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It has recently been brought to my attention that to some people abstract discussions about feminism are irrelevant, and moreover, unfun. To this I say: you have not known true joy until you have felt the adrenaline generated by a good collection of feminist essays read in a fit of cathartic anger. (I’m only half-kidding.) And at any rate, I don’t know how you do good practice without good theory, and vice versa.
But I am, at heart, a bit of a sucker for crowd-pleasing. So I’m trying to keep my overly-cerebral self in the background for the next little while. And in that vein, I’m going to tell you about how I woke up to feminism. If the personal is political, if I’m telling y’all to dig down into your circumstances and ask hard questions, I have to do the same with myself.
Because I am reasonably radical these days people tend to imagine that my first word was “patriarchy.” (It was actually “shit” so I’ll grant that the anger was probably always there.) They imagine that I have always been First And Foremost A Feminist. But I actually encountered my first formal feminist readings in a law school class – and I think I wouldn’t have been half as receptive had it not been for the life that preceded it.
I may seem all internet-ballsy now, but about six or seven years ago I wasn’t very much of anything at all. I hadn’t the faintest clue who my “self” even was. My life was admittedly Just Fine (good grades, good friends, good apartment). But I didn’t have a dude in my life, and the malaise of this condition was all-consuming. I was never that great at boys, but all I thought about was how much I wanted A Boyfriend.
I no longer remember if these thoughts were about wanting sex or wanting the company of a man or wanting romance. Were I to venture a guess now, I would say I would have had equal trouble explaining this then. What I knew was that to be a person, to fit in, I should Be In A Relationship. And I was determined to find one.
What I found was a friend who had fallen in love with me without my noticing. Let’s call him M. He had to work at it, but M got me to go out with him. Long story short, I moved in with M and his Transfuckingformers that he loved beyond all measure of reason and wanted to display in places of honour in our living room. We lived together for about two years, but as you know, that can be about two decades when you are twenty-two.
And one day I think he woke up and realized he did not know what the hell was going on. He dumped me, unceremoniously presenting me with rent cheques when he came home from teaching one afternoon, and moved out. (I may or may not have thrown something at him when he presented me with those stupid fucking cheques.)
In the meantime, as I suppose I should have expected, my entire existence had come to depend on M. I had been desperately ill and had only recently begun treatment that was allowing me to function, my relationship with my parents was on the rocks, my friends had moved away. I had gone to law school locally without the vaguest interest in being a lawyer because I was worried that if I moved away our relationship would be at an end and it had come to seem like the only thing I had going for me.
And here I was, halfway into a law degree and without the faintest bit of self-ownership to show for my twenty-four years on earth. And I was seriously done. Finished, had it, washed up, no good to anyone. When he was gone, it took me two days to get up off the floor and a week to leave the apartment.
And you know what is hilarious about this sad sack story, looking back? I was not in love with M! Never had been! My feelings about him were nothing compared to, say, the boy I had spent the previous three years pining for, or the first guy I ever kissed.* But when he came around I just figured… well, I don’t know what I figured. I was not much devoted to self-reflection in those days.
You know what I think now? I think I was eager to check “Boyfriend” off on the list of Things You Do To Be A Person. I think I settled because I was the kind of person who thought that life was a passive process, and that if I didn’t accept what came to me I would not get something else. I wanted to be, to put it bluntly, like everybody else, wanted to have what they have, wanted their contentment and their complete aura of okay-ness with the way things are. I had convinced myself that my lack of desire to be like everyone else was the problem.
You know how these stories actually go, though, readers. They never seem to follow the right road map for some of us. We have the mixed blessing of seeing these expectations for what they are: hollow, empty rules imposed by no one anyone remembers or cares about anymore.
Because the fact is, even though most of my boxes remained unchecked, life went on. Life got better! I took that fem theory class and thought I had found God when I started reading radical feminist texts. I was shocked when I overheard a fellow classmate, one of the smartest people in the whole school, call me a “powerhouse of thought.” I got a cat. I got to New York, which I love with a ferocity that surprises me, considering its crass approach to money and power. I started directing plays in my spare time, making up for lack of a theatre by stringing up a black curtain ’round the judge’s bench in our mock courtroom.
