Prime Time - Jane Fonda [77]
“Probably,” Kathy continued, “our biggest clash of value has been over how to spend money. Because I’ve always grown up with the belief that ‘where your money is, that’s where your heart is.’ And my heart was in a different place than Bill’s heart. But as a woman of my generation, I fell into the ‘dependent’ role of the wife, wanting to please my spouse, not believing that my voice, if in opposition to Bill’s, particularly around issues of large financial expenditures, was equal to his, and I would give in to his desires around those matters and then harbor resentment. Not smart!”
Bill then told me that they had considered separating for a year, to give Kathy a sense of independence, as a way of strengthening both her and their marriage. When that was too complicated because of the children, their therapist suggested that they work on separateness in their own home, by having separate financial accounts.
Bill recalled, “And so for a year—and this was so painful for me—you bought your own Christmas presents for the children and I bought my Christmas presents for the children. Before that everything had always been from Mom and Dad—even though she bought the presents,” he told me. “And for a year she decided not to go to church anymore. I would go on Sundays and people would say, ‘Where’s Kathy?’ ”
Kathy frowned. “I don’t remember that it was for a whole year.”
Achieving Individuation
“When did this begin,” I asked Kathy, “this feeling that you needed to stand on your own two feet?”
“In the early seventies, when we lived in Pennsylvania, I resonated with the words that Gloria Steinem was saying. I just said, ‘That’s true! She speaks for me.’ ”
“Do you remember what it was she said that so resonated with you?” I asked.
“It had to do with roles. When you are feeling imprisoned by what is expected of women, when you don’t feel the expectations suit you.”
“Because you didn’t feel you could be a full person within those expectations?”
“Yes. You feel like, ‘Is this what I should be doing?’ That kind of stuff.”
Privately, I asked Kathy if Bill had been threatened by all this change.
“Yes,” she said. “I think the whole feminist movement has had an impact on all the men as well as women, and I think at that time, in his head, Bill was a feminist, but in actions it was life as usual.”
“I was that way myself for a few years,” I admitted. “A theoretical feminist but not an embodied one.”
Bill and Kathy Stayton.
TIM SCOTT, SPENCER STUDIOS
“It’s hard to unlearn those things,” Kathy mused. “I didn’t really get into feminism a lot. I was kind of on the periphery but watching to see what was out there. I have more courage in my head maybe than in my body at times.”
“Perhaps, but you did go out and begin to create your own space, right?”
“Well, actually, I always have used my leadership skills throughout my life, even while being a full-time homemaker. But I did move into new territory—in terms of my own ‘space’—in the early seventies.”
Finding Identity in Community
“It was around that time that I started doing community things that Bill didn’t do and we just had different lives,” Kathy recalled. “One of those things was the symphony orchestra. I played the violin, and when I was part of the orchestra no one asked, ‘What does your husband do?’ You really are your own person. You just learn your part and are a part of the group. And rehearsals were every week, so Bill had to take the kids. I wasn’t going to give it up. And that really did help even before I was aware that that’s what it was doing for me.
“Also, in the early nineties,” she said, “the board of our denomination, the American Baptist Churches of the USA, issued a new policy, a one-sentence resolution that caught us all by surprise: ‘The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.’ Period. Our church was up in arms about this and we began our activism and, within a year, we had a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) allied group within the church. That was where I