In elementary school, we had a carpool to and from school. I don’t remember much about it except that there was a girl who must have been 4 or 5 years older than I whose dad sometimes drove us in his VW bug, which only lacked a convertible top to be the epitome of cool. There is one ride, one moment I remember - I have long since forgotten her name or who else was in the carpool- and it is vivid. “Your mom…” she said, matter of factly, turning back to look at me from the front seat, and with slight disdain. Squished between the others in the back seat, I waited.
“My dad said that your mom is a FEMINIST,” she practically spit the word out of her mouth, her perfect blonde ponytail swinging with emphasis. I was horrified.
“No, she is NOT!” I spat back, knowing only that I needed to defend. I simultaneously felt myself shrinking in between the other kids, wanting to be smushed back to not even being there.
“Humph. My dad said so.”
That is all I remember, and the movie screen of memories jumps to bursting through the kitchen door after school, finding my mother, and demanding, “Mummy, what is a feminist?” as I fell into a puddle of tears and followed up with “So-and-so said her dad said you are a feminist. But you’re not, right? What IS a feminist?”
I don’t remember her answer- I wish I did, as it was probably an excellent definition. I already knew that she had founded a Women’s Studies curriculum at the very “old boys” boarding school where we lived, and I spent many a weekend morning outside of Almacs, the local grocery store, holding signs and giving away very cool-looking buttons that said “ERA” and “ERA NOW” on them. And then I understood that working for the fundamental rights of women, telling untold histories (herstories), reading lesser-known authors, and striving to have a successful career on her own terms all meant that she was a feminist. What baffled me for many years was why Mr. So-and-so thought this was such a horrible thing. I didn’t yet understand that many people are resistant to change - to anything that feels a threat to their status quo, and will become angrily opposed to ideas that don’t directly support them, even if in the long run, it could be better for everyone. Sidebar: at the moment I write this, in November 2024, there is a campaign to ask President Biden to finally pass the ERA. A lot has changed, and a lot has stayed the same.
My mother was a solid 1980s feminist. She had dropped out of college at a young age to be a happy housewife, but soon after I was born, she got a degree at Yale and focused on finding a career. At the same time that she pushed back against so many of society’s constraints, she, like many, still struggled with what it meant to be a woman in her day, age, and place. On those same weekends of campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment, and all of the other days, she would run miles and miles, and smoke cigarettes instead of eating, whittling herself down to skin and bones. She got multiple perms one year and decided to stop shaving another. We subscribed to Ms. magazine, and she introduced me at an early age to the work of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurson. In 5th grade, she gave me the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, and in the late 80s, she got a graduate degree at Smith College and we relished the many hundreds of pages of The Mists of Avalon together, wishing we were priestesses. But while she found power in her career, she still carried the weight of expectations around what it meant to be a wife, mother, and woman.
I simultaneously admired and resented my mother’s feminism. On a community and global level, it made sense to me. While supporting feminism, my father simultaneously did his own work of developing courses like “Minorities in America” and worked for greater racial and ethnic inclusion in the curriculum and community of the boarding school where we lived, ultimately leaving it for one that was prioritizing diversity well before the word “diversity” was commonly used in schools, and decades before “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” was coined. He used Howard Zinn’s A People’s History for his American History textbook and taught us to be skeptical of capitalism. So I grew up in a home where there was no question that we should all work for equity, understanding, and supporting the collective good. But I struggled with what I saw as my mother prioritizing her career, her needs, her life outside of motherhood. I desperately wanted a mother who was home more, who was on time, who was a backbone of family life. I think I blamed her version of feminism when, at the age of 14, I was embarrassed by her underarm hair, or when she spoke passionately about how she wasn’t being “selfish” but “self-full” by attending to her needs, or when she and my father divorced, and I blamed it on her “finding herself” in graduate school, when really, they had both been less than ideal partners for one another for years. My mother’s subtext was that “all men are bad” but she still loved certain men, and went on to move from one relationship to another (all with men) while simultaneously (and usually indirectly) conveying to me that all men were abusers at some level. Well, except a few good ones, but they were hard to find and usually unavailable.
