feminist perspective (1)

Women/Feminists: The Struggle Against Fear

Pauli Murray (left), an African-American woman, and Eleanor Roosevelt (First Lady) during the 1930s-50s, had a long letter writing friendship. Barbara just finished reading this book and gave me a good quote on Pauli talking about fear (as a social determinant of her health). See the Forum post I just put up with this discussion re: my becoming a health critic and wanting to reform health policy by including a serious analysis of fear(ism).

Before the quote (see below), one ought to know a few things of important historical background. Pauli Murray struggled under combining forces of oppression, she was poor, black, a lesbian, and extremely smart and spoke her mind. All of which, one could say she was courageous for sure, and yet, she paid an enormous price because of the chronic condition of intersectional oppressions (i.e., inequity due to social determinants of health that were not of her choosing; she was born into them). Eleanor Roosevelt is important in the battle against fear and health and justice inequities in the USA (as was her husband F. D. Roosevelt, famous for his speech on "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."). Eleanor, assisted FDR with developing the "four freedoms" early in the 1940s, and Eleanor was eventually a delegate to the UN and began to work on this and make it a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (of which "freedom from fear" is one of the most important of those four freedoms). See the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights.

Now, to the quote from Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice – Patricia Bell Scott (NY: Alfred Knopf, 2016):

 p. 221-22 – Murray: “I cannot live with fear, and [yet]  the doctor has just told me I have a nervous heart.”  Murray: “I call it a frightened heart.”  “It has been frightened all of my life because of race. Now it is frightened because of something deeper than race—the atmosphere which threatens one’s integrity—an atmosphere of fear.” [she is referring to the McCarthy Era "Red Scare" campaign of which she was accused of participating in, wrongly--she shared this with ER, admitting she herself was having to seek a doctor for this condition and her brother was lobotomized, and left with no initiative after that, Murray herself had been in and out of mental psych wards off and on]

p. 221 – “For Murray, the McCarthy hearings were ‘like garbage thrown upon the shining surface of the Supreme Court decision.’ That the questions witnesses faced were often based on misinformation, outright inaccuracies and ‘derogatory material’ unnerved her. ‘As a serum against fear,’ Murray committed herself to writing one letter of personal faith each day to some friend or person.” [she also smoked a pack and half of cigs a day, exacerbated by her general ongoing anxiety]

[bold added for emphasis] [Note: Pauli Murray's strategy to manage her fear/anxiety is brilliant and very much reinforces the fear response continuum that feminists have come up with doing research, whereby there is not merely a fight or flight, or freeze response built-in, but a 'tend and befriend' response when fear is present, and this is the letter writing/reaching out strategy that Murray employs so well, including how effective she was in persuading Eleanor Roosevelt to speak out on African-American issues among other things in the struggle for social justice.]

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As a fearologist, I am always critically examining the discourses of (particularly white men) who like to talk about fear and how they are so courageous and so on, and they like to use their formulaic approaches and tell the rest of the world this is what you can do too to overcome fear, be brave, be heroic, be courageous, and even fearless.

Such simplistic discourses, based on the psychology of individual fear and its management, do not speak well or accurately to the larger context of the social determinants of health and the role of chronic fear (and constructed 'fear') amongst the marginalized--that is, those who are not white privileged males. This is why womanist and feminist perspectives are so important to take into account when we make any claims about the "truths" about fear and its management/education.

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