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!

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.

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 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.

(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.

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.

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.