Why “Educated” Bothered Me & Action Items for a Lifelong Education
To learn more about Educated before reading this post, see here.
I loved reading Educated.
Dr. Tara Westover’s memoir is lyrical, enchanting, encompassing. I felt like I was there— in her brother’s bedroom looking at the covers of classical music CDs, in her family’s car when it crashed, leaving her mother with a permanent and untreated brain injury, in the messy kitchen where her mother’s herbs lay all about, waiting for the next call from a woman in labor who needed a midwife. I felt like I was there with her— living and dying under the mountain, Buck’s Peak, in rural Idaho. I loved how Dr. Westover described things. Her words painted a picture that was one part magical and two parts horrifying, without turning to cliches or predictable language. I found myself absorbed in the story— not lifting my eyes from the pages for hours, until suddenly realizing how long I’d been sitting in that spot, not moving. My eyes were addicted to the words, knowing that with each chapter, I’d learn about a world I’d never seen before.
This lured me along and along and along.
And yet something bothered me.
Perhaps I am bothered by Educated, because I am more generally bothered by the nature of memoir. Memoirs tend to focus on the past. That is their foundation, after all. But, to me, the past is at its most valuable when it guides us towards the future. This is perhaps the heart of why Educated bothered me. I felt little sense of where we were headed. At times, this created a sense of mere confusion, but other times, it felt much more sinister.
At the time— when I turned the final page and closed the book— I didn’t understand what my gut was telling me. I assumed, briefly, that I felt uneasy because the story itself makes one uneasy. That’s an understatement; I’ll rephrase: Reading Dr. Westover’s life story INFURIATED me. Her family’s abuse, gas-lighting, victim blaming, racist comments, sexism, and disturbing violence (emotional, physical, and mental) all filled me with rage for the young Tara Westover. I wanted to leap within the bounds of the pages, grab her by the arm, and take her away somewhere safe and free. But that’s the hard part about family abuse; no where feels truly safe. We all must find our own ways out.
And that’s what Tara Westover did.
She left her family home in Idaho for Brigham Young University (BYU), then to Cambridge, then to Harvard. Hence the title of the book.
Educated.
Here lies the root of the problem: The word is in past tense.
Educated Vs Education:
“Educated” suggests that Dr. Westover’s education is complete.
On the final page of the book, Dr. Westover writes,
“You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”
To Dr. Westover, as exhibited not simply in this last sentence, but by the book’s very title and nature, an education has an endpoint. It has a final destination, as revealed through a transformation of the self into someone new. While part of this is true, it is short sighted to ignore the implications of this point. That implication being that her work— that all of our work— is done.
But I believe our work is never done.
There are so many ways wherein white people’s refusal to acknowledge that learning is on-going can be problematic and can uphold systems of oppression. You may be thinking that I am inflaming a small issue into a larger one. If you do, that’s fine. But maybe keep reading.
As one famous writer put it,
“Interrupting the forces of racism is ongoing, lifelong work because the forces conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play; our learning will never be finished.”
Roxane Gay, author of the book of essays Bad Feminist, put it another way,
“Feminists are celebrating our victories and acknowledging our privilege when we have it. We’re simply refusing to settle. We’re refusing to forget how much work there is yet to be done. We’re refusing to relish the comforts we have at the expense of the women who are still seeking comfort.”
I won’t settle not because I hate Tara Westover or her story. Quite the opposite. I won’t settle because I love Tara Westover. I love her as much as I can love a stranger, a fellow writer, a fellow woman. I’m here to challenge her because I care. Love is work, after all. I hope to lend perspective.
Education&perspective:
In Educated, Dr. Westover explains that a big part of her education was removing her survivalist father’s lenses from her face so that she could see the world as it truly was— not as how he saw it.
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study,” she writes, “had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind."
In an interview with CNN called, “Tara Westover on growing up as a Mormon survivalist,” Dr. Westover states the importance of her education in that it gave her a new perspective.
“Eventually,” she says, “I do go away. I get an education. I get put on this path of education that takes me to Harvard, I go to Cambridge, I have this wonderful experience with education, but that same path would really take me away from my family, because one of the things that happens I think is you get an education and you become able to hold onto your own perspective.”
When talking about her association with the word “whore,” as Dr. Westover’s abusive older brother would call her frequently throughout her memoir, Dr. Westover tells CNN,
“It would take me a lot of years and a lot of— I mean— education really helped me. Education in the broad sense— of being able to get your own grip on what’s happening and your own perspective on things.”
But, in the end, I don’t feel like I really know Dr. Westover’s “own perspective on things.”
On the one hand, with regards to her family life, she masterfully weaves together the stories of her childhood alongside continuing re-evaluations of events. Sometimes she moves forward only to regress back. It is an imperfect process, but true to growing up. We see how she overcomes her family’s gas-lighting and “comes to grips” with what truly happened to her back in Idaho, despite her family’s incessant objections to the truth. She is told she is wrong, delusional, even evil, over and over again. But, in the end, she sees the manipulation and the lies for what they are. With this knowledge, she is able to restructure her memories and work through them in therapy. It takes work, but Dr. Westover’s perspective evolves from one of complete obsequiousness to her father’s truths into one where she can trust herself.
But it is only with her family that Dr. Westover shares her new perspectives— not about the larger issues surrounding her.
So what is her perspective? How does she see the world? What does she believe in? For any character in a story, be it fictional or not, and for any one we come to know in our lives, we want to hear about what they believe. This connects us and challenges us to grow ourselves. To wonder or ask what someone believes is not a “nit-picky” request. It is human.
The very few beliefs we gather from Dr. Westover in her memoir and in interviews are on the subject of education, specifically the role of the individual in educating oneself. So let’s start there.
Self-Educating & Individual Responsibility:
When Westover journeys to Cambridge and first meets with her adviser, Professor Steinberg, he asks her what she would like to study. She says Historiography.
“I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement— since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others.”
In this context, I believe Dr. Westover is explaining her desire to learn about all the things her father could not teach her truthfully. But this comment, as well as others in the book itself, sometimes make me wonder whether or not the aforementioned “others” might be us, not just her father. As if to say that she can not trust anything that anyone says.
From “The Times” article titled, “Tara Westover: the Mormon who didn’t go to school (but now has a Cambridge PhD).” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tara-westover-the-mormon-who-didnt-go-to-school-but-now-has-a-cambridge-phd-pxwgtz7pv.
In Dr. Westover’s Educated, and in some of her interviews, it sounds like a point she is making is in line with this idea that we can’t know the truth unless we do all of the work ourselves; if we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.
This is not the point she is trying to make. But, when she isn’t being clear enough, it can come across that way.
