Blog | Sharon Dukett

Women Are Fed Up With Waiting to be Equal

by Sharon Dukett | Dec 9, 2019 | 2 comments

In December of 2017, I visited the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York. It wasn’t until that year that I knew such a place existed. In that location, the first Women’s Rights Convention was held in 1848.

Just a short distance away is the north end of Cayuga Lake, one of the finger lakes of New York. On the south end of Cayuga Lake is Ithaca. At the Ithaca Women’s Center in 1973, I learned to recognize my own oppression as a result of being a woman, which changed my life. I hadn’t realized how close I was to where the movement for women’s freedom began.

In the Declaration of Sentiments, an eye-opening and radical document signed by those at the convention, they stated:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

It goes on to list the many ways this was demonstrated. A great many of those grievances have been addressed and resolved, but not to the extent you would expect considering it was written nearly 170 years ago.

At the Ithaca Women’s Center, I frequently attended a pot luck dinner that was followed by discussion. Many of the attendees were students at Cornell and some of them were law students. I lived south of Ithaca on a commune that was based on equality and rejected gender roles, which gave me the ability to explore this new freedom and understand how the rules and restrictions for women had impacted my life.

I now wonder how many of the law students were familiar with this line from the Declaration that had been written just north of Ithaca:

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

There are those who would say women did have a voice in forming the laws in 1973 because they could vote. But if you’ve ever had a job in leadership or you’ve ever had a boss, you know that creating policies versus having one voice out of many to influence those policies is vastly different. The leadership decides what they will hear or not hear, and what they choose to implement and not implement. If you are not the leader, your voice is but a raindrop in a puddle in the office. Do you believe your voice is heard by your government? I believe that depends on the leaders.

That’s why the women from Cornell Law School in 1973 sat in a room one night and explained to all of us that we were at a moment in time when law schools were finally being forced to admit more women, and how that would change our country. Hillary Clinton, a name none of us knew, had just graduated from law school a few months earlier.

“Men aren’t going to give up control voluntarily,” one of them said. She went on to declare that only by women becoming feminist lawyers could they litigate cases, set precedents, then go on to run for office and change the laws. This was the only way we would find a path to equality.

When my friend and I left the center that evening, we discussed our future on the drive home, and wondered what it would take for us to become feminist lawyers. She was a high school dropout and I had just graduated from high school a few months before. We lived on a commune making crafts to sell and growing food. Neither of us had jobs. The following month she enrolled in the local high school and graduated the following year. We each went on to pursue education and careers, although not as lawyers.

That evening was only one part of my awaking, but it was a big one. I thought of it later while working for the state courts in the technology department. I became a leader there, and participated in improving and replacing the outdated systems and processes in the court houses along with women who were judges and lawyers. These were the women who heeded that call to become lawyers and were using their knowledge to change people’s lives.

In 1972, the year before I sat in that room in Ithaca, the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution had been passed in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and was sent to the states for ratification. My friend and I who attended the Ithaca talk bought bracelets with the letters ERA on them and wore them for years. I think I had to remove mine during childbirth. The first version of that amendment was introduced in Seneca Falls in 1923 on the 75th anniversary of the Woman’s Rights Convention, nearly a hundred years ago.

We are still waiting.

Sharon Dukett

Author

Sharon Dukett is the author of the award-winning memoir No Rules: A Memoir. It is the story of her counterculture journey in the 1970s when she ran away from home to join the hippies at age 16, and how the women's movement awakened her to feminism.

Sharon writes a blog, and has been a technology and project manager, as well as a computer programmer.

Finding Freedom From the Clutter in Life

by Sharon Dukett | Oct 7, 2019 | 4 comments

Nothing frees me like getting rid of stuff. My house, like my life, is always cluttered. Right now as I sit here with my laptop, on my kitchen table there are three electricity bills: one for this house, one for the alarm system in a three family house we own, and one for an apartment that was vacant for ten days. There are also containers of vitamins, one for my husband and one for me. There are three silver bracelets I took off when I got home last night, along with several pads of papers with notes on them, a 20% off coupon from Kohl’s, an ATM receipt, a container with napkins, salt and pepper shakers, two pairs of sunglasses and three magazines. I didn’t include my water bottle, a cup of tea and my cell phone as I will take those with me when I get up.

This is a good day. It’s usually much worse.

My cabinets just about close, I have a junk drawer in every room, closet doors barely shut, and framed photographs cover every table top. To make matters worse, my sister moved in over my garage last week and we finally cleared out the house where she has been living for years. It was our parent’s house until our mother died six years ago. The last boxes of photos, books, tools, and other items I couldn’t part with arrived here over the last couple of weeks, including a piano and a lifetime’s worth of sheet music collected by my mother.

