Category Archives: Women's lives

What she left

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“What will I leave of myself?” asked nurse and poet Christine Wiebe (1954-2000) in her journal. The question found its way into a limited edition book, “How to Stay Alive,” produced for family and friends, and now into excerpts carried in the latest issue of the online CMW Journal. I hear it, honest and poignant, as it weaves through the 79 online pages of the piece, and through her poems, and as I read her mother Katie Funk Wiebe’s short biography of her daughter, then a short analysis of Christine’s work by Ellen Kroeker (and the poem, “Her Spirit, a Small Bird with Color”), and the reflections of her sister Joanna and Jeff Gundy Christine, and… well the whole issue, in fact.

Christine faced many health challenges, including lupus and heart attacks and eventually the complete collapse of her body and death. She was interested in healing — of others, of herself. She was both Catholic and Mennonite. And most of all she wanted to be a writer. And she struggled — in the way one’s thoughts turn round and round in journal writing — with those dreams (and others) and what might not be accomplished.

On the evidence of these articles, she left more than she knew perhaps, for her mother, sisters, friends, colleagues, clients, especially in terms of personal interaction. But in addition, and here I speak as one of those now reading these gathered words by and about her, these frank and lovely, almost heartbreaking words, I want to answer her, you left us all this: a gift of what you saw and strove for and accepted.

I close with one whimsical foretaste of Christine’s art and poetry from her journal (used with permission):

Everyone has an angel.
Angels have friends.
Imagine all the angels around
your bed
before you sleep.

Claiming a blessing

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Katie Funk Wiebe longed for a blessing from her church — the Mennonite Brethren — and she’s getting it tomorrow evening (April 24) at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, with the presentation of a festschrift in her honour: The Voice of a Writer: Honoring the Life of Katie Funk Wiebe, edited by Valerie Rempel and Doug Heidebrecht.

I’ll be reviewing the book for the MB Herald, but I haven’t read it yet. Instead, after finishing the biography of Gloria Steinem mentioned in an earlier post, I re-read Funk Wiebe’s own telling of her story, in You Never Gave Me a Name (Cascadia, 2009). I’d read it in manuscript form in order to contribute a blurb for the cover, but wanted to come back to it in book form.

Which I’ve done….

The title strikes me as unusual, even a little odd. But it’s provocative, and in that provocation leads directly into the arc and accomplishment of Katie Funk Wiebe’s  life.

The plain name she was given by her immigrant parents didn’t seem nearly sophisticated enough for the dreams of the talented young woman; she preferred Kay. When she married, she became Mrs. Walter Wiebe, and when he was ordained, she was Mrs. Rev. Walter Wiebe, both names marking a certain (increasing) status but hiding her own. As a professor at Tabor College she was Mrs. Wiebe at first, and then as formalities disappeared for a new generation, simply Katie.  To her children she was Mom. Then, as a writer and speaker she used Katie Funk Wiebe, and gained name recognition.

Other things were given her: a particular heritage; a church unsure of its identity (evangelical, Anabaptist, fundamentalist?) and limiting of women; and the challenges of widowhood, single parenting, and college teaching. Inside what she was given is implied all that she wasn’t given as well — which she had to discover,  wrestle with, accept, or create.

In the “namelessness” of being a widow, a woman in the Mennonite Brethren church, and an older person, Katie Funk Wiebe named herself. She knew the loneliness of being set aside, hidden, unblessed, but she persevered to assert herself, to speak up for herself and others, and to claim blessing for herself even when it wasn’t granted by people or institutions. Continue reading →

Lives of two feminists

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What am I reading these days?

Well, thanks for wondering (if you did, that is). I’ve been reading the lives of two feminists: Gloria Steinem and Katie Funk Wiebe. (I’m not sure KFW called herself a feminist, but she dared call herself a theologian, so close enough;  plus I know one of her daughters gives her that label.)

These two women were born about a decade apart. Funk Wiebe is 85 now, and Steinem is 76. In many respects they were quite different, but both are writers, and both are known for their leadership in the women’s movement, Steinem as an internationally recognized icon of the “revolution,” and Funk Wiebe on the smaller but still significant stage of the Mennonite world.

I picked up The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995) at the local used bookstore. I was drawn to it for two reasons. It seemed a good way to recall an era that I, though younger, also lived through. And who wasn’t aware of Steinem, so often in the papers, on the covers of major magazines, founder of Ms. magazine, author of books like Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) and Revolution from Within (1992)?

Steinem was a journalist and political activist, for causes like migrant farm workers and then on behalf of women’s rights, including abortion, and, as already stated, leader and spokesperson for the Women’s Liberation Movement (as it was called then), in the 1960s and 70s.

Yes, it takes me back all right, to the controversies, the milieu of the world I was entering as a teen and young woman. Consciousness-raising.  It’s been a long time since I heard that expression! Consciousness-raising groups were “intimate assemblies, in which women discovered that their problems were not singular but ubiquitous and widely shared…” The phrase eventually referred, I think, simply to making people aware of sexist language and attitudes, and inequalities between men and women.

I was also interested in this book because I wanted to see how author Carolyn G. Heilbrun, who studied how women’s lives are written (Writing a Woman’s Life, 1988), would approach this biography. I felt she was too analytical of Steinem at times, and thus stood between Steinem and the reader, but her work also seemed thorough and it was well written.  

I found myself very much liking and admiring Gloria Steinem. Though I disagree with some of her views, I’m thankful to her, and of course many other women as well, for their courage and convictions about the rights of women. Steinem was quite relentlessly attacked, both within the movement and without – too radical for some, not radical enough for others. She was articulate, confident, and willing to defend herself when necessary, but refused to respond to much of the hostility directed at her. “She is … an extraordinary combination of change-maker and peacemaker…,” someone said of her, “genuinely humble and kind.”

 (In reference to the “trashing” within the women’s movement, Pat Schroeder wrote, “Women have not yet learned the game of ‘rumps together, horns out’.”)

She was an especially beautiful woman, which was considered an advantage in reassuring those who imagined feminists as some kind of hideous harridans, but her looks also garnered no end of unwelcome comment and celebrity.

The Woman’s Liberation Movement may already seem ancient history to many. In “Remembering the 70s,” an article I wrote for the MB Herald back in 2001, I noted, “When the earth is altered in some way, say by cutting trees or planting them, bulldozing in a road or excavating for a new housing development, we soon forget the contours of the earlier terrain; we soon imagine that this is the way this particular space has always looked.” Yes, one easily forgets. Reading Gloria Steinem’s life, I remember earlier spaces, and I remember changes, and I’m grateful.  

And in a subsequent post, I’ll say something about reading the life of Katie Funk Wiebe.