And you know what gave that to me? Feminism. I often rail about people reducing feminism to a self-help concept, but I would be remiss if I didn’t admit I wouldn’t be here without it. I know some people find feminism a downer, a critic, an articulation of the boundaries of women. I never know how to explain this to people, but in its description of women’s limits it always seems to me that feminism is just telling us we are more than them. We don’t have to adhere to the list of Things You Do To Be a Person. There are ways to think outside it.
If that’s small comfort to some people, well, okay. At the end of the day I have this: even though I now seem destined for spinster catladyhood with a penchant for arguing endlessly on the internet, even if people think I am crazy and harsh and condescending and boring, I am convinced that I am a person. I exist, and even though my own terms are negotiated ones, though I didn’t get to cut myself from whole cloth, that’s just fine with me. I don’t need the kind of freedom that patriarchy-deniers claim they already have. It’s not easy being unfree, but it sure as hell beats being unaware.
* The former of whom played all sort of mind games, writing songs for me and then telling me the next day about the “pretty girls” he was dating, and the latter turned out to be gay. I told you I was not good with the boys!
Excellent piece, PS — I really enjoyed it!
And I hope it wasn’t me who implied that abstract discussions of feminism aren’t fun! I know I mentioned something about abstraction in a recent post, but I never meant to insinuate that I don’t enjoy them. I just feel out of my depth without concrete examples — but that doesn’t mean I won’t “listen” to all the rest of you having a heated, deliberately abstract discussion!
What a gift to be able to locate the precise moment of your feminist rebirth. I can’t trace mine so carefully, because I was certainly accused of feminism before I had really embraced it or understood it myself, so it must have been there all along in a way. Somehow just having a personality and some self possession from a young age seemed to alert people to my dangerousness/feminism. To be honest I don’t think I totally accepted it until after college (despite attending a women’s college), in the wake of sexual assault. It’s a damn shame it took that much pain to let me see what everyone else already could.
PS this will suffice in place of boyfriends I have known.
Pilgrim, as much as we have chit-chatted online about this and that, it’s really nice to read a bit about you. While I identify as Feminist I am not a “cerebral” as you, and that’s okay. I’ve enjoyed you calling me out when I am approaching things lazily (i.e. “what is Feminism anyhow, it’s everything!”). My lack of critical thinking around this has less to do with smarts and more to do with motivation. Namely, that I have none.
I can also remember discovering Feminism, first in a Women’s Studies course and then in a course on Women’s Lit taught my Sandra Gilbert. A big moment for me was finding complete empathy with the character of Edna in “The Awakening,” and speaking with Gilbert about it. It was the moment in my life when I finally discovered why I had always felt so off and different, and it totally centered around what it meant, for me, to be a woman. I came to the understanding that my life would be so much easier if I didn’t want more of certain things.
Anyhow, I could go on and on, but I am glad you opened up and shared with us. And I hope you don’t stay in the background for too long.
xo
I took an honors women’s studies class as an undergrad, and the experience didn’t make me anti-feminist…but it didn’t make me want to declare myself to be one, either. The professor had a very black-and-white view of the world, and I pretty much insist on seeing greys; she didn’t like my papers very much. So I probably didn’t start thinking much about feminist issues until I got out of college and started paying more attention to current events. If someone asked me today whether I’m a feminist, my response would probably be something eloquent like, “Well, duh. Of course I am. Yes, I believe that women should have equal rights, and anyone who doesn’t think so is an asshole, and I will work to counteract their asshole-ish efforts whenever I can.”
Sorry, that was a ramble, not sure what I was trying to say…guess your post just got me thinking!
I will agree with anyone who calls you a powerhouse of thought. One of the reasons I love having you as a friend (not to get all twee here) is because you do challenge people, not least of all me, to challenge assumptions and not take the easy way out. And those “boxes” that remain checked or unchecked define us far less than our intentions, words, and deeds. Based on that, I think your “boxes” are in better shape than most people. I wish I could trace my feminist awareness as clearly as you, but it has certainly never been a “downer” for me.
