If you'd never become a feminist, what would your life be like?

[Hello_Kitty]

Feminism came to me in the late 80s/early 90s. I was in my early 20s. I read Freidan, Steinem, Germaine Greer, and others. It changed my life. Before that I knew feminism was about equal pay and women being able to choose a career over homemaking if she wished. Beyond that, I was very much trapped in the hell of agonizing over my appearance, appeasing men, and experiencing sexual harassment and worse in the Navy (while blaming myself for it). I got really angry when I learned about how the patriarchy worked against women. But I still bought into the Beauty Myth, even after I read The Beauty Myth. And I found it hard to reconcile my feminism with wanting a relationship with a guy. So I struggled. I sold out for a while. I called myself a "sex positive/pro male" feminist (whatever the hell that means). But eventually I had to be true to my ideals and now I declare myself a proud uncompromising feminist. Well...sometimes I still compromise but I try not to ;)

I was thinking today that despite my life not turning out exactly the way I want in most ways, it's actually pretty good. I attribute a lot of that to my feminism. If I turned the clock back 20 years and changed that one aspect of it I shudder to think about how it would be. Maybe I'd have married the jerk I was dating when I was 18, who was basically a carbon copy of my dad. Maybe I would have had children, even though I know in my bones I'm not cut out for motherhood, because it was 'expected' of me. Perhaps today I'd be approaching my late 30s with such dread of losing my looks that I'd be getting all sorts of surgery to stave that off - Okay, that one's for sure since I'm vain as hell - Anyway, my point is that I'm not doing any of those things. I'm making my own unique path, as are most of you in this group, it seems. And that's really cool, isn't it?

I just wanted to share that :hi:

[LisaLynne]

1. What a thoughtful and thought-provoking post.

I read it, then had to go think about it. Always a sign of a good post, IMHO. :)

It's hard to imagine not being a feminist because I started to pick up on the whole patriarchy thing pretty early, although I didn't know what to call it. Because I was raised in such a restrictive, Fundamentalist Christian religion, I really didn't have much choice but to rebel. I was forced to face the fact that there are those who think men are inherently better than women. Why didn't I accept it and let myself be beaten down? So many other women have ... so many of my friends from childhood did, although there have been wonderful exceptions to that. Anyway, I don't know. I've tried to figure that out and I just can't.

Anyway, I suppose if I wouldn't have had that break-out reaction, I would have ended up married by 17, had some kids (maybe -- not sure that would have been physically possible, even back then, but that's another story), and probably ... just gone crazy at some point. Seriously. I wouldn't have the pretty cool job I have now, wouldn't have gone to college, wouldn't have the group of friends I have, wouldn't have done all the traveling I've done ... It would have been a very limiting life, even though I suppose if I could have turned into the sort of glazed-over person that I saw around me growing up, I might have been blissfully ignorant and thought everything was just peachy. Honesty, though, I can't really see myself ever being that way. I would have gone along and done all the right things and wondered why I was so unhappy.

Gosh, this is getting depressing!

Except that it didn't happen! But, no, my life is nothing like I would have thought it would be when I was younger, but it's really turned out to be a whole lot more interesting. :)

[MountainLaurel]

2. Same here, Lisa

I grew up attending a fundamentalist church as well, and have heard all the same things. But I never bought that line of horseshit. In my case, my parents -- especially my mother, who ran out of scholarship money partway through her sophomore year in college and took a job to help support her family -- told me from the start that I WOULD go to college and that I could do ANYTHING I wanted to.

But the overall culture where I grew up was one where women were to defer to their husbands in all matters, were able to work as a teacher, nurse, or secretary of some sort, were considered barren if they hadn't procreated by age 24 or so, and where education beyond high school was not the norm for anyone, male or female, and was not valued.

[Solly Mack]

3. Easier maybe...but not worth it

Not sure how to say it really


It's like any moment when you become aware...you can't go back. There's no undoing the truth you now know.

[tishaLA]

4. I can't imagine any other way

I started going to reproductive freedom events with my mother when I was very young. I was born in the mid-70s and those events (and the ethos of community they provoked) were integral to my youth. I remember going to a huge march on Washington on one of the Roe anniversaries--I can't remember which one, just that it was huge and Cybil Shepard and Whoopie Goldberg talked--with my mother and how I felt like a link in the feminist chain.