In her interview/Q&A at Cambridge, she discusses accumulated knowledge more in-depth and I think it solidifies her point much more compellingly than she does in her book. She says,
“I read John Dewey recently and I quote him at the front of my book. And I like how he separates out what he says are the components (mechanical term)— the components of education. The social and the individual. Or as he calls it what society brings to an education and what the individual brings. And I think what society brings is an accumulation of knowledge, you know? So that idea that no single person invented the iPhone. It took everyone and this body of knowledge and everyone was standing on the shoulders of the person who came before. You need that social accumulation. It would be so regrettable to have every person just chuck out what was known before and start fresh. But you also need, I think, the individual element, and I think people do need to have buy-in in their own education, and they do need to feel like they get to decide what they learn. And I am convinced that any curriculum you design for yourself is going to be better than one that is designed for you.”
When she explains it in this manner, she is actually talking about self-education, which she touches on frequently in Educated. But her lack of clarity paired with the larger context of American life today can result in confusing and problematic messages.
But I’d like to focus briefly on this message of the individual’s engagement with learning. I agree; we all need to be invested in our growth. However, I find there is more to unpack within Dr. Westover’s arguments.
In Chapter 5 of Educated, Dr. Westover describes the way her mother would “do school,” or how they navigated homeschooling. She writes,
“If my finger touched fifty pages, I’d report to Mother that I’d done fifty pages of math. Amazing, she’d say, You see? That pace would never be possible in the public school. You can only do that at home, where you can sit down and really focus, with no distractions… Learning in our family was self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done. Some of us were more disciplined than others. I was one of the least disciplined, so by the time I was ten, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it.”
In her interview with PBS, she is asked if there are any lessons that she learned from her parents that she still values or is grateful for. She answers,
“My parents had this philosophy about learning, this kind of idea about education that was very much about individual responsibility… My dad would always say that you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you… the bigger point is you could have a Nobel Laureate in Literature try to teach you how to write, but if you didn’t want to learn, then I don’t think you would learn as much… I think our ideas about education have become a little bit institutionalized and a bit passive, and we have forgotten that an education isn’t the same thing as a school. And I really don’t think there is anything that can make up for the absence of individual buy-in.”
From “Ohio State University College of Education and Human Ecology” article titled “‘Educated’ author shares her story in Crane lecture.” https://ehe.osu.edu/news/listing/educated-author-share-her-story-crane-lecture/.
I think Dr. Westover makes a leap in logic here.
What she is telling us is that you learn best when you are invested, which ultimately means when you are invested, you can teach yourself perhaps better than any institution. But how can you become invested if no one shows you what’s possible? The individual alone is limited. If you have never heard of Algebra, how do you become invested to learn? In Dr. Westover’s case, the incentive was to ace the ACT. But that was only on her radar because her older brother had done it and encouraged her to follow suit.
It wasn’t her parents that encouraged her to teach herself these subjects. They encouraged her to learn only what benefited them.
This isn’t a lesson in individual responsibility. This is a lesson in obedience. And in that way, her learning was just as systematic as a public education. She didn’t have exams at home or worksheets. She had to buy her own textbooks. But in the absence of those traditional indicators of a larger system, she assumed she was free of systematic restriction. But she wasn’t. Her parents were a system all their own.
Again, I agree with her point, which is we have to want to learn in order to learn best.
But, at the same time, when “individual responsibility” is used in these arguments against larger systems or institutions, it sends out a mating cry to similar discussions around things like affirmative action and government programs that at least attempt to combat racism and sexism, which oftentimes disqualify certain kinds of students from higher education and other opportunities— programs that Westover herself benefited from. I am not saying that Westover’s point is that those things are bad, but she stands close to the precipice throughout her memoir. This comes from lack of clarity.
If, to my point, Westover was more clear about her beliefs on such things surrounding education, then I wouldn’t have to be asking at all. But because she goes up to the ledge, looks over it, and then treads back to safety without making a clear point, I am sitting here now asking what she believes.
In the PBS interview, questions were raised that directly asked what Dr. Westover believes with regards to larger issues. Hearing such questions came as a relief to me; it proved that I am not the only one curious.
When Westover begins to answer these questions about her beliefs, she often begins with the phrase, “That’s such a difficult question.”
And it’s true. It is so hard to articulate what you believe and why, especially if those beliefs go against your family’s. But they are important questions. And I honestly don’t know if these were questions she asked herself while writing her memoir, which is why the answers are absent from the pages.
From “Ploughshares at Emerson College” article titled “Self-Education in Tara Westover’s Educated” http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/self-education-in-tara-westovers-educated/.
Perhaps Dr. Westover did not examine the larger frameworks at play around her, because she does not fully know how to do so without tearing down her deep-seated and professed love for individualism and objectivity.
This is evident in her responses to belief-centric questions. She will often repeat the facts of her history without actually confronting the larger question.
For instance, one question was asked about whether or not Dr. Westover believes the government should do more to stop child abuse, like the abuse she was subjected to. This same kind of question is repeated in other interviews as well.
Dr. Westover doesn’t dive deep into the philosophical debate of state power. Rather, she answers that it would be hard to answer, because the government could not have known about her specific case, as she and her family were so isolated.
In her Cambridge interview, she does say that she thinks there should be some sort of follow-up from the government with certain policies about homeschooling. But then, immediately after, she backpedals and claims that it is a very complicated area and isn’t sure whether or not more enforcement would be a positive thing.
What she is missing here is the opportunity to address a massive and impossible question with bold ideas for change— brave, and again perhaps impossible solutions for girls who grew up like she did. This is a great moment for Dr. Westover to step up as a survivor and a potential leader, someone who can maybe help others in her situation. But she doesn’t. Again, she approaches the ledge, looks down, and then backs away.
What’s Missing?
Dr. Westover was interviewed back at her old stomping ground—Cambridge—by Professor David Runciman in a Q&A type of format just a few days after the release of Educated. They opened the discussion with a question from Professor Runciman,
“…you knew something was missing. And we knew you knew something was missing because you sought to educate yourself. Can you give us a sense of what you thought was missing…?”
Dr. Westover answers but does not frame her existence as one that was aware of a lacking. She answers the question by exploring the first instance where she considered it might be valuable to go beyond her home sphere (finding someone who could teach her how to sing.) This is fair. Dr. Westover, I believe, is trying to be as honest and true to the version of herself at that age and time. She answers questions as reliably from the frame of mind of her younger self as possible. This is admirable, as the text is a memoir and we want to understand that girl as best we can.
But this approach limits our understanding of the person Dr. Westover is as she writes this memoir— who she is now. Because her typical answers to questions begin with “well, at the time, I thought…” we see only a repeated construction of this child. We don’t get to hear, “Well, at the time, I thought this… but now, as an adult, I think otherwise.”
On the PBS News Hour interview, called “Educated author Tara Westover answers your questions (extended version),” Westover claims,
“There were so many world views I had that changed. But I think the biggest change is just— you know, when I was a child, I didn’t go to school. I didn’t have access to different points of view— different histories. I had never heard of the Holocaust. I’d never heard of the Civil Rights Movement. There were— and I thought Europe was a country, not a continent. There are so many things I didn’t know. And then when you get access to different perspectives, you get that… that skill that I think is the most important, which is to be around people who think one thing and for you to think something else. And that’s something I’d never had before.”