Great post – you definitely are a “powerhouse of thought”. It’s a real gift, to be able to inspire those around you to think about things that matter.
It seems that so many people are so unaware of the assumptions that are made by people; the “default setting”, so to speak, of thinking that allows all the terrible little (and not so little) things to happen. People like you, who are so good at thinking sideways from the rest of the world, have a lot of power to influence the way others see things.
Not that I mind all the compliments, ladyfriends, but I was worried this post might read like an invitation to compliment me, and uhhh, oops. I’m more interested in how you got into feminism than I am in my own relatively boring self.
transformers? new one. I really don’t know how I got into feminism. I don’t honestly know how into it I am now. I mean, I consider myself a feminist but I haven’t read much theory or taken college courses or anything. I read a book of essays by Gloria Steinem in middle school, I liked them, and I started calling myself a feminist, I didn’t realize at the time how “uncool” that was.
You don’t have to be “into” theory to be into feminism, necessary. I think it does help explain and connect things that otherwise seem confusing and disparate.
I was always fairly convinced that I was anybody’s equal, or even thought that “anything you can do I can do better” in my young life, even as I dealt with double-standards left and right. I got more radical and more informed early in college, and I started reading a lot: Naomi Wolff, Susan Faludi, Gloria Steinem and even Mary Daly. Tavris, Gilligan, Dworkin, Kilbourne, Lerner…it’s how I learn anything. Heavier gender theory and the recognition of the ubiquity of the P came later, but I remember being 19 and having to justify my anger about unfairness both to my mother and my then-bf. They didn’t get why I was so upset about such “ancient history,” and I know I didn’t have the language to explain my rage. Theory gave me words.
I know no one really cares about my story, but I’m going to tell it anyway.
I’ve always been involved in feminism. My parents are pretty big hippies, and my mother is fairly active in pro-choice causes. It only made sense that I’ve been blessed with an instinct for gender equality.
My most recent foray into feminism, though, came in a similar way to yours, Pilgrim. I was really into this guy at school who I had been crushing on since we met almost two years ago. I decided to go for it, and to make a long story short, he took my heart and stomped on it. I made a pledge after that to no longer date guys at my school (it’s about 60% female here, so all the boys are spoiled and will only date the “hot” girls, which I am not). With the extra time I wasn’t spending obsessing over Boy A or Boy B, I wound up looking at a couple feminist blogs. I was so surprised to see that other people felt the same ambivalence I did about things I always considered normal parts of being female, such as wearing makeup or dressing up every day. I knew then and there that this was a movement I could get behind.
So now I’m registering for a few Women and Gender Studies classes next semester, as well as trying to form a feminist sorority on campus. I’d say that the movement suits me, no?
Mary Daly!!! I totally got a copy of GynEcology in high school! I guess it did start earlier.
Very cool.
I don’t even know if I have an ‘awakening’ story as such, as occasionally I’m still in denial about it. Course, I like to think before I talk, so I check myself.
Certainly some posts on Jezebel have forced me to be more aware of how prevalent(ubiquitous?) the patriarchy is…and how many people really are assholes.
I’ve known about white male privelege if not familiar with the name all my life, as my mom is obviously hispanic while my brothers and I are far from it. That said, if I ever had an awakening to what feminism is, it would’ve come from when I first learned about film studies and was exposed to the concept of the “male gaze.” For myself, thinking the universe revolves around me and what I care about, namely film, to realize that every aspect of filmmaking is perforated with the male gaze really drives home the concept of the female point of view being poorly unnoticed. Since then, I can’t help but try my damnedest to make sure I treat characters as human beings, and not stereotypes.
As a kid my mind was furiously churning with observations and nuances of how people interacted with each other. Like Ph Dork I was aware of double standards as a kid. I pressed for reasoning when my gender was used as an excuse to not allow me to do something. Why couldn’t I climb a tree in a dress? Well I’ll go up the tree last so they can’t see anything Mom!
Amongst my family it was rare to see a father actively involved in raising a child, and from watching my cousins’ mothers struggle I created messages of self-reliance and independence in terms of economic strength. From some of those same women however I also watched how they clung to men who were essentially deadbeat dads or questionable partners and created messages of self-worth.