Ultimately, I wanted my mother to be more like my vision of my grandmother. Annie had no interest in being called a version of “Grandma,” and, from my limited childhood view, did what she pleased. She wore comfortable, sensible pants and shoes, and her beauty routine consisted of running a comb through her short hair and perhaps swiping some cold cream on her face every now and then. She was athletic and an adventurer, trekking through Nepal with her best friend at the age of 71. She spoke her mind, and believed that everyone should be supported to do whatever they wanted to do. I knew that whomever I brought home would be embraced by her so long as they treated me well and helped me be all that I wanted to be. Compared to other women in her circles, she was a feminist. She certainly pushed on the edges of the manicured 50s suburban, white, upper-middle class life, though she also lived not entirely by but within the rules. She was a homemaker who took her job seriously, planning meals, cleaning, walking the dogs, doing the errands, raising the children, and then helping with the grandchildren - all while my grandfather took the train to and from the city each day. She was not a revolutionary, and I often wonder what kind of life she would have had if she had pushed against expectations a bit more. She was certainly someone about whom we would say “born before her time” and I could imagine her in my generation, where she might have followed her passions to become a vet or biologist, and have kids later or not at all. I wished that she could have had this, all the while deeply appreciating and desperately clinging to the sense of stability she provided in my life. As I got older, I began to see some tension between wanting to be more like her, but wanting to have a career that the 1980s feminists had ensured for my generation.
My senior year of high school, I took a “Women in Religion” course, in which we looked at the way various religions around the world view women, at their roles, rights, and responsibilities. We examined ways in which modern women were embracing spirituality and reigniting old religions or creating new forms of religion in which they could be part of the center, if not all of it. I was fascinated, and considered Women’s Studies as a strong contender for my choice of major. Entering college, I considered myself a feminist, and I volunteered at the campus Women’s Center - helping to manage the hotline that provided a pair of people to walk you home if you felt nervous walking alone at night, spending afternoons outside of women’s health clinics to protect patients from anti-abortion protestors, and ensuring that all students knew how to easily access a variety of forms of birth control. I also knew that I wanted more than anything to get married and have a family, that I wanted to have a successful career, but I wanted to be a mother the way that Annie was a grandmother.
I loved the content of the Women’s Studies courses, which introduced me to bell hooks and Adrienne Rich, amongst others. It challenged me, pushed me to think about various forms of oppression, and what I had bought into in current society that perpetuated the state of women as less-than. As I should have, I became increasingly uncomfortable with my own identity - I wanted to have a job that allowed me to live well, to buy a house, to marry a man, to have babies, maybe even stay home with them for a bit if it wouldn’t ruin my career. In the short term, I wanted to go to frat parties and date boys on sports teams and put on makeup and dresses that showed off my legs and pushed up my boobs. I wanted all of that, and I wanted it to be ok to want that. In fact the only thing I was 100% sure I wanted to do in life was to be a mother. But the discussions we had in my Women’s Studies classes, and the looks that I got from other women when I dared to wonder aloud how a desire to be a mother and get married fit within all of this made me feel like I was a horrible fake. How could I even consider myself remotely feminist if I felt motherhood might come first in my own life? How could I like men, especially those who were playing football, hockey, or some other perpetuation of violence instead of working to change society? No, if this were going to work, if I was going to be a true feminist and fit in with the Women’s Studies crowd, I was going to have to let go of those old ideals, to give up my reverence for my grandmother, and fully embrace the angry feminism that was the part I didn’t love about my mother. Feminism, it seemed to me, was not just against oppression of women and capitalism and racism - all of which I could easily rail against- but it in fact seemed to be defined by a deep anger towards and resentment of all men. This was an amplification of what I had learned from my mother, but so much more clear.
