Amanda is asking for your stories of how you became a feminist. Since I’m all into borrowing fantastic topics when I see them, I’ll steal this one from her, too.
I grew up with a feminist mom, but her feminism was always a source of teasing: She’d announce that something was sexist, and we would all roll our eyes and say, “Ok mom, why don’t you go burn your bra now?” I remember being a kid and watching The Brady Bunch before school, and there was a scene where all the kids got back from their after-school activities — the boys had gone to baseball practice, and the girls had gone to ballet. I remember my mom shaking her head and pointing out the sexism in that, and I remember agreeing and disliking The Brady Bunch from then on. But my mom wasn’t particularly radical, and feminism was something that I was exposed to but was never really discussed in any more depth than pointing out the sexism in particular things. She had a copy of “Written By Herself,” and “Reviving Ophelia” was a big deal in my house when it came out, and I remember sneaking her copy of “Promiscuities” by Naomi Wolf because of the provocative title, and quickly growing bored with it because there just wasn’t enough sex. But that was my mom’s feminism: It was about me and my sister and the world we were growing up in. I never really associated with it on a personal level. I played sports from the time I was six, I ran around all day with the boys next door and never thought twice about it, and then I came home and played with Barbies. There was “girl stuff” and “boy stuff,” but outdoor play and being smart never struck me as boy things. I never considered that my playing sports had anything to do with feminism. I never really considered feminism at all, unless I was saying, “I’m not a feminist, but…” before espousing some basic feminist belief.
The summer before my freshman year of college, I came to NYU for a three-day-long freshman orientation, where we had to register for classes. I met with my advisor, Aara Menzi, who ended up being one of the most helpful people I came in contact with in college (Aara, if you’re out there, you’re fantastic!). She had been seeing incoming freshmen all day, and I expected the experience to be little more than a cattlecall, with her asking me what classes I wanted to take, signing my form and sending me on my way. Instead, I walked in and she had a copy of parts of my application, including my interests and extracurricular activities, on which she had affixed her own notes about things she thought I might enjoy doing. She told me about different university clubs, lecture series, and events going on around campus. She had a list of classes that I might enjoy, and suggested Intro to Sociology and Intro to Women’s Studies. I paused. I had never really considered sociology, but it sounded interesting enough, so I’d give it a try. But Women’s Studies? I was sure it would be a bunch of unshaven, peasant-skirt-wearing hippies angrily railing against “the man.” And this 17-year-old Abercrombie-clad suburban-raised pretty-girl wanted nothing to do with that.
I’m sure Aara knew I was skeptical. I pushed back, but there weren’t very many other classes available for incoming freshmen registering in the last orientation session. “If you hate it,” she told me, “you can always transfer to a different class.” She said she had a feeling I’d enjoy it more than I thought, and that she didn’t want to put pressure on me, but that college was a time to try a lot of different lines of coursework. So why not experiment? I agreed.
The first day of Intro to Women’s Studies, our professor passed out an anonymous survey, which she said we could fill out if we were comfortable. I don’t remember what else was on it, but I distinctly recall the question, “Are you a feminist?” We were supposed to circle “yes” or “no.” I stared at that question for a good long time. I agreed with the aims of gender equality. I recognized that sexism still existed. But was I a feminist? Using the word itself was more than a little intimidating. I figured that if I was having doubts, then I probably wasn’t. I circled “no.”
My Intro to Women’s Studies class was held on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I remember this because the morning of our first Tuesday class, two airplanes hit the World Trade Center as I was getting ready to go to school. My room mate’s dad called, asked if Miriam was home and I said no. He said, “It’s a very sad day for New York. Go turn on the radio,” and hung up. I got up and took a shower. Then I looked out my window, where, if I turned my head to the right, I had a view of the towers. I saw what he meant. I called my mom to let her know I was ok, and after about 10 tries got through. I remember her crying and just saying, “Come home, come home.” We gathered in a room down the hall, where they had a direct view out their window. We had the TV on, and watched both simultaneously. I remember watching the whole thing very dispassionately, like it was a movie. I don’t remember anyone crying. No one really spoke. Outside, the day was clear and sunny, as is perpetually emphasized when discussing September 11th. I remember a girl in my hall panicking because her dad was on a flight from Boston to LA, and she didn’t know which one or what time it left. And for some reason, I don’t remember much else.
We stayed inside for the next few days, told that leaving the dorm would likely expose us to all the harmful chemicals and dust in the air. I don’t remember anything else about that week.
I bring up September 11th as part of my “How I became a feminist” narrative because, when I went back to school the next Tuesday, my Women’s Studies professor — the incredible Rabab Abdulhadi, now at UMich Dearborn — sat on her stool in front of the class and did something that none of my other professors had: She talked about what had happened, and how she felt about it. She invited us to do the same. She didn’t do it through the “lens” of the class, and she didn’t push business as usual, or insist that we stay on schedule. She said that we are a community, and that a lot of us may not have had a chance to talk to other people about what had happened exactly a week before. She wanted her classroom to be a space for that.
