songs of experience

Scooter and mis_nomer asked about the context for “a pocket of broken glass.” Angier’s essay was entitled The Origin, Procreation, and Hopes of an Angry Feminist and here is the paragraph from which I pulled the expression:

“When I was a teenager, and by then having moved from the Bronx to a small town in Michigan, my mother and I decided to start a consciousness-raising group of our own, and we invited a ragtag collection of friends and neighbors to join us. But after a few weeks, I began to feel that our meetings were off-track. We weren’t talking about important things, notably the Oppression of Women, or how pissed off we were by that oppression. We were, or rather the other women were, gabbing. They were talking about their daily lives, their kids, their husbands, their in-laws. And they weren’t even angry about anything! What was the point? This was supposed to be a CR meeting, not a bridge club!

So I began to complain. I began to rant. I scolded the others for not passing the feminist purity test, for neglecting the political in favor of the personal, and for wasting their time on trivia. I didn’t want to discuss the minutia of when and under what amusing circumstances Barbara had nursed her baby the other day. I wanted to know why Barbara assumed complete responsibility for child care and let her husband off the hook every time! And then a funny thing happened. After a few weeks of being put down, the women wouldn’t put up with it anymore. They kicked me out of the group. I was a founding member, but they asked my mother to ask me to leave, and she did, and I did. In truth, I don’t blame them. I didn’t even blame them back then. I knew I was a pocket of broken glass.”

Does that help?