“Women have Agency; Women have Value; Women have Authority to make decisions about their own lives and their own bodies. We have got to respect women in this country.” Kamala Harris, Town Hall Meeting, Spartan South Carolina, May 28, 2019
When my editor told me I should find ways to give my protagonist more agency, I wasn’t sure what she meant. I didn’t recall ever having heard the word agency applied to a quality a character should have, although I imagined everyone else must know exactly what it meant for a character (person) to have agency. Of course, assuming that everyone else but me knew something important when I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about pointed to the meaning of agency, and to the fact that I apparently hadn’t got it.
I told myself my editor understood agency in a way that I did not because she’s a millennial and I was born in the mid-twentieth century. The concept of agency must be a thing young people understood, but my generation had missed .
I put the question to Kathy, a smart and funny friend and retired teaching colleague, and a peer. She had just read the umpteenth draft of Fruit of the Devil, and was giving me her critique. “My editor says Aurora should have more agency,” I confided in Kathy. “Do you know what agency is? How do you know when someone has it, and how do you get it?”
“Of course,” she said, ever the self-assured and somewhat bemused Canadian. “Let’s go outside to the garden and I’ll explain it to you the way I used to explain it to my second graders.”
Second graders? Clearly, the concept of agency had left me behind long ago.
In the garden, Kathy chose a short stick from a pile of recently pruned plum tree branches and pinched a few inches off a tender nasturtium stem that was insinuating itself into a corner of the raspberry patch.
Kathy pointed the nasturtium stem at me and said, “Push on this.” The greenery was so limp it gave way and flopped to the ground as soon as I touched it. “Now,” said Kathy, pointing the plum twig at me. “Push on this.”
I pushed on the twig with the flat of my hand and the twig pushed back, leaving an impression on my palm. There may have been a slightly flexible give, but twiggy sprang back to her full size as soon as I removed the pressure.
“This twig has agency,” Kathy laughed. “Agency is what you have when you stand up for yourself, what you have when you don’t let any thing or anyone push you around, belittle or diminish you. You have agency when you know who you are, believe in yourself, and pursue your own dreams without allowing anyone or anything to thwart you. When you have agency, you have power; you are empowered.”
Well, as they say, “Writing is rewriting.” While endlessly revising my novel over the last five years, I’ve tried to dive ever deeper into my protagonist’s emotions and motivations. When I consider the arc of Aurora’s character, I now see that at the beginning of her story she readily gives herself away, slavishly trying to meet the expectations of the social order and doing the bidding of authority figures who want to diminish and control her. But as the plot moves forward, she’s in the process of becoming, of gaining self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-love. She ultimately overcomes her fearful sense of unworthiness, her sense that there is something wrong with her, that she’s not “okay,” and she finally develops healthy self-respect and personal power—agency.
Thinking about the concept of agency as it applies to my protagonist, to myself, to all women, and to all other people who are marginalized in their society, I realize that understanding and actualizing agency is not an “age” thing. Long ago, my grandmothers—the suffragettes—and my great great grandmothers—the witches—had agency.
Although understanding agency is not an “age thing,” still, there is a big difference in the degree to which—compared to women of the twentieth century—young women living in the “Free World” today feel entitled—free to be themselves, free to develop to their full potentials unafraid and unfettered by restricting societal norms. Young women I meet these days are often surprised by my reticent wimpiness, and I occasionally feel put off by what seems like the self-entitled pushiness of some millennials. However, I do love that there have been so many gains in my lifetime in what we in the 60’s called “women’s liberation.”
But now, all the progress made in the twentieth century to lift up women—greater access to higher education and traditionally all male professions, control over money and resources, and control over one’s own reproduction—is in danger of being lost! During the three-year reign of Jabba the Hutt defiling the White House, our laws assuring social and environmental justice and our very democracy have been viciously attacked and torn apart.
Unfortunately, women who today feel entitled to take control over their own destiny have a false sense of security. We are actually skating on thin ice: we never cemented into law a guarantee of equal rights for women. Thanks in part to the Stockholm syndrome (the psychological effect that causes victims of imprisonment and torture to side with their jailers), not all women in the US stood behind the Equal Rights Amendment when it was going through Congress and we had the chance to pass it into law. The ERA—guaranteeing equal pay for equal work and other protections for women’s rights—never got passed! We became complacent living in our newly won house of freedom, and ultimately forgot that we never finished installing the security system.
The threat most directly impacting women at this time is the wave of inhumane abortion bans sweeping the red states and threatening to overturn Roe v. Wade. The right of a woman to obtain a legal and safe abortion is the ultimate determinate of agency. If a woman has no say over when, and whether or not, she wants to make the life-long commitment to grow a life inside her, give birth, and mother a child, then she has no agency.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated, “It is essential to woman’s equality with man that she be the decisionmaker, that her choice be controlling.” RBG declared, “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices.”
If you have not yet seen these two outstanding films about Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I recommend that you put them on your watch list:
On May 21, 2019, the anniversary of women gaining the right to vote in the US, I joined women all around the globe demonstrating for women’s right to legal safe abortions. Unless All women Awaken, Rise, and Fight, we’ll descend into a Handmaiden’s Tale nightmare, into hellish hypocritical so-called “Christian” Sharia Law in the USA . Sisters, Mothers, Daughters, Granddaughters—Assert your agency NOW!