I don’t remember much of what the discussion actually entailed, but I remember being impressed and taken aback by her approach. It threw a wrench in the idea that feminism was an “agenda,” or a strictly political theory. Her feminism was a way of living, and it inherently involved community-building and an emphasis on taking care of each other. It meant that we were more than our politics.
I took away a lot from that, and I think it’s obvious here, when we’re referred to as the Mayberry of feminist blogs and even when we’re both criticized and followed when we post silly memes, pet pictures, and iPod shuffles. I am my politics, and I am more than that. There isn’t a conflict there.
I don’t remember if it was in that immediate post-9/11 class or a subsequent one, but at some point that semester Rabab read a short journal entry that she had written during a return visit to Palestine, where much of her family still lives. She talked about the trying commute to her family’s home, about the places that she just couldn’t go, about how she was unable to visit some of her relatives because of restrictions, about it taking hours to go just a few miles, about her decision whether or not to wear the hijab. She talked about being back in the U.S. a while later and her anxiety at buying a train ticket, afraid that the man behind the counter would see the name on her passport and brand her a potential enemy. She presented her various identities to us, openly, and expected the same from us. I could never figure out where her politics lay — I knew she had to be liberal, but then she would have a guest speaker come in and talk to us about the Men’s Rights Movement, which was presented with as much respect as everything else we learned about. She was skeptical about everything, and encouraged us to be. We talked a lot about the idea of “consciousness,” which I had never considered — who is the most conscious? How do Western women know that other women are oppressed because they wear the hijab, when they say that the hijab protects them from oppression? Who really “understands” gender-based discrimination, and who is driving the narrative?
The other part of the class involved a small-group recitation, where I was lucky to have an unbelievable TA who was quite patient with my ignorance and absolutism. What that class did more than anything else was put a name on things that I had experienced but never identified. If offered me new ways of seeing, and new models for organizing experience. It also presented new ideas about activism and understanding. I remember reading Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” and being absolutely blown away (if you haven’t read it, go now). That class was the first time that women’s experiences were presented as valid and whole in and of themselves — there was very little comparison, and no “Here’s what 50 men said about this, now let’s see what one woman said.” That was a marked difference from the rest of my education, and it helped me to realize that women’s experiences matter. They aren’t secondary. It was the first time I considered the idea that traditionally “female” activities are denigrated not because they’re naturally not as good, but because women do them. It was the first time I considered that street harassment was representative of a wider cultural problem, not just an individual annoyance. It was the first time that I considered the idea that gender is a performance, and it doesn’t have all that much to do with biology.
For 18-year-old me, these ideas were revolutionary.
In that class, something clicked. I felt like I saw things more clearly, which turned out to be a bit of a curse — ignorance of inequality and inability to see all the little problematic pieces lets you remain comfortable. There’s a reason that so many feminists are interpreted as “angry”: When you subscribe to a political belief that doesn’t let you ignore all the fucked-up shit around you, you can’t help but get pissed off sometimes. That doesn’t mean that we’re all running around in a blind rage, because we certainly aren’t. I’m pretty happy most of the time. But I can’t move through the world in the same way that I did before.
My “coming to feminism,” then, was more of an academic pursuit than a turning-point life experience. Following it, several experiences shaped my version of feminism: pro-choice activism was key, as were the sexual health education projects that I was involved with in college. Other feminists I met, spoke to and read (Angela Davis, Susan Faludi, Andrea Dworkin) also influenced it, and my group of feminist friends and the thriving feminist community at NYU gave me a safe space to further develop my beliefs. After that Intro to Women’s Studies class, I was lucky to be able to take a few more, and minored in Gender & Sexuality Studies. My only regret is that I didn’t have enough time to complete a full major in it.
I think a lot of young women in my generation found feminism in their music and their zines. Those things certainly laid a lot of the feminist groundwork for me, in shattering ideas of how cool girls were supposed to behave, and what we were allowed to do. I think a lot of us who grew up in the Title IX era spent all of our young lives under the impression that men and women were equal, and that girls had just as many opportunities as boys and were just as respected and entitled as they were — I sure thought that was true for most of my life. Then you grow up, and you take a look around and you realize that the story you were told as a kid just isn’t true. For me, part of my feminist beginning was having my childhood assumptions about how the world worked completely dispelled, and searching for some way to understand how and why that happened. I suspect that this is a common experience for women of my generation.
The further I go in my education, the older I get (yeah, I know I’m still a kid), the more I travel and the more I read, the more radical my feminism becomes. Living in a female body, and learning about what that means in this world, can be a radicalizing experience — you just have to be paying attention.
So that’s the (long, tedious, boring) story of how I “found” feminism. Share yours.