Feminist Wiles.

[The Pilgrim has come to the profound realization that nothing sold at Wal*Mart was ever designed to flatter the female body.]

The Pilgrim is a friendly and generally cheerful person, accommodating with a streak of conflict avoidance, a woman with a positive father-figure in her childhood and considerable comfort with her own heterosexuality -- someone who likes and values men, frequently preferring their company to women's. The Pilgrim is also a card-carrying feminist who, by virtue of her Ms. subscription frequently receives mail from Gloria Steinem, occasionally quotes Andrea Dworkin and seriously ponders giving money to NOW.

Generally speaking, these aspects of my personality are far from mutually exclusive; at times, I've worried that I've "gone soft" in my feminist principles, especially in light of the first flowering of feminist awareness in some of my friends and colleagues. There are, however, occasional occasions where I'm caught off guard by the force of my own convictions, like the time last summer when I very nearly bit the heads off a team of young presenters whose representation of "Christian feminism" got stuck on the more esoteric aspects of Mary Daly, leaving yet another generation of seminarians with the hazy sense that the two attributes are either irreconcilable or, at best, pretty damn silly. (The presenters, God bless them, took the clenched-teeth points-in-the-guise-of-questions assault -- and the subsequent apology -- with reasonably good humor.)

A more recent encounter occurred this week, amidst a Q&A time following a panel discussion in which matters of sex, faith and gender roles had been discussed with eminently good sense. The commentator, a young-ish gentleman who by virtue of his Ph.D. in psychology speaks on "Sex in Seminary," suggested that the sexual revolution had been entirely detrimental to women, and that Americans would do well to go back to the time of "our grandparents," where "gentlemen" treated women "as they ought to be treated."

Over the course of the roughly 2-minute statement, the Pilgrim went from "twitchy" to "minor conniption." The panel promptly moved on; rightly so, since none of the audience was present to hear either the commentator or an apopleptic Pilgrim. If, however, I had had my wits about me and occasion to speak, this is rather like something I might have said:

"You'll forgive me, sir, if I will take you back to my grandMOTHERS' days -- you see, I never knew my grandfathers, and neither did either my mom or my dad. Let us dwell for a moment on my paternal grandmother -- may she rest in peace: She was born the oldest daughter -- an illegitimate child -- on a small-ish farm. As such, she was put to work, placed in charge of the younger children, and basically treated as a servant. Despite her showing great intellectual promise, her step-father forced her to leave school after the mandatory four years of elementary education. She was a pretty young woman, but no one saw fit to protect her against the sexual harassment she experienced from the older men in the community. When she was 16, she ran away to the big city, where a man more than twice her age with an education and an exciting career took advantage of her. When she found herself pregnant, he shipped her back home to her family -- who, of course, heaped disdain upon her and her bastard, my dad. She never inherited any piece of the farm on which she had spent most of her life working; she died in her 80s, still bitter about the deprivation she had suffered."

"My maternal grandmother had an equally hard, if perhaps less adventurous life: She married a young man on the verge of being shipped off to war. He met his daughter, my mother, a few times before he was killed, leaving his wife without insurance or provision. She instead had to shack up with two of her sisters, an aunt, and a few other female relatives under pathetic circumstances. She had to send her daughter, my mother, to school, but only just long enough until she could earn a living, having completed the mandatory 8 years of schooling."

"You'll forgive me for not being impressed with this vision of how women "ought to be treated." From what I can discern, in those days, women were treated as economic resources, kept on even less education than their male counterparts, exploited sexually without recourse, and left to fend for themselves when they were least prepared to do so. I do not know quite what a "gentleman" -- as opposed to a good man -- is supposed to be, but it appears to me that the "gentlemen" of my grandmothers' generation were no worse and certainly no better than the "boys" of today. There appears to me to be, in fact, no better time to be a woman than today, and it seems to me that we owe this in large part to the good men and women who actively worked as part of the second wave feminist movement."

This, perhaps, is rather like something I might have said to the gentleman in question. But I didn't and the moment passed, and by the time the talk was over, he had disappeared into the night, and here's an unsatisfying ending to an unsatisfying story.