I tend to be a pack rat. This came from my father’s side, not my mother’s. My mother loved to get rid of things, and through her I learned to love it too. It was how she de-stressed. But since she barely owned anything, the things she liked to get rid of were mostly my father’s.

My father had a drawer of Look magazines, trinkets from the war, and other stuff I can’t recall. What I do recall is that when my mother hounded him to clean out this drawer, his solution was to pick out his favorite items and walk them into my room, asking me if I would like them. I always did. That’s how I ended up with his most prized possession: a Look magazine about Flying Saucers from 1967. Of all the clutter I have cleared from my life, this part of my father has stayed with me. Besides winning the lottery, his strongest wish was to know the truth about UFO’s before he died. Neither came to fruition.

I seldom clean out clutter. I manage the everyday stuff enough to keep it from turning into “Hoarders,” but it nags at me. And the more it accumulates, the more stressed and disorganized I feel. There are times when I am paralyzed by inaction and overwhelmed by a lack of control. When this happens, attacking the source gets me motivated again.

Once the urge strikes, I try to take advantage of it before my hoarder self regains control. I feel as though I am shape shifting between being my mother the disposer and my father the collector until I lose the ability to continue. I must devote myself completely to the task and not get distracted.

This year in particular, my husband and I developed reoccurring piles heading to Goodwill, or the library, or the coat drive. And our recycle bin has to be emptied several times a week.

Still there is more that needs to go. I have folders full of feedback from writers groups for the memoir I finally finished this year, some dating back to the 1990s. I just discovered stacks of information from technical schools and colleges my son had considered fifteen years ago. I recently tossed out my thirteen years worth of performance reviews from my last job. I retired two years ago. They seemed important when I walked out the door, but not now.

Clearing out my belongings makes space not only in my house, but in my life. Those old memoir reviews need to disappear so I can move on to my new work. I held onto my resumes and performance reviews from my job because the day I left, I didn’t know who I would be when I wasn’t a Deputy Director of Information Technology anymore.

Now I do.

I am an author who needs room to stack boxes of books. And a traveler who needs a location for suitcases. And a grandmother who needs space for her grandchildren’s toys. And a follower of yoga who lays her mat alongside her husband’s mat in the morning and does downward dogs. I am a woman who needs a clear mind and a clear space to continue to become the person still in progress and forever changing.

Sharon Dukett

Author

Sharon Dukett is the author of the award-winning memoir No Rules: A Memoir. It is the story of her counterculture journey in the 1970s when she ran away from home to join the hippies at age 16, and how the women's movement awakened her to feminism.

Sharon writes a blog, and has been a technology and project manager, as well as a computer programmer.

10 Secrets to a Loving Relationship That Lasts

by Sharon Dukett | Sep 19, 2019 | 2 comments

My husband and I have been a couple for nearly forty years. In my younger days before we met, I had doubts that any relationship could last this long. Mine typically ended after painful experiences. My current husband and I were both married before, and our first marriages were riddled with mistakes.

Fortunately, we each grew from those mistakes, and avoided many of the same pitfalls as we built our lives together.

Trial and error overshadowed my earlier alliances, but I discovered what worked for me and what didn’t, and enjoyed the differences in my second marriage.

Here are some lessons that I learned. Perhaps you, or someone close to you, can use these to avoid the pain that I felt while learning them, and experience the joy that I finally found in a loving, lasting relationship.

Be friends. Good friends enjoy each other’s company, play together, help one another, offer comfort and build each other up.
Be lovers. Sex needs to be on your agenda forever. Regardless of your busy lives and conflicting demands, prioritize this time together and set up an agreeable schedule. If you feel desire fading away, work to reawaken it before you feel like strangers. But don’t place pressure on your partner. Be there for each other without being demanding. If you have physical or emotional health issues, explore ways you can pleasure one another while maintaining physical closeness. And above all, be loving.
Have your own money. There may be times in a relationship when this is not always possible, but don’t let that continue indefinitely. You each need the satisfaction of earning your own money, and the freedom of spending it without asking for permission. But always pay the bills first.
Don’t run yourselves into debt. Nothing ends relationships faster than financial problems. When money is tight, you each need to sacrifice for both of you to survive. Too many people waste money on possessions they don’t need and jeopardize their finances to pay for them. Don’t make it tougher by taking on debt unless it will educate you and improve your circumstances, or create financial security.
Drop old baggage. Forget about your parent’s marriage, your previous marriage, or your partner from the past. That relationship isn’t this one. Make sure you discuss any assumptions you each have about being a couple, then throw out the old junk and build a new, healthy relationship.
Ignore imperfections. Everyone has something you don’t like about them including your partner. Accept that no one is perfect and leave those flaws alone as long as they aren’t serious. Focus on the characteristics you love and overlook the ones you don’t.
Respect each other. When in public or among friends, don’t put each other down, criticize, belittle, or embarrass your partner. If you have an argument, have it privately without demeaning one another and keep it fair. Your goal is to resolve your differences, not to win.
Assume trust. This can be difficult, and who hasn’t been burned before this? But to commit to one another, you need a trusting heart and mind. If one day that trust is broken, deal with it then, but don’t destroy your love by imagining what hasn’t happened.
Support each other’s dreams. They may not all blossom, but encouraging each other to grow and become your best selves will not cause your partner to outgrow you; rather it will strengthen the bond between you by lifting each other up. Plus you will always have something interesting to discuss at the end of the day.
Work as a team. Here is a powerful exercise that taught my husband and me this in our early days as a couple. The two of you step into a single canoe and begin paddling down a river through small, then larger rapids. You are each responsible for either steering the canoe or pushing it away from the rocks, and you must coordinate these activities as the current rushes you forward. You may find yourselves panicking as you scream at one another and blame each other for mishaps. Eventually you must stop this and focus on working together to be successful. Once you do, it’s magic.

