As a youngster, I was briefly involved in Brownies. I guess I must have been about 8 years old, and the program was sponsored by the elementary school I attended.
The meetings and activities were your standard after-school fair, I think. A snack, followed by a service or craft project, with specific curricula designed to encourage leadership growth in young girls. And it was there that I saw one of the most egregious abuses of petty power I can remember.
Each meeting, one of the mothers would bring snacks for all the girls in the group. There were enough girls that I don't think it was an onerous task for the moms (always moms, never dads - it
was 1973). The snacks were usually home-made goodies, as status was derived by such things among many of the adult women in my suburban community in those days. But one day, the mom in charge of snacks decided to bring
long-johns. One for each girl.
When it comes to status symbols, oftentimes the scarcity of the item is directly related to its desirability. In the early '70's, most of us had stay-at-home moms, and getting homemade goodies was pretty commonplace, and because we were 8, we had no appreciation of the time and work associated with making dozens of snacks for elementary school kids. And we didn't often get bakery goods -
buying such things (when the discerning housewife should be
baking instead) was Frowned Upon. So when these boxes and boxes of long-johns arrived for our snack, we were EXCITED, in only the way youngsters can be when they feed off each other in anticipation of something special.
One of the things the Brownies did was say some sort of "grace" prior to digging in to our snacks. I don't recall the language, other than it was pretty vanilla, and we all had to memorize it and say it at each meeting.
And at this particular meeting, all the girls were breathless with excitement over the long-johns, and as we said grace, a number of girls were holding or otherwise touching their pastries during grace. When we'd finished, one of the adult leaders decided that was inappropriate, and decided to speak.
Now, I understand that what was considered good manners in those days was much more rigid that what we apply today. So if this woman had just said, "All right, girls, I noticed a number of you were handling your food during grace, so I think we should try it again without doing that," it would not have stuck in my mind, over 40 years later. Instead what she said was, "We're going to say grace again, because girls like Christy X* were touching their food during grace, and that's not the way we do things here at Brownies."
Christy was
devastated. She ran from the room and hid in the bathroom, inconsolable. She cried until her mom picked her up, horrifyingly embarrassed and shamed by being called out by name in front of her peers. I don't recall if she ever came back to Brownies, or not. Quite a punishment for the crime of being overly excited about a special treat.
Now, as an adult, I wonder - what in the Sam Hill was this woman
thinking? Was she disappointed and angry that the store-bought snacks provided by this mom were so much more popular among the girls than her own home-baked offerings? Was she taking this anger out on Christy, because Christy was pretty and popular, and her own child was not? What possible outcome did she expect by publicly shaming this girl? Because the outcome she got was a devastated youngster, 40 other girls who thought she was really, really
mean, and an adult who uses her behavior as a yardstick for how the axiom of "praise in pubic, criticize in private" MATTERS. I'm quite sure the whole "don't handle your food during grace" lesson was lost among the emotional trauma. And I'm equally sure the lesson in manners wasn't the point of her comment in any event.
So what's the point of this little morality play? Words matter. Positions of authority carry power, no matter how little. And being an uptight, mean, bitch gets you remembered in a less than flattering light.
________
*I remember Christy's last name - as a direct result of this incident, in fact - but I don't want to publish it here.
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