Provincial (Stepford) + Cosmopolitan (Progressive)

 

Cultural Bifurcation between 

Provincial (Stepford) + Cosmopolitan (Progressive) 

Women

It struck me when I was informed of the identical names of women of the same upper-middle class neighborhood and in the same socio-economic class [that, also, could be applied to those of lesser economic demographics] that 

my memories and impressions of the  movie, ‘The Stepford Wives’, 

bum-rushed my imagination.

I thought of the type of females of what I call a provincially-centered, ‘Stepford Wife’ behavior and those whose own background involuntarily 

obliges them to look beyond their own more narrow provincially-centered interests and see, plus empathize in more sympathetic and holistic 

perspective the cosmopolitan unifying nature of their status with those 

outside their locale or their culturally provincial similar interests. This spectrum of attitudes gained my  attention  from a maxim I heard from 

a whipper-snapper undergrad, ‘Women are the (physical and paradigmatic) bearers of our culture!’. With those distinctions formulated in my head, 

I considered the cultural evolution of feminism and what I see as its operational bi-furcation.   

The provincial-’Stepford women’, no matter what economic level : centered their focus on the well-being of family. On the less-resourced end,  for physical security and day-to-day/week-to-week survival; on the more 

affluent level, the more abstract concerns of security and survival (now thriving-legacy). There’s a good rationale for these attitudes to the limits 

of rational, practical needs. With a broad brush, I’d say that a more 

hovering helicopter myopic-focus, micro-management  for the exclusive promotion, leverage, and advantage for their nuclear family and 

acquaintances. Within that nuclear shell the same parochial orthodoxy 

of not only public behavior-posturings, but thought would be the 

stereotypical image 

 

The sports-mom or the ‘not my baby’-denial 

mom comes to mind in this stereotype.

Counter-that with my more favored cosmopolitan-progressive,  

free-range matriarch exists beyond the 

conventional norms and paradigms, creating her own space beyond 

the status quo’s architecture. 

I see and  envision her-with or without a weapon-as a fierce bad-ass 

for universal principles: not just those for her convenience and exclusive 

self-interests. She’s a non-self-conscious iconoclast with her  ‘au naturel’ 

ways of unprogrammed and non-dogmatic attitudes and beliefs. She’d be 

in a seamless coherence with those of different origins and circumstances, because it’s her common humanity not only with others but the physical 

grace of being sentient to the sensation of life as a gift for all to cherish 

in a shared congregation of symbiotic, if not synergistic solidarity.