Sharon Dukett

Author

Sharon Dukett is the author of the award-winning memoir No Rules: A Memoir. It is the story of her counterculture journey in the 1970s when she ran away from home to join the hippies at age 16, and how the women's movement awakened her to feminism.

Sharon writes a blog, and has been a technology and project manager, as well as a computer programmer.

Are There Secrets Between Best Friends?

by Sharon Dukett | Oct 2, 2018 | 3 comments

When I was eighteen in 1973, I lived on a commune in upstate New York outside of Ithaca. There I met Patty, not her real name. Our birthdays were exactly one month apart. We were younger than the others who were in their mid to late twenties or more, and we were outnumbered by the men.

Patty and I bonded immediately, and over the months we lived together at the commune, and later in a rental house, we became inseparable. We went to pot luck dinners at the Ithaca Women’s Center where we shared stories with other women about our experiences and feelings as we explored our new feminism. We filled out a lengthy detailed survey about our sexuality from a researcher named Shere Hite, which later became part of the famous Hite Report, considered the most extensive study ever done on women’s sexuality. We read our answers out loud to each other which included our sexual fantasies, and what we had and had not done. We told each other about our “first time,” then laughed together as we made a list of our sexual partners and rated each of them. She was hesitant at first to tell me one of them was my then boyfriend, but it was before we met so I didn’t mind.

We discussed having children one day, and what we would name them. Patty, who was white, imagined having a daughter who was biracial that she would name Fantasia. Her daughter would be like the Disney movie that blended music and animation together. I wasn’t sure yet about children. My boyfriend at the time made it clear he wanted none.

We sang songs together while walking through the fields on our commune property. We felled trees with a chainsaw and chopped the wood into pieces. We snuck off to drink milkshakes in town while we went to the laundromat. She told me about her young marriage and divorce and the day she almost killed her husband. She explained the scars on her body and the glass that sometimes emerged from her forehead resulting from a terrible car accident. When she was fourteen, the first time she drove, she slammed into a telephone pole and was thrown through the windshield. She had been in a coma afterwards.

We wore each other’s clothes, read the same books, and loved the same music. We even hitched hiked together to Ohio to see Leon Russell in concert.

Over time we moved away from each other, her to Florida and me to Connecticut, but our first babies were born less than a year apart. She shipped me her maternity clothes when she was done with them. We kept in touch for many years, and saw each other occasionally. I still have many of her letters.

As time went by, we became busy with our lives. Sometimes a few years went by with nothing but a note around Christmas. Then email came along and we started communicating more often again. She was in graduate school and had an award winning photography project on a website. I was able to view it and share the excitement with her. She sent me photos of her son sky diving and her daughter’s first child – Patty’s first grandchild. After one Christmas I sent her some family photos and didn’t hear back.

Several months later, there was an email from her son in my inbox. I froze, terrified to open it. I was shaking when I clicked on it and it turned out to be as bad as I feared. She had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer only months before and had passed away. I am crying now while writing this and remembering that moment. How I long to share my recent experiences with her that only she would understand, like how I met the editor of Ms. Magazine, a new publication we both cherished that first summer we met as we were discovering how to become stronger women.

After she passed, I googled her name on the internet hoping for more artwork and made a startling discovery. She was creating a work of photography she called A Show Of Hands, dedicated to child sexual abuse survivors, and she was one of them. She was collecting hand prints of survivors which she planned to turn into an ocean of blue to exhibit. My first reaction was shock, and then I experienced hurt, thinking how she never trusted me enough to share this with me.