When my mother decided to go to a technical school and work, my dad quit his job and stayed at home with us (at the time I didn’t know how “forward” that decision was.) Second grade was a big year as I had an awesome teacher who pushed me to learn and had me read a book about Barbara Jordan that really opened my eyes to what I could do in my life. As I grew older and my body started to change, I became hyper aware of how men and women, including my parents, looked at me and treated me body first, person second but didn’t know the full impact until I was older.
There are about a million anecdotes I could tell that informed what I now know to be feminist thinking, but my education gave me the language to frame my personal experiences and untangle the larger issues of feminism that hadn’t crossed my path before.
Great piece!
I’m not sure when I really became a feminist. I mean, I know when I first became aware of feminist theory– that was in a Critical Theory class I took through the English department at my college, and I loved it. But I just think I was sort of raised by unconsciously feminist parents. My dad, especially, as weird as it sounds. He fiercely loves his three girls, and all he ever wanted for us was that we grow up smart and independent and ask questions. He taught me about science and cars and gardening and astronomy, and he pushed me to do my best and excel academically and never to let anyone place limits on me. So I think it was my rearing that led me to feminism, to the point that when I first started reading theory, it was like finally discovering the words for something I had known all along.
I am jealous of all you early-starters! I have been trying to think through why I didn’t go to feminism for so long. I did a lot of work on protest history in my undergraduate degree and somehow it never even occurred to me to look at the women’s movement or fem theory – I was always talking about the civil rights movement or the Yippies or Gandhi.
Some of it I think was growing up in Canada, where public discussion of sexism/racism/class is at a… much lower volume level than here. I’m not sure I could explain why. In some ways it is definitely complacency.
I think it also had a lot to do myself with feeling like I wasn’t “smart enough” for what seemed like high-minded theory – mostly because my university experience was a huge culture shock for me. I was brought up by parents who, though white, came from dirt-poor rural backgrounds. My dad dropped out of high school, though through the military he ended up with a masters’ in physics. So going to university, suddenly it seemed everyone knew this language I had never really spoken, and I fought learning it for a long time, I think.
I still haven’t read any feminist theory, although I consider myself a feminist. I am one of two daughters, and I think we were just brought up to believe unfailingly that we were just as good as boys. As such, I can identify moments in which sexism has happened in my life, but often I just Brooked No Opposition. Construction work in college? Yes, please, I have been using a jigsaw since the third grade at home. Did some of the men look at me funny? Maybe at first, but I knew more than most of them anyway. I didn’t react, so they had to accept me. Rock climbing at the gym? Why yes, I *have* been doing this for 8 years so you can stop offering me random, trivial, idiotic “advice” before I even get on the wall, Mr. Stranger-Who-Started-Last-Month.
Normally, I just don’t react and let them see what I can do while I ignore them. They learn, they then treat me as an equal, and life goes on. To those guys, I say, “Suck it.”
Strangely, the most debilitating sexism that I have encountered is in grad school for psychology. Less overt, more insidious, and far more infuriating…. despite it being a touchy-feely field. I am expected to be a docile yes-woman. If I correct someone, I am a bitch. If I show ambition, I am a bitch. Don’t I just want to teach instead of doing research? No? I am a bitch.
Am I going to have kids some day and still get tenure? Yes, because I am a fucking bitch.
Love,
The Bitch of All Bitches, Danger Mouse
I have to say I just…well, fell into it without thinking really.
but it helped me think about a lot of concepts that hovered around my subconscious.
My parents are liberal and progressive, and my father has always been very proud of my academic success, but then most fathers I knew were like that.And my mother just tells me not to be silly when I think I’ve failed something, she has faith in me.
I was called a feminist in middle school, when I didn’t exactly know what the word meant, because I was an angry little girl who ran around a lot and bitch-slapped the dudes who pissed me off. very “girls are just as good as boys, so nyaah”.
I didn’t think about it much after that, mainly because, well, i didn’t have to. It seemed so damn logical to me, and I lived in a world where no-one tried to stop me.
