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To many of us, it seemed John Kelly took a tangent in his recent speech defending the content of Donald Trump’s phone call to a Gold Star widow. After complaining about recent political debate, Kelly segued into nostalgia: “When I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred and looked upon with great honor.”
I’d like to take some space, here, to womansplain the shock waves these words sent through the feminist community. It’s not simply that Kelly works very closely with a man whom we have witnessed denigrating women again and again. It’s not simply that the initial protest against the content and tone of the president’s phone call was issued by both the widow herself and a black female congressional representative. It’s not just that the recent executive orders on health insurance and workplace protections will hit women harder than men. It’s the words themselves: sacred and honor.
As many who have responded to Kelly’s speech have pointed out, the childhood about which he’s reminiscing would have been in the 1950s and early 1960s, when, as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell observed in a blistering rant against Kelly,
You know what wasn’t sacred when he was a kid growing up where he was growing up? Black women or black people. And, oh by the way, women were not sacred either. They were not honored. In John Kelly’s neighborhood in the Catholic parish he grew up in, women were getting beaten by their husbands, their drunken husbands, as a normal weekly occurrence. And their parish priest would tell those women, you can’t get divorced or you’ll be ex-communicated. You are just going to have to bear it and bear it for the children. It’s nothing you can do about it.
You find discussions of sacred most often in conversations about religion. It’s distinguished, for instance, from the term holy in being used primarily for objects, places, or happenings: sacred space, sacred relics. Saints may be holy, but they are not sacred. Philosophers like Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade have discussed the notion of the sacred at length, opposing it to the idea of the profane, not as some good-versus-evil dichotomy, but as a way to understand the complementary nature of religious and mundane experiences. To be sacred, then, is not to participate fully in the human experience, to be a symbol or an object more than a person. To experience something (or, in this case, someone, since we are talking about women) as sacred is not to experience them as individual and quotidian.
I’m hard put to think of this status as being appealing to anyone. There are movements, led by women, that generously employ the term sacred, but for the most part their aim is to reduce violence in the lives of indigenous women. The term sacred in American Indian communities, according to the Lakota writer Vine Deloria Jr., “is a profoundly difficult concept for many people to understand, especially from an Indian perspective. … Sacredness, in its first and deepest encounter, requires that a boundary of respect be drawn around our experience and/or knowledge of this personal energetic presence.” It’s fair to say, I think, that Kelly’s use of sacred has little to do with an essentially political plea by writers like Deloria (and, by extension, the indigenous activists who claim the term for women) to forge respect for and within native communities.
The second part of Kelly’s statement on women is an agentless passive: “and were looked upon with great honor.” Presumably the agent here is men. But Kelly’s leaving that out, and his going on to talk about “the dignity of life” and “religion,” implies that we are the ones failing to look on women with honor — that women are not themselves part of this we, this body politic.
The word honor itself reinforces what many feminists would call this “othering” of women. Several years ago, doing research in Pakistan, I learned that according to traditional Pashtun tenets, honor was a quality reserved to men. Women carried with them the honor of the family, generally lodged in their namus or sexual chastity. But women could not themselves possess honor. Instead, what they possessed was shame. And their shame, presumably, would keep them from giving away the honor of their family, the honor that belonged to men.
We’re not quite so doctrinaire about the term in the west. Yet according to Google’s N gram viewer, even today, the term honorable man appears 15 times as much as the term honorable woman. There is nothing wrong with our all honoring each other — honoring our humanity, our decency, our efforts to do the right thing. But to be looked on with honor is to accord honor itself to the men who are doing the looking. I can’t say that’s an entirely comfortable feeling.
Finally, let’s not even talk about switching the genders to make the sentence “Men were sacred and looked upon with great honor.” No one says that. If anyone did, it would sound distinctly weird. Which is exactly how it sounded, to some of us, when General Kelly made his statement.