Dr. Westover admits that her worldview was conflicted while at university. Her feelings were torn in two directions— one with her father’s ideas back home and one with herself at university, as a member of the larger world. She admits this conflict, but does not explore it beyond except to say they have changed in the time since.
Memoirs are a reflection not simply on what was, but how that affects what is. That reflection is missing.
I think Professor Runciman’s question is profound and touches directly on what I am asking of Dr. Westover now. There is something missing in your work, Dr. Westover. And it doesn’t lie with that little girl. The missing piece is who you are today. That missing thing is your belief. We don’t know what you believe.
I’m not asking for a manifesto from Dr. Westover. I don’t need a dissertation on “I believe in this…” and “I don’t believe in that…” But I would really love to hear what she thinks about larger issues that she already brings up in her text.
Let’s look at some examples of those issues she raises in her memoir, but does not explore herself.
Conflicts of Belief in Educated:
The only problem that I had with Westover’s crafting of her story— the literal pen to paper work— was that she seldom clarified her own beliefs.
From “The Pool” article titled “Tara Westover: I didn’t think of our family as strange – I thought of us as the right ones.” https://www.the-pool.com/arts-culture/books/2018/8/Tara-Westover-on-Mormon-upbringing-in-Idaho-and-Educated.
In her memoir, Dr. Westover frequently brings up conversations with family members that directly touch on real world events and histories. She does not know about these events or histories, at least not beyond what her father’s paranoia has to say about them. And this is not her fault; as a child, she had no opportunity to learn the facts. She had no opportunity back then to stand up for the truth against the crass and harmful things her father was propagating.
But Dr. Westover— the adult woman who is attending some of the most influential and celebrated universities in the world and who is the one writing this book— never contradicts her father’s world view. She gives herself plenty of opportunities, but says nothing. Now that she knows the truth, she still does not deny her father’s words.
Let’s explore a few examples of this.
The Holocaust:
In her CNN interview, Dr. Westover is asked what she knew about the world when she first went to university. She replies,
“I knew about the Constitution, because my dad was a Constitutionalist. But there were a lot of things I didn’t know about.”
She addresses the fact that she didn’t know about the Holocaust.
“I was sure once I thought about it— I think I’ve heard of some context where Jewish people were killed. But I think in my head it was something like the Boston Massacre, you know, where a handful of people had been killed. I hadn’t— the scale of it had never— I’d never been taught that.”
In her interview with CBS This Morning, “Tara Westover's journey from off-the-grid childhood to Cambridge,” she says that, when she asked what the word “Holocaust” meant, she was met with hostility in the classroom.
“I think they thought I was denying it… I think they heard it that way, but I meant it completely sincerely; I didn’t know what it was.”
The Holocaust is a specific subject that pops up again and again in Dr. Westover’s memoir. When she first meets her Cambridge adviser, she explains to him that she wants to study Historiography. Professor Steinberg, her adviser, is celebrated for his writings on the Holocaust. Prior, while attending BYU, Dr. Westover’s parents come to visit her. They go out for dinner and her father dives into a rant about “twentieth century history,”
“He said Jewish bankers in Europe had signed secret agreements to start World War II, and that they had colluded with Jews in America to pay for it. They had engineered the Holocaust, he said, because they would benefit financially from worldwide disorder. They had sent their own people to the gas chambers for money. These ideas were familiar to me, but it took me a moment to remember where I’d heard them: in a lecture Dr. Kerry had given on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, published in 1903, purported to be a record of a secret meeting of powerful Jews planning world domination. The document was discredited as a fabrication until it spread, fueling anti-Semitism in the decades before World War II. Adolf Hitler had written about the Protocols in Mein Kampf, claiming they were authentic, that they revealed the true nature of the Jewish people.”
She breezes past this to continue describing the dinner— as her father continues to rant about Europe and the end of the world, and then describes her father noticing her MLK poster on her door at her apartment, who he calls a communist.
Dr. Westover says nothing to stop her father from saying these things, which, fine, none of us are perfect at calling out family about their bullshit. But, even in her memoir, she doesn’t discredit him. The only thing she says about it is,
“It’s astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion.”
But it is unclear what “all this” points to. The conclusion of the section speaks to her father’s fear of doctors and hospitals, and how she has never been immunized. The end. Nothing else is said.
The Civil Rights Movement and Anti-Blackness:
In the CNN interview, Dr. Westover continues,
“I didn’t know any of the presidents, really. And I definitely didn’t know about the Civil Rights Movement. And that was something that really changed my conception of the world. I mean, my family— my brother had a nickname for me that was a slur. The N-word. And I’d heard it my whole life. And I had always laughed, because I thought it was— I don’t know what I thought about it. I thought it was funny. And then I learned about the Civil Rights Movement, and I realized how recent that had been. And I realized what that— that that word had been formed as part of a discourse that had only one purpose really and that was to dehumanize people. And I think learning about that history changed not just how I saw history but how I saw my family. And how we were unwittingly allowing ourselves to become foot soldiers in this conflict.”
The CNN interview grazes past this. As does the book. In Educated, Westover explains the context of her brother’s N-word “nickname.” (Note: Dr. Westover spells out the word in full each time. I am choosing not to do so. I will indicate where the word is appearing by ******.)
She describes a hot day, when she was cleaning something in the junkyard covered in grease. As she worked, she was sweating and wiped her face frequently, smearing the black grease on her face without realizing it. This was when her abusive older brother started calling her ******.
“The word was surprising but not unfamiliar. I’d heard Dad use it, so in one sense I knew what it meant. But in another sense, I didn’t understand it as meaning anything at all. I’d only ever seen one black person, a little girl, the adoptive daughter of a family at church. Dad obviously hadn’t meant her.”
She describes her previous knowledge of slavery before ever attending college,
“I had read that slaves in colonial times were happier and more free than their masters, because the masters were burdened with the cost of their care. That had made sense to me.”
She then goes on to describe the visceral feeling of learning the truths of the violence of slavery. In her mind, the end of slavery had stopped racism. So when she heard about the Civil Rights Movement, she was even more blown away.
“I was still ignorant enough to be surprised.”
Her brother tried on different nicknames for her, to see which one would make her react. ***** did just that. So he kept at it. And when she told him not to call her that, he ignored her. She tries to navigate the knowledge she gained at school versus the person her brother was.
“I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested. I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless… I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others— because nurturing the discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward… I did not have the language I have now. But I understood one fact: that a thousand times I had been called ****** and laughed, and now I could not laugh… What they heard was a signal, a call through time, which was answered with a mounting conviction: that never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”
The exploration stops here, which I find unsatisfactory. Simply stating that racism was a conflict that “I did not understand,” is not enough. I am not calling for a dissertation, but further devotion to unpacking this racism would be preferable.