I had different issues growing up, notably coming to terms with being a stranger in the land I grew up in, so I didn’t think about feminism for a while, although I did get into a lot of very loud classroom arguments
And then I discovered the feminist blogosphere, who articulate things so much better than I ever will
It didn’t change my life as such, I already had my very own copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second sex (yeah, I live in France)
Now I’m just trying to contaminate the rest of the world
Well done PS!
I guess looking back I was so very lucky. Growing up I was always encouraged to be myself, and pursue my self and my dreams, and to hell with anyone else who couldn’t/wouldn’t board my ME train. That meant I had no boyfriend until College, and I was sad about it, but I never once compromised. I guess I did Feminism Rite, without a whole lot of thought put into it. I thank my mother. I do think about it MUCH more now, and speak up, and still ride my train. On or off, bitches – you’re either on or off!
Pilgrim, I still don’t know the language.
@DangerMouse: My history sounds very similar to yours, actually. I’m one of two daughters as well, and, despite my parents’ many failings, I think they did a good job with respect to gender stuff — at least when we were kids. I just never considered that I didn’t have the same rights or opportunities as boys. (Although my diminutive physical stature and general sickliness kept me from wanting some typical “boy” stuff, e.g., a career in sports.) My parents’ messages did become more mixed as I got older: Sure, Kivrin, you should absolutely study your butt off, excel in school, and get a great job — but don’t you want to quit that job soon and make bebehs?
As an aspiring psych grad student myself, I look forward to being The Bitch — I’ve certainly played that role often enough in my corporate and gov’t jobs! Bring it.
I don’t know how I really got involved in feminism. I know that before I even really knew what “feminism” was, I called myself one. I was a kid, and wanted to be seen as both smart and controversial, and feminism” seemed to inspire controversy and being a feminist didn’t appear to be a good thing. And I liked ruffling feathers.
It wasn’t until I took my first women’s studies class in undergrad, which from there turned into a minor for me, that I really understood what feminism was. I loved reading about the roots of the movement, I loved reading about all the gender inequality in so many aspects of life and society because it helped me to understand things that I had experienced. I was able to see myself in these stories and in these essays, and suddenly my life experiences and world views fell into place. It helped me to accept and understand my experience as not only a woman in this society, but as a queer woman in this society.
I wish I could be as cerebral and abstract in my thinking as you ladies are. I read everything that is written with interest and fascination, but abstract thinking has never been my strong suit. It makes sense when I consider it and read other people’s words about it, I just have trouble articulating my thoughts on matters in the way that you and many of the commenters on here do. But don’t think that just because I’m not actively participating in the dialogue the way that others are that I’m not soaking it all in, and that I’m not enjoying reading what other people have to say. Because I most definitely am.
I want to clarify one thing about that opening paragraph since people seem to be a little bit stuck on it: for me, the separation of theory and practice is in any event kind of artificial – as MacKinnon likes to say, if it’s no good in practice, it’s not a good theory, is it? So I was not intending to imply that feminists should be reading theory because it is somehow the other “half” of feminism that they need to attend to.
And in any event it was not this commenting community I was thinking of in writing that first sentence; it was more a general thrust in culture that seems to dismiss critiques of power as “too abstract,” usually because someone wants to tell me that they don’t “feel” oppressed and that by that token oppression does not exist and I should shut the fuck up about it.
I have to hold my hand up here and admit that I have never attended feminist theory classes, and actually I loathed being asked to make Marxist and feminist interpretations of literature when doing my English degree, it was the main reason I switched to history.
(I know, I know, I don’t mind it so much now but I still find such takes on literature constricting in that while I see the value of looking at a Victorian text through a feminist eye, to use the example which irritating me at university, I think that to solely look at in this way is to deny a large part of the text but that’s an argument for another day).
Anyway as to being a feminist, I grew up the oldest of two daughters plus a younger brother. Women were all powerful in my family. My mother was one of only three women to get a medical degree in her year, she took two weeks maternity leave for each of us and worked until retirement this year. She herself came from a long line of working women and my father, who also came from a line of women who worked couldn’t comprehend the idea that a woman couldn’t and shouldn’t achieve anything and everything.
