Gay goes on, “The label is rarely offered in kindness. Like Gay who writes, “I sometimes cringe when I am referred to as a feminist, as if I should be ashamed of my feminism or as if the word ‘feminist’ is an insult,” I often hide my feminism because it’s unattractive and that’s the one of the worst things a woman, even a forty-year-old woman, in our culture can be. Both identities are often in competition and neither allows them to be the people they want to become.Īs I began articulating my ideas about my feminism, I read Roxane Gay’s essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial, 2014) and found that I, too, am a bad feminist. Many of these women carry a two-fold burden: what our traditional society tells them they should be and what their patriarchal religious traditions tell them they should be. Instead, I’ve taken it up again because I’m now a college professor who mentors young women at a small Christian liberal arts college. Not because I feel I’ve been wronged and that I haven’t been the recipient of many privileges awarded by the fact that I’m white, educated, heterosexual, and was born in one of the wealthiest nations in human history, or that I haven’t had the opportunity to flourish through the help of both women and men. Now, twenty years later, I’ve taken it up again. Why be angry? I suddenly felt as if I had no right to complain. I had simply been endowed with knowledge I’d never heard before and wanted them to see (Couldn’t they see?) how disturbing it was.
Instead of embracing my new banner, they asked why I was so angry. Women and men must unite to make sure injustice ends! We should all be feminists, I insisted. In my zeal, I breathlessly blurted out statistics, tried to get them to see how women had been stomped on by patriarchy. Surely my mother would understand because she was a woman I was convinced my brother would want to become a feminist because he’d grown up in a house of women. It was the first time I heard the word “feminism.” I took this new knowledge home to my mother and brother.
It was the first time I learned that women were shockingly devalued in entertainment, the workplace, religion, even in the home.
I opted for an introduction to Women’s Studies. Later at Ball State a chunk of my credits needed to come from liberal arts electives. Be independent.” Since my mother was a lesbian in those days and we never acknowledged the fact to each other, I figured her cryptic warnings were invariably wrapped up in our different desires for love rather than about the truth of our world. Before that, my education in feminism came from coded messages from my mother: “Never rely on a man,” she’d say when she thought I was pining too much for a boyfriend.
I learned what feminism was as a twenty-year-old journalism major at Ball State University in 1995.
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