Midnight Mutterings | Florynce Kennedy

Midnight Mutterings: Florynce Kennedy

I had a couple of other lame ideas for this little column in the last few days, but somehow Florynce Kennedy popped into my head. I had never heard much (well anything, really) about her, but I did see her on a television panel in the late seventies, I think, and I always remember what happened on that broadcast.

There was a group of people, mostly men (possibly all men except for one Black woman I didn’t recognize.) One man I did recognize on the panel was William Buckley a conservative columnist, whom I sometimes admired in spite of his political leanings which were so different from my own. I don’t know the platform for the panel, or anything else about it except for Florynce Kennedy’s one liner.

So here’a bit about the panel discussion, as I recall it from those decades ago: The topic seemed to be job appropriateness for men and women and why. For example, should women be allowed to have jobs that required physical strength and if so, how should that be measured and would it harm women’s abilities in childbearing, etc. (This was long before Sally Ride was allowed to ride into space.) Another topic was how much did women in any jobs cause damage from time away from their family responsibilities. You get the drift. This was a long time ago and such issues were discussed in what seems today as a fairly low level of awareness. I don’t think fairness even entered this particular panel discussion, which veered more into issues of whether women would ‘take jobs away from men’ in any level of professionalism or societal need. As I said, I don’t remember who any of the other panelists were except for Kennedy and Buckley. And I never heard of Kennedy again and didn’t realize until tonight when I was prowling the web that Kennedy’s first name had that unique spelling.

So the men on the panel went on and on in what seemed (to me) like adding up the reasons women should be kept out of the workforce except in the most mundane and low paying, unrewarding roles that wouldn’t disturb the status quo. In all of the discussions, Kennedy was silent: listening carefully, but not speaking. I was about to turn my attention elsewhere when Buckley suddenly addressed Kennedy, saying something like: Floraynce, what do you think about what jobs would be good for women?’

Here was her answer as I recall it: ‘Very few jobs actually require the presence of a penis or a vagina, and all the others should be open to anyone.’

The panel discussion came to an abrupt halt. Everyone was silent for a very long pause and eventually an ad appeared and the panel disappeared forever.

Of course I was struck dumb as well. Such a reasonable answer to what had seemed a complex issue only moments before.

Not long after that I took my young daughter to a new-to-us orthodontist. In the early stage of his exam, he pointed out some of the basic things about teeth, especially bite development in children and that my daughter’s issue was a ‘cross bite’ and congratulated the dentist who had noticed it and how unusual that diagnose was for such a young child. (I think she was a young four year old.) He said I should be grateful to him, referring to the dentist, whose name had not been mentioned. I said the discovery had been made by my sister ‘who is a dentist.’

The orthodontist seemed surprised and said so. He then continued the exam, still explaining what he was seeing.

Women dentists were pretty rare at that point in history, and my sister had been required to drop out of dental school after her first year as she was pregnant and was only allowed to rejoin after her baby was born which put her a year behind her classmates. In her fourth and last year, she was again pregnant. This time she was allowed to stay in school, but was not allowed to ride the elevator to the fourth floor with regular staff, students and patients, given her condition. Instead she had to ride the special elevator which connected all the floors of the hospital to the morgue.

I did not tell that story. The orthodontist said he thought that ‘women might be good dentists working with children ‘because of their smaller hands.’ At that point I referred to to the panel discussion I had recently viewed, quoting Kennedy. The orthodontist, hesitated, his hands still in my daughter’s mouth, but no longer moving. Finally he said, sounding a bit defeated by the turn in the conversation, his voice conciliatory, ‘I think women could even be orthodontists.’ He remained our daughter’s orthodontist until we left the Bay Area and discussions were confined to teeth.

https://againstthecurrent.org/atc187/p4906/

Above is a book review. Below is the first paragraph from the book review cited above. I plan to read the book soon.

Somehow Floraynce never made into the group of well known feminists I was familiar with at that time, and I never heard of her again until tonight when I remembered her again and searched the web.

FLORYNCE KENNEDY (1916-2000) is probably most commonly remembered for her distinctive appearance — sporting one of her many cowboy hats and more than one political button — and her profane, humorous, and witty manner of speaking. About reproductive justice, for example, Flo coined the memorable line, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

One more thing in this review that struck me is a reference to a quote from Shirley Chisholm, one of my main heroes, which I always wondered about: Chisholm said that she had ‘suffered more discrimination from her gender than her race.’ This review of the book about Kennedy, contains the answer to my question about Chisholm’s quote.