According to the Combahee River Collective’s statement, found in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective,
“One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement. As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue".”
Accountability is key here. Dr. Westover is accountable for her beliefs AND for her silence in the lack of her beliefs. By not further addressing her role in a racist family and in an anti-Black situation, she is not doing the work the CRC and others are asking us to do. And she must be accountable to that.
Later in her memoir, when exploring the memory Dr. Westover has of a neighboring family who was also survivalist that had been attacked by the FBI and many members of the family killed, she researches and comes to understand the full scope of the tale, which her father had withheld from her,
“There was one thing I still didn’t understand: Why had the federal agents surrounded Randy Weaver’s cabin in the first place?… I remembered Dad saying it could just as easy be us. Dad was always saying that one day the Government would come after folks who resisted its brainwashing, who didn’t put their kids in school…According to the sources, including Randy Weaver himself, the conflict had begun when Randy sold two sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent he’d met at an Aryan Nations gathering. I read this sentence more that once, many times in fact. Then I understood: white supremacy was at the heart of this story, not homeschool.”
And, Dr. Westover, I hate to be the one to maybe break it to you, white supremacy is at the heart of your story too. It’s at the heart of all of our stories. Not white supremacy in the specific sense of white guys gathering for Aryan Nations, but in the wider sense of what white supremacy is. If I am not the first person to tell you this, great— you already know. But I might be.
We’ll talk about this more down towards the end of the post under Action Items.
Some of you may be wondering why I so frequently quote texts about feminism and racism here. So let’s explore that question and my answer to it now.
Feminism:
I gave Feminism its own, separate space here because it is only mentioned two times explicitly in Educated and it is seldom explored in Dr. Westover’s interviews. Its absence is felt just as strongly as its presence would be felt. And I wanted to dedicate time and research into exploring Dr. Westover’s few words on the subject and what that scarcity tells us.
Some readers and critics might argue that Dr. Westover’s individual journey, in and of itself, constitutes a feminist act. Because she is a woman and she pursued an education outside the home, because she did not allow herself to become the woman her father and family wanted her to be, because she struggled to achieve something “more,” she is a feminist.
I’d like to introduce at this time Jessa Crispin, writer of the manifesto Why I Am Not a Feminist. She writes,
“Making feminism a universal pursuit might look like a good thing— or at the very least a neutral thing— but in truth it progresses, and I think accelerates, a process that has been detrimental to the feminist movement: the shift of focus from society to the individual… a focus on individual history and achievement.”
Essentially, the larger point Cripsin makes is that an individual’s achievement can now symbolize an act of feminism/the person’s feminism, even if they are not doing the work feminism demands of us.
I disagree with many of Crispin’s arguments in this book. But this one makes sense to me to some degree. We can’t make decisions and then posthumously call that decision feminist simply because we identify as feminists or our action could be perceived as feminist. Therefore, I argue that Dr. Westover’s education is not inherently feminist.
Now that we have addressed that potential concern, let’s look at how Dr. Westover addresses women’s issues and feminism in her memoir itself.
The first blatant mention of gendered roles in Educated comes in Chapter 3, where she writes about something her father once told her,
“A woman’s place is in the home, he would say every time he saw a married woman working in town. Now I’m older, I sometimes wonder if Dad’s fervor had more to do with his own mother than with doctrine. I wonder if he just wished that she had been home, so he wouldn’t have been left for all those long hours with Grandpa’s temper.”
This represents a common pattern that arises throughout the book and Dr. Westover’s interviews: even though she claims her education relieved her of her father’s perspective in exchange for her own, Dr. Westover frequently explores topics through an exploration of her father’s psyche, his character, his feelings. Not her own.
The second time Dr. Westover mentions feminism is when she describes when she goes out for coffee with two women she met at Cambridge or Havard (I’m not honestly sure which university she is at when this interaction occurs).
“They used complex phrases with ease. Some of them, like second wave, I’d heard before, even if I didn’t know what they meant; others like the hegemonic masculinity, I couldn’t get my tongue around let alone my mind… I understood that they were talking about feminism. I’d never heard anyone use the word feminism as anything but a reprimand. At BYU, you sound like a feminist, signaled the end of the argument. It also signaled that I had lost. I left the cafe and went to the library… I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second wave writers— Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir. I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut. I’d never seen the word vagina printed out, never said it aloud. I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first— Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. I read through the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood.”
In an interview with the Library of Congress, Dr. Westover explains the moment that most drew her to John Stuart Mill and his writings on women,
“I think I was at Cambridge, really, when I started reading a bit of feminist texts; I was in no way ready for anything that most feminists would call feminism. And I stumbled upon this passage by John Stuart Mill. And I’ve read a lot of feminist stuff since then, and this is still the most powerful thing that has resonated with me personally is a line he says. When he says, “on the nature of women, nothing final can be known.” And his argument is that all the social pressure women have been cajoled and pushed and defined themselves and changed so many different ways, so now we have no idea what they are capable of. We just don’t know. We don’t know what they are. We’ve been deforming them for so long. And that whole absence of knowledge was so appealing to me… to me what that felt like was whatever I’m drawn to, whatever I want to be, I am a woman, so that must be okay. And I don’t need to find external definitions of what I should be like, who I should love, what I should want to do. I can just discard all of that and say, definitionally you can’t say that women don’t like politics, that women don’t like history, because I am one. And I do.”
I find it strange that Dr. Westover’s favorite “feminist” scholar and discussion comes from a man. Not only that, but she chose to focus on John Stuart Mill for her PhD dissertation at Cambridge.
I found myself bothered by this too. Not by any one thing alone, but certainly by the sum of their parts. But I wasn’t quite sure why I was bothered. So I compiled a reading list of feminist texts by feminist authors, sidled with an attention to whiteness and racism both within and without the feminist movement.
I read the following texts:
Why I Am Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins
Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Edited by Keeange-Yamahtta Taylor
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I know this reading list is still limited. That’s why I also referred to online articles from Trans women, non-binary feminists, disabled feminists, and others. I am also pulling from previous reading experiences, where I studied feminist arguments by Indigenous women.
I’d like to begin this discussion with a few words from Roxanne Gay, whom many of you will know from her book of essays called Bad Feminist:
“Too many people have become self-appointed privilege police… when someone writes from experience, there is often someone else, at the ready, pointing a trembling finger, accusing the writer of having various kinds of privilege… Does privilege automatically negate any merits of what a privilege holder has to say?… We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgement rather than accusation.”
The reason I chose to start this way is to get something clear from the start: This is about acknowledgement, not accusation.
I do not wish to tear down a very talented writer simply because she is privileged. I don’t wish to tear her down period. Dr. Tara Westover is talented and wise and worth reading. I discuss privilege and feminism here not to accuse Dr. Westover of being a horrible person or writer, quite the contrary. I discuss privilege and feminism here to inspire growth. Growth by understanding context. Context that only comes when we question our privileges, all the while hoping that by raising questions, we can change our thinking. When we broaden our minds and ideas for the future, we can push our movements to do the impossible.
