By Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis–
“This is the result because Mommy worked so hard.” When South Korean actress Yuh-Jung Youn uttered those words last month in her acceptance speech for the best supporting actress Oscar, our thoughts immediately flashed to our own mothers and the ongoing struggle for women’s dignity and equality.
Seconds earlier, Youn with a touch of humor had thanked her two children “who made me go out and work.” What Youn didn’t explain was that, years ago, she was a newly divorced single mom in her late 30s, raising two young children as a Korean immigrant in Florida.
Before she married and followed her husband to America in the 1970s, Youn had been a pathbreaking Korean movie star at the peak of her career. But she suddenly had to ask herself whether she could support herself and her two children on a minimum wage job in Florida that she estimated paid about $2.75 per hour. She determined she couldn’t. Even though the Korean entertainment industry shunned divorced actresses, Youn’s tremendous talent and hard work ethic enabled her to return to Korea as an actress and make ends meet. Her grit and determination took her to the Oscar stage last month.
As Youn spoke, we recalled how Stuart’s mom, also a woman of Asian descent facing formidable odds, worked full time, completed her doctorate, and raised children all at the same time on her own. For many academics, successfully completing your doctoral dissertation almost feels like winning an Academy Award. At the beginning of her doctoral dissertation on the struggle of women in higher education, Stuart’s mom thanked Stuart and his siblings for their unfailing support of her work, which she said “made the entire process a cooperative one.”
Of course, millions of mothers and women in America, Korea, and around the world do not receive Oscars for their extraordinary feats forged by their hard work and often unacknowledged skills. The struggles of those women were also recognized at this year’s Academy Awards.
The film Nomadland about women living on the margins of American society won best picture, and its director Chloé Zhao made history as the first woman of color and only second woman to take home the prize. When the film’s star Frances McDormand received the best actress Oscar, she emphasized the power of women’s voices and work, declaring: “My voice is in my sword. We know the sword is our work. And I like work.”
McDormand has shattered gender stereotypes throughout her career not only through her acting and producing but also through her authentic presentation of herself on the high-glam red carpet, as she did at this year’s Oscars. No makeup, no fancy hairdos, no form-fitting attire—just “Fran” as a real 63-year-old woman.
We could not help but think of John’s mother, a barrier breaking professor, who also had no interest in makeup or hairstyles and along with John’s father turned many gender role stereotypes upside down to the extent they were able to in 1960s America, where women workers earned just 59 cents to the men’s dollar.
Oscar-winning actress and director Regina King began the ceremony by giving voice to other women’s struggles, that of African American moms whose sons live daily under the specter of police brutality. “As a mother of a Black son, I know the fear that so many people live with—and no amount of fame or fortune changes that.”
Later, producer Tyler Perry praised his mother as a role model and thanked her for the wisdom she imparted to him, forged as a woman who came of age in the Jim Crow South where she often grieved the murders of numerous of her African American peers. Perry recalled as a boy coming home from school one day to find his mother at home and “in tears,” and not at her job working with small children at the local Jewish community center. Her tears that day were not born of anti-Black violence but of an anti-Semitic threat to blow up the center. Perry said: “My mother taught me to refuse hate. She taught me to refuse blanket judgment.”
As we mark Mother’s Day this weekend, we think of these powerful women and mothers and the value of their words, work, and example not just to themselves and other women but also to their children and society more generally. But even with so many “mommies” working “so hard” and achieving so much, American women on the whole still earn 82 cents to a man’s dollar. The struggle continues forward.
Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis, together for over three decades, were plaintiffs in the California case for equal marriage rights decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. Their leadership in the grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA contributed in 2015 to making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
Published on May 6, 2021
Recent Comments