As I thought through our old conversations, I started to make sense of things she had said and I had not understood. I recalled having a discussion with her and another woman who was talking about being a virgin, and Patty said, “I wish I could be a virgin again.” I had thought that was an odd thing to wish for. It was critical to her to be a strong woman. She brought this up frequently. When her son was born, she discussed how she wanted him to understand that women are strong, and she would need to show him that strength. Years later she shared that she was a recovering alcoholic, which took me by surprise since neither of us drank when I knew her best, and I wondered what had brought her to that point.

Then I read these words about her own handprint on her photography blog:

“I choose to do mine as a reverse shadow because I wanted the effect of being tattooed. What was done to me one summer when I was a child forever altered my life, it is permanent and can never be removed. It left scars that went unnoticed or ignored for many years. But once my denial was too painful to continue, my healing finally began.”

In 1973, she and I were living in an age of sexual liberation and she was doing her best to join in that parade. How painful it must have been for her to carry that inside, unable to share that with anyone.

It was only this week that I realized it wasn’t only she who didn’t share everything. I never told her about that time on the Boston Common. I never told her about leaving the James Gang concert with a group of guys I thought were my friends. Because I never told anyone. Because in a way nothing really happened, or so I convinced myself. It just almost happened, so that didn’t warrant even thinking about it, much less telling anyone. I could pretend it never happened at all. Telling someone would make it too real. Even though it was forty-seven years ago, like another woman recently shared, I can still hear the laughter, the talking to one another like I wasn’t even there. Why would you tell anyone about that when you don’t want to even think about it?

I never even told my best friend.

Sharon Dukett

Author

Sharon Dukett is the author of the award-winning memoir No Rules: A Memoir. It is the story of her counterculture journey in the 1970s when she ran away from home to join the hippies at age 16, and how the women's movement awakened her to feminism.

Sharon writes a blog, and has been a technology and project manager, as well as a computer programmer.

Sisterhood: Standing on the Edge Between Love and Grief

by Sharon Dukett | Jul 17, 2018 | 0 comments

When I was sixteen, I ran away from home. Not completely however. My twenty-one year old sister went with me. You might think it was the other way around, that she left and I went with her. I don’t think she would have gone however, if I hadn’t talked her into it. I was always the trouble maker. Or the “idea person,” depending on how you look at it. My life as a runaway was certainly easier because of her. She had money saved, so we had an apartment, food to eat, locked doors. We also had each other for companionship, support, and love. Mostly she took care of me, more than I realized at the time. I just took it for granted that she would. Even when I ventured off on my own, she eventually followed at first and even saved my life on at least one occasion, although she never knew it at the time. That was in 1971. Forty-seven years later, our lives are quite different. Several weeks ago, her long time companion and true love of thirty-five years passed away from cancer, following a long illness during which she cared for him until the end. Now I am doing the best I can to take care of her. I don’t know if it’s enough. I have been fortunate because I have not yet had to live through the intense grief of losing a spouse. I have seen others go through it, but like sex or childbirth, I believe it is one of those things that can’t be understood by hearing about it. My sister is a strong woman, yet fragile. We text throughout the day and talk, and have established a new ritual of going out on little trips once a week. In addition to grief, she suffers from health issues that make her winded easily and fearful to push herself too much. She may never be free of the burden of her own body and the restrictions it places on her, yet I keep imaging if only she could make a bit more effort each time, she would surely become healthier and robust. I have no way of knowing if this is true. Is grief holding her back? Does it help her or hurt her if I try to coax her to come along with me? Forty-seven years ago we changed each other’s lives forever. She once picked me up from the abyss and dragged me back into the world. I hope I can do the same for her.

Sharon Dukett

Author

Sharon Dukett is the author of the award-winning memoir No Rules: A Memoir. It is the story of her counterculture journey in the 1970s when she ran away from home to join the hippies at age 16, and how the women's movement awakened her to feminism.

Sharon writes a blog, and has been a technology and project manager, as well as a computer programmer.

Welcome to my new website and blog

by Sharon Dukett | Jul 17, 2018 | 0 comments

Welcome everyone to my new website and blog. I am thrilled to be launching this at last! Mentally I feel like the people in the photo above. Despite thirteen years of managing web development projects and people, actually sitting down to figure this all out and pull it together by myself has been an enormous challenge. It didn’t help that all the documentation I kept reading ensured me this was so simple anyone could do it. Yet here it is following a number of long days and nights doing nothing but working on this. If you find problems, please let me know. There are a number of ways to contact me on this site. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy my first blog on Sisterhood: Standing on the Edge Between Love and Grief.