Now that that’s out of the way…
Amidst all the positive reviews for Educated, towards the bottom of the results page, I found Micki McElya.
Micki McElya is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and specializes in the histories of women, gender, sexuality, and racial formation in the United States from the Civil War to the present, with an emphasis on political culture and memory. She wrote an article for Boston Review about Educated called “The Education of an Ambivalent Feminist.” This article is important to me, because it pointed me in the right direction to explore why Educated and Dr. Westover’s minimal discussion of feminism bothered me.
Just to mention this now: I wrote about Educated in one of my previous blog posts called “What 2018's Most Popular Reads Can Teach Us About Writing Successful First Chapters.” It was here when I read the first chapter of Educated that I first felt bothered. But I couldn’t put my finger on why. That’s why I turned to Google. I was on a deadline for the post, and I didn’t have time to really dive deep into my feelings. I was relieved when I found McElya’s article, because it provided a foundation. It was only after reading the full article, writing the blog post about first chapters, and then continuing to read Educated further that I realized I needed to devote more materials to this— more time, more energy. The question of why I was bothered had not yet been fully answered.
That’s why I am writing this blog post.
That brings us up to speed.
If you have the time, I recommend you read Micki McElya’s article about Educated. But in case you don’t, here are the highlights:
“…Westover’s memoir rings with the foundational U.S. stories of exceptionalism, rugged individualism, organic intellect, and pure hustle…”
“Educated may reveal more about the place of feminism in contemporary U.S. life than any book in recent memory.”
“She has insisted, for instance, that her memoir’s central takeaway on matters of schooling and education is that ‘you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.’”
“Westover steps gingerly around the term ‘feminist,’ as has most of the coverage surrounding the book.”
“In the late 1960s, the Women’s Liberation Movement transformed feminism with the radical claim that “the personal is political.” The phrase explained how the seemingly mundane experiences of women, their daily indignities and private frustrations, were not individual or just “personal problems” but the systemic outcomes of patriarchy. Subsequently spun through pervasive neoliberal rhetorics of privatization and the liberty of consumption in a free market, this radical feminist claim has been turned upside down, grotesquely reanimated as a celebration of women’s personal choices and individual gains as political acts in themselves. This is where Tara Westover’s Educated enters the picture.” (We will come back to this point later.)
“Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir,” she writes. “I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut.” It was all too much, Westover says, without offering more by way of explanation. She simply could find no way into those books or ideas.”
“As a scholar of the nineteenth century, Westover is most comfortable with that era's brand of feminism.”
“Westover’s education rejects analyzing the collective conditions of women, their diversity and intersectional oppressions across time and global geographies.”
“In the process of becoming her own woman, Westover finds comfort in the individual freedoms of Classical Liberalism and the Enlightenment. But these freedoms, which are presented and consumed as distant from history and context, are sheared of their foundations in empire, slavery, biological determinism, and the violent economies of extraction.”
“Westover’s arguments intersect easily with the conservative politics of personal responsibility and equality of opportunity—not outcomes.”
“She sees little beyond her own experience, knowledge, and the freedom of her choices—sheared as they are of their foundations in the abiding privileges of her whiteness and Americanness and in the very same feminist texts and activism she describes rejecting.”
McElya’s article didn’t give me all the answers. Quite the contrary. But it started me on a reading and research journey towards the truth. A journey that involved seven other books and weeks of thought.
I hoped that the culmination of this research would help me reveal why Dr. Westover’s non-conversation about feminism with regards to her education— her selfhood, as she calls it— bothered me. And it did. I can tell you why it bothered me in one, beautiful word.
Context.
The right to access education, the right to access a good education, the right to learn and study and work, has all come to be women’s rights through feminism and activism. And that work is still not done. Many non-white students and working class students struggle everyday to access a decent education, but instead are inserted in the school-to-prison pipeline. White flight and gentrification still enforce the same need in white people to be separate from Black students. The work is not done.
And yet this is not touched upon at all in Educated. This alone is not the end of the world. We all have our own stories. Dr. Westover could not have aptly spoken for a disabled person, or a Black person, or a Trans person, because she is none of those things. Her story is unique and it carries power. There may be a young girl out there, living a similar life to what she lived, who discovers Educated and is inspired to do what Dr. Westover did— seek an education and find independence. And for that girl— even if it is just one girl— I’d like to thank Dr. Westover. Our stories have power, and she should be praised for sharing her experiences publicly. It takes guts to do that.
But the absence of the discussion of access to education from the book paired with the arguments I make in the sections above about Dr. Westover’s general silence on her beliefs and on feminism pose a problem. These are problems with context.
This is not singularly a problem on Dr. Westover’s shoulders; context is sometimes forgotten in books belonging to the memoir genre. The point of memoirs is to tell one individual’s story, and rarely does one person’s story touch on every political issue out there. But good memoirs shed light on context around the individual. If your story is aiming to discuss education, then to ignore activism is to ignore a huge swath of context.
Feminists have had this exact problem before.
Roxane Gay wrote in Bad Feminist, while critiquing Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman,
“Her feminism exists in a very narrow vacuum, to everyone’s detriment. It’s a shame because the book could have been so much more if Moran had looked just a bit beyond herself.”
Not only is context important to understand for the betterment of our own thinking and problem-solving, but it has very real, harmful effects when excluded.
The wider feminism movement excludes a great deal of context— context that could be gained by actively including and fighting for rights of all women and allies, including disabled folks, Black folks, Latin folks, Trans folks, femmes, non-binary folks, Indigenous folks, and others. Harm is caused to those groups when movements exclude them.
For example, take the wage gap between men and women— a very commonly addressed and prolific discussion happening today and over the last 40 years or so. But the typical discussion you hear focuses on non-disabled women versus non-disabled men.
When you de-focus non-disabled women, you can see immediately how much worse the problem is for disabled women. In her article “DIS Representation: How the Wider Feminist Movement Forgets Disabled Women”, Cara Liebowitz writes, “Due to a loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act called section 14(c), disabled people are one of the only groups that employers can pay less than the federal minimum wage. Groups like Goodwill can legally pay disabled workers only pennies per hour. Yet I only hear about this issue in disability circles, not in feminist circles, because the problems of disabled people aren’t considered a feminist issue.”
Similarly, according to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s introduction to How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective,
“African American women make, on average, sixty-four cents on every dollar made by white men. In real dollars it meant that Black women were making, on average, $34,000 a year compared to $53,000 for white men.”
This is an example of empirical evidence of a harm done to Black women because of White Supremacy. But harm isn’t just empirical. Harm is emotional, mental, and spiritual. Harm is daily. It is something some folks, especially Black women, can not forget.