Of course I haven't always been actively feminist; when I haven't, I have been the most unhappy. I remember also thinking derisively about some of my mothers feminist notions and, to tell the truth, I still reject some of her most facile ideas (as kids we could never watch "I Dream of Jeannie" reruns on TV because she didn't want her children watching a show where a woman calls a man "master," but a critique of the pervasiveness of patriarchal domination--for want of a better term--eluded her). But in a way I think I had to first reject some of what she represented so I could claim a feminism on my own terms.

Hmmmmm. I'm not saying anything really productive here and normally I would erase a post like this because it's too self-indulgent, but I think I'll leave it. I think maybe I need to think more about feminist genealogies and about female Oedipalism (or something like that) and what, if anything, it means to feminists now.

[eridani]

5. I'm old enough te remember--

Help Wanted - Male and Help Wanted - Female, illegal abortion, and women having miscarriages dying on the table because doctors were hesitant to intervene lest they be accused of facilitating an abortion. The only female college professors taught foreign languages. Being a survivor of three miscarriages after 1973, the alternative to being a feminist might well have been being dead.

[Hello_Kitty]

6. You know, I'm sorry to say this

But being the narcissistic twit that I am, I didn't even consider the issue beyond my own navel, or generation, when I wrote my original post. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for the feminists who struggled for BASIC rights and freedoms like the vote, or a job, or being able to get a divorce or credit. It really was a life or death struggle and I'm eternally grateful to those of you who put yourselves out there so that we so-called "3rd wavers" could have the opportunities to do what we're doing.

Old School Feminists...:yourock:

[OldLeftieLawyer]

13. Imagine this:

1969, newly married, and I went to the bank to open my own checking account using my maiden name.

I was told I couldn't do that. I had to use his surname.

When I started law school three years later, I had a hyphenated last name, mine and my husband's. I was told it couldn't work in the school's computers. I told them to try. They figured out a way.

That year, in my freshman law school class, there were 50 women out of 150 students. This was because of Affirmative Action. The year before we entered, the freshman class had had 3 women.

After our midterms, there were 4 women left. Forty-six dropped out. I think being called "Lawyerette" when you were standing to recite in class probably got to a lot of them. It got to me, but I refused to let it take away from me what I wanted.

All 4 of us graduated.

This is but a tip of what the iceberg was like, my personal - and quite superficial - recollections. This is why, almost 40 years later, I have not much patience with women who complain about things that piss them off, things that are part of the human condition, not necessarily limited to women and which are within their powers to change. There are bigger battles out there still, and I wonder how it will go, given that the term "feminist" seems to have taken on such a negative connotation.

The things that are taken for granted by the younger generations are things my generation struggled for - reproductive rights, for instance - and, without eternal vigilance and lots of cash, they're going to be taken away. I doubt that "feminist" will be a dirty word then.

[ismnotwasm]

7. I can't imagine

I had to overcome many early troubles, but as I went through things the one thing I could hold on to was my feminist idenity, who I was, what I was. Even when I went through self destructive behavior, it was never behind a male, I did it to myself. I kept men on the periphery. I was tough and streetwise and strong. Now I have that background to look back on, I realize that one of the first labels I ever gave myself was feminist. It probably was one of the factors that saved my life. I have a strong female identity. I learned to equate femininity with strength. The lies they tell us about femininity, you know body size, makeup whatever, had nothing to do with what I was inside. I knew how to fix up that outside stuff to conform when I was younger, but I always knew it was window dressing, and the powerful feminine ideal lived inside me.

[StellaBlue]

8. Not my life

I've been a feminist since birth.

Before I knew it was unusual to think like I do.

Before I knew there was a word for it.

I'm just a human being; that's why I am a feminist, too.

[BlueIris]

9. Nice!

That's how I feel.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Even in the 1950s, I was a non-standard type of girl

I looked at my mother's and grandmother's lives and the lives of their friends, and it seemed that all they did was wait on people, whether husbands or children, and all that women talked about when they got together was children, husbands, clothes, and recipes. The only acceptable leisure pursuit was some kind of needlework. And boy, your house had to be spotless, or the other women would gossip about you. It seemed boring and tiring.

People didn't ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up--they asked, "Do you want to be a nurse or a teacher when you grow up?"

My mother and grandmother warned me about "not letting boys take advantage of me," but they never officially told me about sex, not even menstruation, which they left to the school. I pieced things together for myself from reading the "Tell Me Doctor" articles in the Ladies' Home Journal and especially the second chapter of Mary McCarthy's The Group, the book that was passed around secretively among the eighth grade girls at my school.

