The Choices Chicks Make

By Donna Ladd Wednesday, March 15, 2006 5:37 p.m. CST

I spoke to a roomful of young chicks recently. We were all packed into the charming old depot in Forest, Miss., some 40 miles from where I grew up in Neshoba County. They've renovated the building into a downtown art gallery and performance space in a small town where such cultural offerings are unusual.

I wasn't quite sure what to say to these young women, mothers and guardians who attended the Mother-Daughter Social, put together by the Partnership for a Healthy Scott County. They just told me I had 30 minutes to talk to these young women—pre-teens and early teens, whom they characterized as "at risk"—about making good choices as young women.

As my assistant, Natalie Collier, and I drove there on a Friday night, I alternately tried to apply mascara by the light of her car makeup mirror and think about what the idea of "choices" means to me. I didn't prepare much to say, figuring a group of 75 young women didn't want to hear a 30-minute canned speech. I wore pink and black, figuring that they were girls, and if all else failed, maybe they would dig my outfit.

As we ate our catered dinner, I watched the young women—mostly black, a few white—sit a bit stiffly at the menagerie of tables throughout the gallery. The art on the walls ranged from paintings of romantic Old South landscapes to slaves picking cotton. The young women, from schools throughout the area, were dressed in suits, dresses and neat pants with chic jackets. They were on best behavior as the classical music played in the background.

The organizers explained to the young women that the idea was to expose them to different things—from the music most probably don't hear everyday to the art on the walls to ballroom dance demonstrations to the speech I was about to give to tell them about my upbringing in Neshoba County and the choices I had made.

When I stood up, I was a little nervous, figuring they'd fidget my boring butt out of there in five minutes. But when I started talking about my mother and the limited choices she'd had as a young woman, they seemed riveted. I talked to them about the bad choices my mother had made, the two alcoholic husbands who alternately delighted us and made our lives hell, how she hadn't had a lick of education growing up.

I told them about how the most important thing to her was for me to have choices like education and freedom so I didn't think I had to marry young—she married at 14 to get away from an overbearing father—or find a man to take care of me. She wanted me to be able to take care of myself in every way possible. Then, she'd say, I'd find myself a "good" man, one who wouldn't hurt me, bleed dry my bank account and my soul, one who would respect my choices, too. She had learned those lessons the hard way.

They listened to me describe how I wanted to know everything there was to know growing up, to escape a state where I thought there were not choices for being myself, a place where early marriage and babies, too often followed by misery and divorce, seemed to be the primary choice for young women.

I told them about choosing to leave the state, then to drop out of law school, first to become a DJ (young audiences love that part) and then to pursue my heart-and-soul dream of writing for a living. Choose to do what you love, and then work incredibly hard, and then even harder, and the livelihood will follow, I told them. But don't dare cut off those choices.

I spoke about alcohol and drugs and how their abuse limits your choices. I told them about working to be strong enough to resist the bad boys—and later men—who would make promises and then leave them, perhaps with too many mouths to feed.

The young women were attentive and appreciative—and actually fidgeted very little, considering. One, dressed in a mod Emma Peel-style dress (even if she didn't know it), ran up and hugged me afterward, then giggled and ran away before I could even learn her name. Some of the mothers walked up and thanked me, looking knowingly into my eyes, clearly contemplating the hard row to hoe many of these dynamic young women would face.

What I didn't tell the young women is that they are growing up in the worst state for women. I love Mississippi to its core and am invested in it, but I know well its limitations. So many young women leave—me, the day after graduating from State—because simply speaking our minds can get us labeled and disparaged. Mississippi is, routinely, the most violent state for women, with more women killed here by men with guns than in any other state.

And this state, perhaps more than any other, uses an entire group of women as political whipping girls. In a state with the most poverty—along with our best sister Louisiana—more women are forced to have children we cannot care for than in any other state, and are then harangued with the "single mother" (and/or "welfare mother") epithet. And in a state where the women's movement had a huge impact even if few people noticed, men—Democrats, Republicans and other—believe if they just imply that we're sluts they can say anything about us or legislate against our rights to choose whether we are prepared to raise children in this poor state.

To me, the word "choice" is about so much more than abortion rights. But abortion rights are an integral part of women being able to escape abusive homes and poverty. Through education and delayed motherhood, women can raise healthy children who themselves understand and respect the power of making choices.

The ability of individuals to make good choices for themselves and their families depends on women's ability to make decisions for ourselves with no thought to political consequence. It is simply too late to put the genie of choice back into the bottle. We cannot go back.

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