If You Want to Build a Strong Girl

For all of us who are influencing the development of daughters and granddaughters (and nieces and young friends) here are a few thoughts:

IF YOU WANT TO BUILD A STRONG GIRL:

Be relentless. She must graduate from college and graduate school, not because these institutions offer young women much but because they still provide the only entrance into the professions.

Alternatively, trade schools. Women plumbers and electricians earn a good living and are providing useful services to their communities (and we need to get over our white upper-class insistence on white upper-class professions).

And be equally relentless in teaching about desire in all its forms and birth control.

And in laying down a standard of ethics—one we adults often betray: preaching inclusion while never having a dark skinned person in the house. Girls and young women know we are all hypocrites but, strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to destroy the power of our ethical teaching.

And insist by example that other females are and will be their best and sometimes only friends.

BUT IF, BASED ON YOUR OWN HISTORY, YOU WANT TO BUILD A GIRL WHO FITS IN…

And this requires an honest appraisal of what it has cost you to fit in or not fit in…

Then the church in all its many forms is your answer. Not because it offers anything specifically tailored to the many women and girls that fill church pews, but because it endorses an ideal of self-sacrifice that ensures that the self-sacrificer will always fit in.

Here I come to the photos I took Sunday the 20th at the Santa Fe Convention Center’s show, “Crown & Cloth: The Sacred Style of Our Lady.”

You don’t have to be a Roman Catholic to appreciate the enormous number of small dresses and cloaks and the array of jewelry created (often by men) for the dressing of the ancient statue of La Conquistadora, also called, paradoxically, Our Lady of Peace.

This statue, according to the legend, was carried away from Santa Fe during the spectacular eviction of the Spanish conquistadors in the fifteenth century, only to be carried back by them in triumph fifteen years later, in the so-called “Bloodless Reconquest.” I doubt if any of the members of the 18 northern pueblos who achieved the Spanish eviction would call their return “bloodless.”

Be that as it may, this version of the Mother of Christ is attended by La Cofradía de La Conquistadora, a group of men who wear wide ceremonial red satin sashes; two of them are posed beside her statue at the show of her garments. Essential, for a girl to fit in, is to belong to a group hosted by men.

Ceremonies of all kinds—birthdays, weddings, baptisms and christenings—are also essential parts of this training. Never neglect or ignore the good wishes assigned to these ceremonies. Many of La Conquistadora’s outfits are created to celebrate a fiftieth wedding anniversary as well as a recovery from illness or the birth of a child. Greeting cards are a poor substitute but they are better than nothing.

These garments are not special because of the needlework involved; most depend heavily on the gilt and glitter of manufactured decorations. And most in this show were created very recently.

Does that mean La Conquistadora will soon lack new outfits for Easter and Christmas as well as for the procession of Holy Days?

Probably not. Her wardrobe is so extensive there will never be a lack of choices.

Seeing her at home, high up in a side chapel in Santa Fe Cathedral, a visitor may not be aware that this is a fashion show. The women who dress her may now and then reflect on this curious concurrence of style and spirituality.

But they will certainly know that all followers of this Lady are sure to fit in.

In Women, New Mexico Santa Fe