilege. I feel the need to point out that the majority of people who gain power and privilege work very hard to keep it for themselves. They do not work as hard as Susan Look Avery did to share it with others. Susan Look Avery took a different path. By choice.
One scholar seemed baffled by the fact the Susan began her activism late in life. I do not find this baffling in the least. The mythology and cultism that restrains the success of women tends to run out when we reach our later lives.
An example is required.
In 1966, Barbara Welter coined the phrase, “the Cult of True Womanhood” to refer to women like Susan Look Avery. Roughly speaking, this phrase referenced the Victorian era. Women who subscribed the Cult of True Womanhood were personifications of purity, piousness, submissiveness, and domesticity.
My name IS Victoria. I can sometimes manage purity and piousness. (who is laughing) I may not be good at submissiveness, but I am quite domestic. Just ask my husband, I sleep indoors most nights.
I have a longstanding theory that when the lives of women are no longer constrained by conventional scripts they are free to be themselves.
Older women know this to be true.
When they are freed from the expectations of wife, mother, helpmate, even earth mother goddess, mature women can gain a sense of themselves as individuals. My older friends are autonomous, self-accepting, honest, courageous, transcendent, and whole. Even in literature which has seldom been kind to our gender, the older woman is often depicted as a sage.
Isaak Dinesen wrote:
Women, when old enough to have done with the business of being women and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the world.
Dorothy Sayers wrote:
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Susan Look Avery shows us that all that is required for us to claim our freedom is to recognize that things-as-they-are is not how they have to be.
Allow me to paraphrase her words:
"The first desire of every cultivated mind is to take part in the great work of government. When I think of present conditions, not only In South Africa (read Latin America) and the Philippines (read North Korea), but in our own nominally Christian (read vaguely religious) land, I am appalled by the apathy and indifference of intelligent and in some ways thoughtful women. If they could be awakened to their possibilities, opportunities and duties. If they could but realize the fact that they are one-half of the people; that they citizens and that 'the right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged.' I am sure that the world's housekeeping would be improved."
By the world's housekeeping, I am confident she was not talking about vacuum cleaners.
She embraced her power and gained self-assurance enough to share it with others.
"Since the position of white women in the General Federation and elsewhere is assured, and cannot be compromised by the admission of colored women," she wrote in the January 1902. " ... our only question would seem to be, Can we be helpful to them? ...In what lies the essence of character? Is it in the physical organism, is it the color of the skin, or in the spirit, the soul which animates the whole being?"
The Holy Grail is often depicted as a cup with a sword on it. The cup, the jar, Pandora's Box, a symbol of the feminine; the sword is a symbol of the masculine. Together they suggest a unified whole: powerful, nurturing, creative, thoughtful, intuitive, wise and compassionate.
We must cherish women like Susan Look Avery who walk freedom's path and who invite others to join them on that path. The object freedom is not to reduce us all to the same dull patterns, all signing the same songs and listening to our ateries hardening, instead it must be to affirm the richness and variety offered by true diversity.
We must free one another to go everywhere. We must do everything. We must not "mince along timidly." We must eat the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We must affirm ourselves and we must affirm our sisters, we may even affirm our brothers who sing in the choir.
I will give the last word to Susan Look Avery. One of her favorite aphorisms is reported to have been:
"It is bad for the ignorant and vicious to do ill, but it is worse for the educated and honest to do nothing.'"