ladybusiness | (Reply)

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Like I told you before, I worry I’m sometimes guilty of taking the advantages my education gave me for granted and not realising that some books I breeze through are not necessarily as accessible to people with different educational backgrounds. I know you told me I haven’t made you feel this way, so this isn’t a “oh noes I’m horrible!” type comment; just a note to myself to remember to pause and consider possible barriers to accessibility before I loudly declare, “this book is super easy to read!”

And since we’re talking about the process of becoming feminists, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about my own: like Jodie I can’t point to a specific “click” moment, and I don’t have any interesting anecdote to share about when I became a feminist. My family is politically liberal, but my culture is still pretty stifling when it comes to gender roles, and growing up I was told about a gazillion times I wasn’t allowed to do things my brother was allowed because I was a girl and girls needed “protecting”. Sexual double standards in particularly were a huge thing, and making sure I didn’t “act like a slut” was always a big concern of my mother’s. She’s very much NOT someone who identifies as a feminist, though at the same time she certainly HAS felt the constraints of gender roles and isn’t very traditional. I remember her telling me that when she first met my father’s family, they hated her because she a) wore pants and b) smoked, which were both still very transgressive for a woman. This might not have been the case in the rest of the world in the late 60’s, but hey, we were a fascist dictatorship.

Anyway, I reacted pretty strongly to the whole double standards thing, but I didn’t join the dots and began to realise this was all the result of sexism until I was 19 or 20. And this is where my university education comes in. I actually began by rejecting feminism in my first year at university because I was exposed to Carol Gilligan’s “difference feminism”, which is entirely based on gender essentialism, and didn’t realise this wasn’t all that there was. But then I switched majors from psychology to English, and the humanities department at my university was very, very feminist. I began to do more reading and quickly realised that yes, you COULD be a feminist and reject gender essentialism, in fact a great number of feminists did, and also that there was a direct link between sexism and a lot of the things I’d struggled with in my life. Becoming a part of online communities where there were many women who identified as feminists and made the link between the theory I was being exposed to in my lit and history classes and everyday life was also really important to me.

I can’t pretend to know what it’s like not to have the educational advantages I did have, and I certainly don’t want to appropriate that kind of experience, but I thought it might be useful to tell you that despite everything, that feeling of inferiority, that suspicion that everyone else is more secure in their knowledge and had things figured out long before you did, is still very familiar to me.