I recoil from the question, my facial expression measuring
somewhere between ‘Do you like liver and onions?’ and ‘Do you believe in
aliens?’ on the Richter Scale of reactions.
“If you’re a woman, you must be a feminist,” Earl states.
At first the question rolls around in my head like a loose
marble. It’s not a left- right-brain thing either. I can feel it roll from one
side to the other without regard for the corpus callosum.
Surely, I am not a feminist. Feminists are radical lefties,
aren’t they? Though it is 25 years later, aren’t feminists those women who
burned their bras? I would never burn my bra.
Earl is waiting for my answer. He is visibly exasperated
with me.
I remember my dad boasting that he had married one of the
first feminists. But it was a joke, and we all knew it. He would only say this
when Mom was in one of her recalcitrant moods. And the joke was usually
sufficient to alert her that it was all great fun to see a woman taking a
stand, but it was time to knock it off, and cooperate.
“I’m not a feminist,” I finally state.
Earl is incredulous at this response.
But his question continues to haunt me for several weeks,
until I decide I need to find out what this moniker really means.
I call the one person I know who would probably
unhesitatingly state that she is a feminist—an “out” lesbian friend of mine.
She asks me a series of questions:
- What
are your views on equal pay for equal work?
- With
what political party do you best identify? Why?
- What are
your views on traditional female versus male roles within the family unit?
- How do
you feel about education and women pursuing non-traditional roles in the
work place?
- What
do you know about and what are your thoughts regarding sexism in the work
place?
Most of these questions make my brain feel like mush because
I haven’t much thought about them at all, and now feel very stupid that I
haven’t. But my friend doesn’t make me feel stupid. Instead, she hands
me the subscription card from inside her latest issue of “Ms.” Magazine and
says, “Educate yourself.”
I receive my first issue a few weeks later, read the thing
cover-to-cover, several times saying the word “yes” out loud as if the author
is there waiting for my personal affirmation, and have now been a subscriber
for almost 15 years.
Yes, Earl, I am a feminist.
Copyright DJ Anderson 2012
