Posted by:
Nightingale
(
)
Date: March 25, 2022 08:14PM
Here’s SC’s thread about defining a woman:
https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2422506Here is an account from the Smithsonian magazine about Gladys Bentley, a “gay African-American blues singer” in the 20s and 30s. Challenges she faced in her life, especially in post-WWII US but before as well, arose from the conservative norms of gender and sexuality of her time.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-great-blues-singer-gladys-bentley-broke-all-the-rules?utm_source=pocket-newtabHere are a few excerpts but the full article summarizing her life story is well worth reading:
“In 1952, Bentley wrote her life story in an article for Ebony magazine, entitled “I Am A Woman Again.” In the article, she described the life of a glamorous performer who silently struggled with herself. “For many years, I lived in a personal hell,” she wrote. “Like a great number of lost souls, I inhabited that half-shadow no man’s land which exists between the boundaries of the two sexes.”
“After a lifetime of loneliness, she wrote that she had undergone medical treatment that awakened her “womanliness.” She claimed to have married twice, though Wilson says that one of the men denied ever having been married to Bentley. The article was accompanied by photos of Bentley wearing a matronly white housedress and performing the role of homemaker—preparing meals, making the bed for her husband, wearing a dress and flowers in her hair.
“Scholars who have studied Bentley’s life said that the story Bentley told about being “cured” in the Ebony article was likely a response to the McCarthy Era and its hostile claims that homosexuality and communism were threats to the country.
“Gladys Bentley should be remembered for being a gender outlaw,” says Wilson. “She was just defiant in who she was, and for gender and sexuality studies today, she shows the performance of gender.”
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Here’s Gladys performing on the Groucho Marx show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-LTJNasTMcThis is an amazing account of her life and talents (Adult):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LeDbXK7H20Was Gladys Bentley a woman? I guess it depends on which definition a person wants to use. Gladys herself spoke of living “in the boundaries between the sexes”. I think her expressions of relief at being “a woman again”, following medical treatment, were a reflection of the times in which she lived. (Have we come that far from that – not so much it would seem). Partly too it could have been the imperative to earn a living in the face of discrimination.
The definition of most importance is whatever the individual person chooses or describes themselves to be, based on their own experience and knowledge about themselves. Nobody is appointed, divinely or otherwise, to decide what the definition should be or that it is written in stone to last through the ages. Scientific knowledge has changed our understanding of biology. I can only hope that increasing knowledge of biology can inform religious teachings much more than has occurred to date. Some writings in stone are best left to history.
One of the narrators in the second video above concludes: “She is someone we can all look up to. She invited us to be our whole selves and that’s what we all want to be.”
Is that too much to ask for in this life? I don’t think so.