My journey (back) to Feminism

When I was growing up, my grandparents had a trailer on St. Joseph’s Island in Lake Huron, Ontario.  My grandfather would often take his (numerous) grandchildren out fishing in the motorboat.  After one such outing when I was eleven years old, my grandmother called to the kids, asking if there were “some strong boys who could help grandpa with the boat”.  My cousin Julia, who was just a few years older than me and who I strove desperately and unsuccessfully to emulate in every way, yelled angrily across the beach: “Just because I DON’T HAVE A PENIS, doesn’t mean I CAN’T MOVE A BOAT!”  In that moment, thanks to Julia’s passion and ensuing tears, I knew I would have to prove to myself and to the family that I was a feminist too.

In those days, as an adolescent, it was all about challenging assumptions about what we can and can’t do, or should and shouldn’t do, as women.  I spent my teen years fighting the man, and periodically butting heads with school administrators, conservative uncles and random members of the public.  As a young adult, I met a nice man (who I am now married to), moved to the city and dove headfirst into the real world.  We lived on student loans and credit cards and really struggled for a few years to make ends meet.  We had crappy part time jobs, often couldn’t pay the bills, and hung out with progressive friends who talked about the world and current events.  The young men that I knew were struggling too, and our common enemy was poverty.

Meanwhile, in my women’s studies classes, the profs railed against the liberal and radical feminism of the past, but in my opinion offered no alternative in postmodern, or third wave feminism.  They still took all of the ills of the world, including poverty, and blamed them on an abstract (natural? inevitable?) force called patriarchy.  What I saw was a world divided not into men and women, but into haves and have-nots – people who have to work hard to survive and people who don’t.  Sure, there were more women on the have-not side and more white men in with the haves, but it was relative wealth that seemed to be the only consistent distinguishing feature.  Patriarchy and sexism seemed to me to be tools to enforce and maintain this imbalance.  This is when I decided that I would not call myself a feminist and would instead focus on social justice and labour activism.

It’s only in the last few years that becoming a mother, working at Positive Women’s Network, and gaining my own voice “separate from the boys”, has led me to a place where I’m re-embracing and redefining feminism for myself.  I still feel strongly that the inequality between women and men is the result of a system that benefits from all kinds of inequalities (as opposed to gender inequality being the root of the world’s evils).  Ironically, in large part, it is my experience in activist circles that has led me back to thinking about “what we can and can’t do; what we should and shouldn’t do, as women”.  In my personal, professional and activist lives, I have had to speak twice as loud to be heard and fight twice as hard to be taken seriously, and I have sometimes been called a “bitch” as a result.  I have volunteered for groups in which I’ve had to fight to avoid a secondary or “support” role when I was more suited to a leadership role.  There’s also the plain and simple fact that while women in our privileged corner of the world have acquired new roles and taken on new responsibilities, boys are still largely raised without the skills to pick up our slack (especially in the domestic realm).  We’re now supposed to be caregivers and nurturers, but wear the pants and bring home the bacon too.  These are the realities that I face as an active, working mother.

This is just my own personal journey with feminism to date, and you see I’m making progress!  I believe as a society we are making some progress too.  But there’s a lot of work to be done before women are truly on an equal footing with men.

-Miriam

This was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Daily Moments . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.

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