Plus we grew up in a house where everyone had long drunken arguments about politics, literature, films, sport and religion over lunch, frequently all at the same time.
So I don’t know, I grew up thinking that I could. It helped that motherhood and babies were never mentioned in our house, it’s not that my mother was unmaternal but she’s all about choice, my sister married early and that was seen as fine, I didn’t and that wasn’t an issue either.
So hmm my feminist awakening isn’t really something I can pin down, I will say though that the older I have got the more I am likely to proclaim it. I never did the whole denial thing that’s quite prevalent in England but I also did when younger feel less comfortable with announcing ‘this is who I am’, something which would have horrified my mother had she known.
I’m typing this on an iPod as I managed to (brilliantly) break the screen on my laptop this weekend, so forgive any typos.
I don’t remember how I got into feminism. I remember a male teacher in high school sneering at the term and me wondering what the hell was wrong with aiming for equality. And then I remember gravitating towards the liberal groups in college, and that further developed my thoughts/feelings/whatever on womens rights. I guess it came about organically, sort of. I won’t say I was always a feminist, but I started thinking about it when I was pretty young, and as I grew up it continued to be something that was extremely important to me.
I wouldn’t say I’m a GREAT feminist, even now; for one, I still feel like I relate better to men than other women. But I’ve started to think of it as more of a process. As I grow as a person, I think I’m becoming a better feminist.
It appears that a lot of us “discovered” feminism or really began to grow in our feminism during college. That’s certainly true for me.
But we must remember not to make formal education a litmus test for measuring a person’s feminism/womanism. Plenty of poor women and women who simply didn’t attend university for whatever reason have lived sexism; they know oppression even if they do not know the names of feminist theorists.
I don’t think anyone was suggesting that, SarahMC, but it’s true it’s something to keep in mind. I certainly can’t trust patriarchal institutions like universities to properly equip people anyway; it’s not in their interests to do so, and thus the ghettoization of “women’s studies.
Academic feminism definitely tends to get far from the streets and the roll-up-your-sleeves work of feminism. And a lot of the “high theory” stuff is literally impenetrable – weighed down by jargon. Which is why I’ve tended to gravitate more towards radical writings, myself.
I nonetheless always try to encourage people who have gotten over the initial hurdle of actually seeing the big P to actually read feminist/womanist writing. As people have written here, it’s a means of acquiring vocabulary. Because poor women and women who didn’t attend university may feel their oppression, sure. But it is an essential part of the feminist project, it seems to me, to point out that feminism is here to help them talk about that.
Furthermore, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how a lot of people seem eager to articulate a critique of feminism that is more about the American media image of feminism than it is about, well, feminism, which shouldn’t ever be that much more than the actual lived oppression of women, in my book, anyway. And they often do this with an extremely poor grounding in actual feminist writing. There is a lot to be criticized in “feminism,” don’t get me wrong, but we have to weed out the actual anti-feminists from the people actually interested in the liberatory project. And encouraging them to read “theory” (which as I said above, good theory to me is not that far from practice) is the first step in that, to me. In so doing, you pretty quickly learn that all this stuff about man-hating, and leg-shaving, and lesbianism, says much more about the people advancing that critique than the people who might actually engage in any of those practices.
I was talking to my best friend from home this weekend about this and she reminded me that we belonged to a feminist reading group our junior year of high school. I guess my vague sense of myself as “becoming” feminist much later in life just goes to show it’s something that’s always being redefined and challenging me anew.
Sometimes you have to go through these tough situations to grow as a person. We become stronger and learn more about ourselves when we go through something hard like this
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Pilgrim Soul – this post resonates so much with my own recent experiences. I too was trying to check all the boxes on my List of Things I Should Have as an Adult Woman, and failing miserably at the Finding a BF item. I’ve since decided to f–k the List.
My feminist awakening came late in the day – about a few months ago, when a local woman’s group (I’m in Singapore) was drastically hijacked. I realised that I could no longer be passive about my ideas. Now I am a loud and proud feminist at age 27 and trying to do my bit for feminism in Singapore.
I love what you Harpies are doing here on this site. Shine on with the power-housing of ideas!