Morgan Jerkins, a Harlem-based author, wrote a book titled This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, where she writes,
“Growing up as a Black woman is different. It prepares you to remember that you have to navigate two worlds. One world that White women are never forced to navigate as Black women are. Therefore, White feminism often times forgets certain truths of womanhood that Black feminists can’t forget.”
Again, Dr. Westover is not disabled nor is she Black, so she does not include the personal, life experiences that come with those identities in her story, which is fair.
But she does include mention of other groups of people different from herself, and, when she does so, she inadvertently does so in a strange and harmful way.
Dr. Westover does not speak often about Native Americans in her book, but when she does, it is problematic.
In Chapter 4, young Tara is in Arizona where a grandmother lives. They went hunting for rocks one day out in the desert, just for fun. She writes,
“According to Grandma, a hundred years ago a tribe of Apaches had fought the U.S Cavalry on those faded rocks. The tribe was outnumbered, the battle began and the warriors became trapped on a ledge. Unwilling to suffer a humiliating defeat, cut down one by one as they tried to break through the cavalry, they mounted their horses and charged off the face of the mountain. When the Apache women found their broken bodies on the rocks below, they cried huge desperate tears, which turned to stone when they touched the earth.
“Grandma never told us what happened to the women. The Apaches were at war but had no warriors, so perhaps she thought the ending too bleak to say out loud. The word ‘slaughter’ came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle when one side mounts no defense. It’s the word we used on the farm. We slaughtered chickens, we didn’t fight them. A slaughter was the likely outcome of the warriors’ bravery. They died as heroes, their wives as slaves.”
This segment is problematic for a number of reasons— from the reference to Native peoples in this instance as “mounting no defense,” and as “slaves,” to the propagation of the stereotype of the extinction of Native people, to the unclear point of this story.
She concludes,
“As we drove to the trailer, the sun dipping in the sky, its last rays reaching across the highway, I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone alter on which they had died, the shape of their lives had determined years before— before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”
This point— the inevitability of violence and history— seems bizarre in this story. I don’t fully understand the need for it to be here. The larger chapter is about a time in Westover’s childhood when her family went to visit their grandmother, then drove back home late one night, when they had a horrible accident, leaving her mother with a lifelong brain injury that would affect her for years to come. At the end of the chapter, Westover finishes by saying that the accident reminded her of the Apache women,
“… and all of the decisions that go into making a life— the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment then rock.”
The comparison— her family’s car crash with genocide— is offensive. Ignorant to say the very least.
White feminists cause real harm by centering themselves in history. Granted, this is a memoir, which by nature centers the writer. But Dr. Westover’s ignorance to this matter is not swallowed by her intent to tell her story. This choice to include a tale of genocide alongside her family’s car crash tries to equate the two. A simple car accident, caused by her father’s stubbornness and made worse by his refusal to trust hospitals, is not catalyzed by the same level of force as the U.S’s policy of genocide against Indigenous peoples. A car crash might be inevitable, if you believe in fate. But genocide is not inevitable. It was a conscious, racist choice on the American government’s part. The same government that Dr. Westover’s father frequently worshiped— the founding fathers and the Constitution were topics he revered and taught his children about frequently. But did he not teach them about Native peoples? I won’t make a judgement there.
All I will say is that this is a clear indicator that Dr. Westover’s education is not done. She has a lot to learn. Context is important and rejecting it can cause harm.
Individual groups are having discussions about how to combine the best of their movement and feminism to inspire widespread change that touches the deep-rooted, foundations of America’s problems.
For example, Renya Ramirez in her scholarly article “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging,” raises brilliant thinking in how Native women can claim “feminism” (as a word and a movement) as their own within Native communities. If you have the time, you should definitely read it.
“Since indigenous women constitute a diverse group,” Ramirez writes, “it is important to base any Native feminist theories on how indigenous women themselves view the world.”
Ramirez explains further,
“Native women come not only from divergent tribal backgrounds, but also from different relationships to their respective settler nation-states.”
In her blog post, “Indigenous Feminism Without Apology,” Andrea Smith, a Cherokee woman and a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and the Boarding School Healing Project, delves into the role of feminism within Native communities and de-centering white feminism.
“These Native feminists are challenging not only patriarchy within Native communities,” Smith writes, “but also white supremacy and colonialism within mainstream white feminism. That is, they’re challenging why it is that white women get to define what feminism is.”
The history of feminism itself centers white women, in that most often the waves we know are prescribed according to white women’s suffrage.
Smith argues, “However, if we were to recognize the agency of Indigenous women in an account of feminist history, we might begin with 1492 when Native women collectively resisted colonization. This would allow us to see that there are multiple feminist histories emerging from multiple communities of colour which intersect at points and diverge in others. This would not negate the contributions made by white feminists, but would de-center them from our historicizing and analysis.”
Native feminists are not only focusing on issues related to gender, but given their shared experience under colonization, they are also focusing attention on governance.
“By making anti-colonial struggle central to feminist politics,” Smith continues, “Native women place in question the appropriate form of governance for the world in general. In questioning the nation-state, we can begin to imagine a world that we would actually want to live in.”
Furthermore, “A Native feminist politics seeks to do more than simply elevate Native women’s status — it seeks to transform the world through indigenous forms of governance that can be beneficial to everyone.”
So what are the benefits to a feminism within a larger context that de-centers white women?
Morgan Jerkins argues this,
“…saying I feel for you to a woman unlike yourself means you somehow share in her experience is one of the pitfalls that plagues mainstream feminism. It signals to women of color that their stories are only worth telling if a white person can understand them, and therefore that a white person’s emotions and responses are of greater importance than the stories themselves. We cannot come together unless we recognize our differences first. These differences are best articulated when women of color occupy the center of the discourse while white women remain silent, actively listen, and do not try to reinforce supremacy by inserting themselves in the middle of the discussion.”
We all must learn from these modes of thinking: our movement must reflect the diversity of our numbers, without excluding certain groups because they come from their own unique experiences, and also without silencing them.
By thinking and debating and organizing alongside diverse groups of women, we all bring to the table ideas on how to make the world a better place, not just for women, but for everyone. Furthermore, by white women not occupying the narrative, women of color can be heard, fully-appreciated, and can lead us towards change.
You may be thinking, but Lauralei, you just said that Dr. Westover is problematic for not mentioning these things. Now you are saying white women should shut up.
No, I am saying that Dr. Westover’s silence on larger systems of oppression and on contemporary feminism is problematic. I reference the issues that non-white folks, disabled folks, and others specifically face under White Supremacy and colonization in order to emphasize exactly how HUGE the stakes are when we remain silent on oppression. It isn’t Dr. Westover’s job to speak to experiences she has never had. It is her job; however, to explore her beliefs— to question herself and her silence and what good it does.
This line of thinking— examining larger systems at play, specifically within education— is missing from Dr. Westover’s Educated. And it is harmful.
Who is Educated Really About and who is it really for?