So I abandoned Women’s Studies. I spent the next 20-odd years being a bit afraid to be considered a feminist, working without a label to build a career, be a devoted mother, and do it all. I knew I wanted something to shift for women, for mothers, and by extension, for men as well. But the 2000s brought feminists who did it all, and we were told to “Lean In” by the successful tech women who were killing it in a man’s world. Lead Yahoo and still be a mom? No problem - just work through it. Look at these amazing women- they are doing it ALL, and doing it well. But push back the curtain, and ask, do they have a nanny? Or a few of them? Do they live near family who helps? What about all of the other parts? Oh, right, they make enough money (or started with enough) to have meals, cleaning, errands, all the rest taken care of. And they don’t sleep. Each generation before us had paved the way, cleared the path, broke down barriers for us to be able to DO IT ALL. How exciting! Look at us, all out here, killing it in our own way! Lean in! Work harder! Do more, sleep when you are dead!
In the past few years, I have found myself up against structures and mindsets that feel like an embodiment of patriarchy. In navigating these challenges, I have realized that so much of what I believe, so many of my values, are in fact a kind of feminism. Parts of it are more mainstream - cheering for and loving the Barbie movie, and gleeful that we are now seeing and hearing so many references to dismantle the patriarchy. I realized that it is a version of feminism that embraces being a woman, and various forms of femininity, acknowledging that motherhood and sexuality and beauty are all vital and wonderful if approached from a place of respect and love. We do not have to abandon our womanhood, we need to allow it to empower us. Somehow I missed the beginning of this movement - oh wait, because I was entirely focused on doing it all.
There are other elements that have brought me back to an embrace of a new feminism. Non-violent communication, leading through consensus, working for the collective good, prioritizing nourishment of body, mind, soul, and the earth in all that I do, and finding ways to work towards re-generation and reparation of what and who has been wounded and generation of ideas and love - all of this is about reclaiming, embracing, and upholding the feminine. Our world has become so dominated by the masculine that all people are suffering from it. Shifting the paradigm to one where a sacred feminine energy is valued is a way to bring the nurturing of our grandmothers into alignment with the power of our mothers, but all in the service of a healthy existence for all and for the planet.
I fully appreciate and uphold all of the work of the women before us - each generation has had their own version of a movement, sometimes subversive, sometimes radical; sometimes harmful to other groups, sometimes focusing on others; sometimes angry and sometimes full of love. My grandmother, my mother, mentors in between - they all have made where we are today possible.
AND
I think now is the time to simultaneously be stronger, more insistent upon shifting the paradigm AND more inclusive and peaceful in how we go about it. My current version of feminism is one in which I promote matriarchal ideals that include and positively impact all people, no matter their sex assigned at birth or gender identification. It is a version that aims to bring us ALL - color, ethnicity, religion, ability, etc. - to a place of value. It is a vision of a society that collaborates for the collective good, that upholds the diversity of unique individuals and groups without hierarchy. It is a movement where we nurture and care for each other and the earth, to heal the myriad wounds inflicted by the patriarchal, capitalist ideals we have held for the past hundreds of years. It is a society in which we place the value on caring for one another so that we may each generate creativity, ideas, solutions, and better ways to nurture one another. It is a society in which parenting, education, and children are valued without assigning hierarchy.
I want to see my daughters live full lives with agency over their bodies and minds. To be able to rest in balance with what they do and create. I want them - and all of our children - to choose the partners they love, to have time for their family, their purposes, and their passions. Perhaps everyone works a 5 or 6-hour day, and consume less. Perhaps each parent works outside of the home part-time and in support of the home part-time. Perhaps they live in connection with others, in villages where the labor of life is shared and enjoyed together, and resources are used more efficiently. Perhaps I can be a grandmother in one of these communities, holding babies and tending to people who need care and teaching children how to live in a collective, generative, nurturing way.
Matriarchies of many Indigenous peoples, and of the past were not “women in power” but instead egalitarian societies based on the idea that in the beginning is the mother, and looking to natural principles to guide us in a sustainable way of caring and living. It is moving from an individualistic, power-as-domination, greed-focused society towards a collective, power-as-generation, nurture-focused society. That is the ultimate paradigm shift we need to save the world.