It was assumed I would go to college, mostly to catch a middle class husband, but also to be trained for something I could work at "if my husband died."

Well, I decided that I would be a high school foreign language teacher, but halfway through college, I took an honors seminar in this "women's liberation" that had been in the news. Two women professors, one in psychology and the other in poli. sci. taught it, and it was a revelation to find out that other young women were discontented with the options presented to them. I am also eternally grateful to my creative writing professor, who became my mother confessor during the years I was trying to reconcile traditional and new roles.

I decided to chuck the idea of becoming a high school teacher and to become a college professor instead.

It's an interesting thought experiment to consider what my life would have been like without feminism. I suppose I would have become a high school teacher and, like my classmates who became high school teachers, ended up teaching in some dismal small town, unable to leave because the job market turned sour a few years afterwards. I may have succumbed to social pressures and married the geeky guy who was stalking me in senior year and whom my mother and gramdmother encouraged, because they believed that the real purpose of college for a woman was to snag an "MRS" degree. Or, being stuck in a small town without any intellectual peers and certainly no suitable prospects for marriage or even an affair, I might have gone quietly mad.

I'm sure glad that feminism came along when it did.

[eridani]

16. "Quietly mad" pretty much describes it

I'd probably be stuck teaching high school chemistry in a small midwestern town someplace--no offense to people who like hanging with that age group and are also good at explaining science.

[Hello_Kitty]

17. I don't do anything "quietly" so I'd be stark, raving mad!

I often joke that I'd for sure be burning at the stake were I unfortunate enough to be born several centuries ago.

[politicat]

11. Not me.

I've always been a feminist, albeit second or third wave (there being some argument about those of us born in the 70s being second or third wavers....) My mother graduated from anti-war work to ERA work around the time I was born, good Quaker that she is. I attended ERA rallies in my stroller.

I ran for 6th grade class VP on the platform that girls and boys groups on campus should have equal access to student council funds. (I lost; the argument went over the heads of my peers.) I resisted taking typing and home ec classes; when my guidance counselor gave the options of BYU or Rick's College, I insisted he get data on Harvard, Stanford and USC (not that I could afford any of them....) I refused to be pigeonholed. Without the mother I have that insisted I put my future before the future of others - and gods know, she has her faults - I probably would have converted to Mormonism, and would be married to a very nice, but ultimately very Mormon lad I went to high school with, and we'd probably be on our 4th kid right about now. (Not going to college was never an option, Even with the nice Mormon Lad.) This despite my conviction that I'd make the worst mother on the planet....

But even so... even with all of that empowerment, there are places where I've gotten hurt - I've fallen for the most inappropriate people; I've let others take advantage of my generosity and my good will. I have not fought as hard as I should have for what means so much to me. I don't feel I've done enough to keep access to abortion, birth control and equal access open to all women. I know I haven't done enough to ensure equality in hiring, pay, and educational access

[WestHoustonDem]

12. I don't ever remember a time when I wasn't a feminist

even if I didn't know the word. It never occurred to me that I should have or be less because I am a woman.

[Warpy]

14. Well, there was no chance of that

considering I was raised by a female engineer whose earliest childhood memory was of a Sufragette parade in NYC with her mother and grandmother.

However, I can easily see myself being horribly discontented with a nice girl role and wondering why my life was so godawful unfulfilling and why on earth I couldn't have been satisfied living with an alcoholic and being his full time maid while working outside the home, since it was my biological destiny to be just that and only that.

I'd think intelligent women who aren't feminists either turn to Valium and/or alcohol or just go quietly bonkers and start having the furniture talk back to them. I certainly haven't met any healthy, intelligent nonfeminist women, ever. And I've moved a lot.

[geniph]

15. There are certain advantages to having been reared by lesbians,

one of which is that I never had the limitations placed around my expectations that most girls growing up in the early 60's did. I knew women who were bank managers, owned their own businesses, fixed their own cars, built their own houses, managed their own finances - women who functioned just fine without men "taking care of them."

There's also one advantage (I can only think of one) to having been the youngest of 13, with seven violent older brothers who whaled on me every chance they got. That being that I had the choice of either developing one hell of a tough hide, or not surviving. I'm still here, so guess which way I went? To this day, I can't show fear outwardly - showing fear gets you beat up. So I have damn few phobias. I surely can't think of anything ELSE that was good about being the youngest of 13!