Many of the interview questions that Dr. Westover receives are about her father, and this makes plenty of sense, as he is perhaps the most interesting and alluring character of the book and of her life. But, I don’t want him to be the most interesting. This is Dr. Westover’s story. I want HER to be the most interesting character.
In her memoir, Dr. Westover performs this reverence for him— giving his voice plenty of room on the page and in her interviews to be full, rich, flawed too, but ultimately human and real. So much so that sometimes it feels like he is far more real than she is.
Professor Runciman remarks in his interview with Dr. Westover at Cambridge, “And your mother is a really important part of the story too. I think a lot of the reviews tended to focus on your father as the central figure. But in a way, there are two central figures in the story. And your mother is the other part of it.”
This thinking, as Professor Runciman both intentionally and unintentionally reinforced, places Dr. Westover’s parents as the “central figures” of her memoir. But this excludes Dr. Westover from her own story. Her mother and father have more room to dictate the truth of who she is than Dr. Westover herself possesses, which is kind of the opposite of the book’s point. The book explores Dr. Westover’s childhood and how her parents’ choices impacted her ways of thinking, but they were not permanent. Dr. Westover ultimately wants us to know that she has agency over her own mind, despite what her parents did to hinder that.
So why are we still so focused on her father and mother?
I want Dr. Westover to give herself the same amount of space to convey just how full and rich she is— even though she is young and just starting this amazing journey beyond her home. She is deserving of room. She is deserving of volume. She is deserving of all the texture a human being can have.
And, perhaps most importantly of all, I want her to demand it. Not just from herself, but from us.
Later in the CNN interview, Dr. Westover is asked about her father and whether or not he was a leader of a cult. And she explains that no, they were not a cult, but when she was a child, she believed her father was right about everything in the world. But that changed when she went to university and learned about mental illness, which helped her understand her father’s words and actions.
“When I was a child,” she defines, “I thought there were two categories. That you could be insane or you could be sane. And if you were insane you fell in love with turnips— whatever. I didn’t have a category in my head that you could be functional and something could still be going on. That really helped me. That was one of the formal bits of my education that really helped me see my life.”
I want to focus on that last sentiment: “…that really helped me see my life.”
It helped her see her father’s life, and how he impacted her life.
To me, it feels that her education served not necessarily to help her experience more truths than those given to her by her father, but rather to help her navigate the truths given to her by her father.
I sympathize with this. We all eventually have to unpack our parents’ lives to better understand why they did what they did, and to better understand who we are as a result. But this raises a question for me: Who is her memoir really about? And therefore, who is it for?
And, to be honest, I don’t have an answer for you. It feels like it is for herself— to come to grips with her life and what happened to her. And that’s fine. All writers are, to some degree, writing for themselves. This does not make it selfish. But, typically, writers are also hoping to reach a certain kind of person beyond themselves. Stories, either inherently or intentionally, convey beliefs about the world— how things should be or how we see them to be. Those beliefs connect us with readers— either positively or negatively. The problem arises when our beliefs are not known or clear. That can add readership to a degree; readers can impose their own beliefs upon your work to reinforce their own. So, really, your book is “for everyone.” But deep down it’s for no one, but you.
It is unclear who Educated is really for. I’d like to think it is for other little girls who may be trapped in lives they don’t want— there to inspire.
But inspire to what exactly? Self-education? What about those little ones who don’t have older siblings to guide them along? What about those little ones who aren’t allowed jobs, and can’t buy their own textbooks? What about those little ones who aren’t taught to read? What about those little ones who self-educate, apply for college, and are rejected because of the color of their skin?
If you look at these questions, then you can see clearly that Educated is not a book for everyone. And it shouldn’t be for everyone. But it should be for someone.
Action Items:
In Educated, Dr. Westover describes a friend at university who helped guide her through the transition from home to public life.
“Somehow,” Dr. Westover writes, “she understood that my missteps came from ignorance, not intention, and she corrected me gently but frankly.”
I want to be this friend. I hope to correct Dr. Westover gently but frankly. I might fall short; at times I may sound less than gentle. But frank? Yes, always frank.
Frankly, Dr. Westover, you have work to do.
You may think I sound condescending or even brash to offer suggestions to Dr. Westover and to other women like her. But I felt compelled to do so, when I read this in Educated,
“Charles [a friend] said my behavior was self-destructive, that I had an almost pathological inability to ask for help… It had never occurred to me to talk to a professor— I didn’t realize we were allowed to talk to them— so I decided to try, if only to prove to Charles I could do it.”
This happens a lot throughout Educated. Young Tara faces a barrier— be it academic or personal— and she flees from it, until she stumbles upon a solution, normally supplied by a friend or a professor. She takes some convincing. But eventually, when no other solution is available, she will fold and give the solution a shot. Then, repeatedly, the solution comes through and she is able to move forward. Think of it like a game of Monopoly where your game piece is in jail. You can’t advance until you stumble upon one of the methods to get out— draw a “get out of jail free” card, roll doubles, or pay the fine. As young Tara played the game of life, she often found herself in precarious situation— normally due to finances— and landed in a metaphorical “jail.” She was trapped until something came to her rescue. But ultimately, she advanced through by way of some miracle of the universe— some hand of a friend reaching through the void.
Essentially, I learned through Dr. Westover’s account of herself, that she often needs help but doesn’t know how to ask. And when she gets help, she will take it, but only after struggling with it for a while— debating its value and authenticity.
From “Tes” article titled “Tes talks to… Tara Westover.” https://www.tes.com/news/tes-talks-tara-westover.
I’m here to offer help, even though she doesn’t know how to ask for it.
Now, some of you might be thinking that I am being harsh. But let me put it this way: Educated is one of the most celebrated books of 2018. Educated is a #1 New York times Bestseller. Educated was one of President Barack Obama’s favorite reads of 2018. Educated won the Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir & Autobiography. Educated was a finalist for several National Book Critic Circle’s awards. And Educated is currently listed at #9 in Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank.
This is an extremely popular book, regardless of how I feel.
With great power comes great responsibility. Dr. Westover may just be a writer— not a world leader or a superhero. But her words carry immense weight. And she must challenge herself to be better, precisely because she is now in the spotlight. She is an example and a role model that people will point to as time goes on, especially for young girls.
Tara Westover, therefore, does not need more people out there praising her without question. She needs an ally who is willing to push her even further than she pushed herself.
From here on, I’m addressing Dr. Westover, but I am also addressing “you”— any other women (especially white women) who might be telling their stories without challenging and questioning certain things about that story.
Talk about your future and make others listen.
As I watched your interviews, all of the questions posed were about your history— stories and truths written in your book. People are (rightfully) mystified and intrigued by your childhood with a Mormon survivalist father, no access to schooling, and the gruesome injuries you and your family members sustained working in your father’s junkyard. That’s what the book is about. But all I can wonder is what’s on your horizon now that you have liberated yourself?
I did not see many questions posed to you about the future, which I find deeply unfair. Not just to you, but also to all of us.
I don’t mean questions like, “What’s next for you?” Not that. But rather, “Now that you have studied and learned so much, what do you want to do with it?”
Throughout the book’s recounting of your time at Cambridge and Harvard, you describe encounters with professors who compliment your brilliance.
You write about a Professor Steinberg, your adviser at Cambridge,
“I have been teaching in Cambridge for thirty years, he said. And this is one of the best essays I’ve read.”
Then, later, you continue,
“At my next supervision, Professor Steinberg said that when I applied for graduate school, he would make sure I was accepted to whatever institution I chose.”
From these conversations, we can see that you have an impeccable mind. Your professors are impressed with your thinking and writing. They are willing to support you in every way possible to continue your education.
Not that you necessarily have to do anything with that love and support; you could easily drop off the map and never contribute to society again. We all have that power.
As for what’s next, Westover says, “I am trying to put together a documentary about rural education. Rural kids tend to struggle a bit more transitioning from high school to the next stage…” She said this in her interview with the Library of Congress.
This is great news! Shout it from the mountains. Be proud of where you are going.
Yell at injustice. Don’t stay silent.
In your memoir, you describe an encounter with your abusive brother. He prods you, both physically and emotionally, and you react. You say, “Don’t touch me.” He attacks you, in your very home. You write,
“I was a misbehaving child; he was setting the child right. The pressure on my windpipe eased and I felt a delicious fullness in my lungs. He knew I would not call out… Yelling is rude, Shawn said, again speaking to the kitchen. You’ll stay down until you apologize. I said I was sorry for yelling at him. A moment later, I was standing. I folded napkins from paper towels and put one at each setting. When I placed one at Shawn’s plate, he again jabbed his finger into my ribs. I said nothing.”
Your trauma— though I wish more than anything that it didn’t exist— trained you in two ways. It trained you in one way to avoid confrontation. It drilled into you the fear of speaking out against wrong-doing. But it also trained you to know what to expect from White Supremacy and the patriarchy.
In your Cambridge interview, you specifically point out class and its influence in unequal access to education and opportunity in America. And this is one of the first times in your interviews where I have seen you speak passionately about a topic beyond your family. I want to see more of this. I want to hear more of what you have to say about access to a good, public education. I want to hear your ideas on how to change things. And given your experiences, I think you could be an amazingly positive and forceful advocate for change.
But also, challenge yourself to speak out just as passionately about other kinds of injustice— racial, gendered, ableist, and others.
Audre Lorde said,
“Your silence will not protect you.”
AND
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
This does not mean that you should attempt to speak for others or above them. But it means that you must read, you must listen, and you must speak up when something doesn’t feel right. Now that your name carries weight, and now that your voice will be heard, you must grow and challenge those parts of you that are racist or otherwise indoctrinated by White Supremacy, imperialism, colonization, and the patriarchy. It is imperative that you set an example for what a “true” education looks and sounds like. Your education must be one towards justice.
Look Beyond Yourself; Do not simply study the nineteenth century voices.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, her sixth suggestion is this:
“Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions.”
Both in your memoir and in your interviews, you speak to John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft, to the writings of the nineteenth century that resonated with you and awakened a curiosity, a wonder, a joy within you. I am so glad you found those voices. But, you must understand, as I am sure a part of you does, that those voices spoke to experiences that offer only a fraction of women’s experiences; they spoke of white women. You must read beyond these voices if you wish to truly be a force for change for all girls who want an education. You must read Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni, Florynce Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Austin Channing Brown, Brittney C. Cooper, Iris Morales, Sonia Sanchez, Paula Gunn Allen, Bernice L. McFadden, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Roxane Gay, Ann Petry, Angela Davis, and many, many others.
And you must question, above all else. Question why those nineteenth century voices so deeply appeal to you above all others. Question what voices you might be automatically ignoring or not wanting to hear. Question why. Question how you can grow into a more well-rounded thinker.
White Supremacy is everywhere— challenge yourself to notice its presence and to fight it.
After you found out about your neighbor, Randy Weaver’s involvement with the Aryan Nations, and called it out for what it was: white supremacy, you go on to discuss your father’s mental illness— about his disease not being a choice. You write,
“Because he believed himself right, and he kept on believing himself right— after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid.”
These two ideas may seem discordant, but they are connected. When we think we are right all the time, you’re correct to point out that we hurt people. Other people pay the price for our ignorance. This is also how White Supremacy works. When we don’t challenge ourselves about our actions, our words, our choices, our reactions, we miss opportunities to grow and fight structures of injustice.
Believe that your words, actions, and presence will have an impact on others.
This is crucial. You must believe and understand that your words, actions, and presence will have a positive and negative impact on others. Largely, the reception for your memoir, Educated, has had a positive impact on others. But you must also assume that there will be times when you take the stand and your words, actions, and presence will have a negative impact. It is important to be prepared for both, to listen to both equally, and to respond to both with respect. You may begin to notice blind spots sooner— areas that could be problematic. But you must not run away and hide when you notice these blind spots. You must research, listen, and try your best. If you fail, you can learn and get back up. If you succeed, you can celebrate. Either way, you are giving more and more of yourself each day to the world around you.
Either way, you are recognizing your integral-ness to our ecosystem. In this reflection you will recognize both your power and, ideally, your humility in the face of our forward march towards justice.
In Conclusion:
None of us are perfect.
But it’s exactly the fact that we push each other, that we hold up mirrors and force each other to acknowledge the reflection and all her flaws, that we fight and debate openly, that make us powerful. We shouldn’t hide from those things simply because they are full of conflict and confrontation. These things should excite us. These things should motivate us to be our best selves.
The point of all of this is that Tara Westover is not alone in her position, in her lack of context. There are many, many women out there who shy away from this movement. Because of fear. Because of ignorance Because of labels that carry weight— sometimes too much weight for a single person to carry.
I’m not just speaking to Tara Westover.
I’m speaking to all women out there who shy away from the movement, yet enjoy the spoils of its few victories as if they were born from their own choices, their own strength, their own individual prowess. Our strength is never our own. Some of it is born in our spirits— in who we are. But some of it also comes from our ancestors, their choices, their actions (good or bad.) To ignore that context is to ignore the truth.
The truth is we need movements and we need each other. Our individual beliefs, choices, decisions, strengths and drives will only get us so far. If we give up on context— on our sisters and allies— we lose. If we remain silent on our beliefs, who are we helping?
If our memoirs only look towards the past, we abandon our power at the door.
Let us all accept our power, accept that our words can cause harm AND good, accept that our stories matter but our beliefs matter just as much.
This way our pasts can push us forward— together.
Again, here are all of my resources from this blog post. I recommend we all pick up the tools to make our feminism stronger and fight for everyone.
Why I Am Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins
Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism by Robin Diangelo
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Edited by Keeange-Yamahtta Taylor
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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