My 12 year old son and I were chatting recently about the girls in his class and what they thought of his new longer hair. I asked with mild curiosity if he was “interested” in any of them, to which he replied no. He did, however, offer me a few characteristics he was looking for in the dating world, whenever that might be for him.
“I like girls who are nice,” he said, which seemed like a reasonable, if vague, starting point in terms of considering possible matches.
“…And I would like to date a feminist.”
It would be hard to overstate how happy and surprised it made me to have my adolescent son name feminism as not just a good thing, but a key factor in imagining someone as attractive.
“I wonder what he means by that?” my husband asked, when I shared this conversation with him. “Does it mean that he wants to be with someone who works?”
Recognizing and appropriately valuing women’s labor is an important cornerstone of feminism, but I am certain this wasn’t on my son’s mind when he made this comment. Based on other conversations that we have had, I expect the thing that my son was naming was equality. He wants a relationship with someone who thinks that equality across genders is something of essential importance.
What delighted me most about his comment was that, in one simple statement, he was able to cut loose the stereotypes and politicization of the word feminist and to claim what we should easily be able to claim: that caring about how people are treated as equals is beautiful and deeply attractive. He did so with a disarming naiveté—completely unaware that what he was saying could sound so liberating and radical.
Mixed in with my delight was something else though. His words called me to account in a way that felt a little unsettling. When I was his age, I believed something very different. When I was his age, I thought feminism was not attractive, and I claimed feminism was not for me.
Naming my privilege
I am exceptionally privileged. I am white and straight and middle-class. I grew up expecting that I would be educated, that I had the right to vote, that I could work in any career I chose if I was willing to apply myself. Others listened to my voice. My body was never physically abused by others. I have never once been scared to be out walking alone at night, either in the large cities or the small towns in which I have lived. I had strong women as role models. I knew countless kind and loving men. I was encouraged to be a leader. I learned to overcome my natural inclination to be quiet and interior and maybe a bit shy because I was taught that it was good and important for me to speak up.
And as I name this incredible good fortune, I also have to acknowledge that this good fortune clouded my vision in some important ways.
I grew up in a church denomination which has been ordaining women two years longer than I have been alive. I was in my early teens before I saw a woman leading our little rural Hanover Church, but I saw women leading other churches around town for as long as I can remember. I also saw women owning and operating businesses, practicing law and medicine, acting as politicians and leading in a variety of other capacities across society.
While it was easy for me to imagine becoming a lawyer or a priest, it was harder to see what I wasn’t seeing. I was steeped in the classical music world, and although I majored in music history for my undergrad degree, I am only now beginning to understand how completely this world is defined and constrained by the patriarchy. In all of my studies, the only female composer of any note who was drawn to our attention was Clara Schumann, and she was treated as a footnote to her more famous composer husband. Composing, from what I could see, was not something that women did. I also never saw female film directors, plumbers or firefighters, nor did I question why women alone seemed relegated to jobs such as nursing, house cleaning, and infant care. The term “glass ceiling” is an appropriate one because I failed to recognize the barriers women did face, even in jobs where they appeared to be welcomed, or what kinds of choices women were navigating between careers and families even as the narrative seemed to be that women could (and perhaps should) do it all.
My friends and I thought we could be whatever we wanted to be, not seeing clearly what didn’t appear to be on the table at all, not imagining the obstacles we might encounter with what did seem to be on the table, and rejecting feminism as a label because we bought into all of the worst sorts of stereotypes of what that was. We wanted to shave our armpits and put on mascara and dress in clothes that made us feel attractive. We wanted boys to like us; we dreamed of getting married and having babies. I myself didn’t feel angry with men, and I didn’t relate to the bitterness and anger that I perceived in the feminist voices that I heard.
I also didn’t listen very hard to what those voices were saying. I wasn’t curious about finding out more or listening more widely. I was happy to be a person who fights for equality. I was not aware that this is the definition of feminism: feminism believes that people are equal regardless of gender; feminism believes that opportunities and pay should reflect that equality. I had no idea that unmasking and dismantling the entrenched patriarchy is essential in pursuing equality for all of us.
I didn’t appreciate what had been done for me
I didn’t realize that my privilege came with responsibility.
As a parish priest, I have asked my congregation to consider how to be good parents. I mean this metaphorically. Many of them are parents and they care about raising their children wisely and faithfully and with kindness. But what I am asking of them more broadly is to consider how they can be good parents of the church. Generations have gone before them and been good parents to them. That is why we have a church. These people gave time and money and talent and resources and love, so much love, to care for the community of faith and to make in that community of faith room for the next generation to be nurtured in that gift of faith too. They acted in ways that understood that this gift of faith could never just be for them, it had to be generative. It had to be passed along in a way that would welcome newness.
If they at all value their own belonging in the church, then they must also value offering that place of belonging to others, and in a way that allows those others to bring their own needs and hopes and challenges to that search for belonging.
I was slow to realize that this same responsibility applies to the life that I have received as a woman growing up in the last decades of the 20th century. I knew myself to be blessed. I understood that I had opportunities and options and a voice that I could use and expect to be heard. I also vaguely felt grateful that I lived in this time and place, rather than in a time and place where my path would have been much narrower and my voice more muted.
One of my favorite books is The Handmaid’s Tale. I felt saddened on Atwood’s behalf when a friend labelled her writing as feminist, noting that he “quite liked her writing anyway.” I thought that this label pigeon-holed one of my favorite writers unfairly, not imagining that this might be a label she herself would embrace.
When it comes to her dystopian fiction, Margaret Atwood is quick to point out that every dynamic she describes has its basis in policies and beliefs that can be referenced in history or in modern times. I read this book as a gripping and emotional and meaningful piece of fiction. I did not understand that it was also written as a warning: if we are not vigilant in continuing to care for the equality we have already won, then that equality can all too quickly be lost.
I did not appreciate that this fight was hard-won and hard-won by my immediate predecessors.
I did not appreciate how precarious my own position of power and opportunity is.
And most importantly, I did not appreciate that I needed to intentionally position myself as one who belonged in this fight so that I could continue it for the sake of those to come.
I did not understand myself as a daughter of the feminist movement. I did not accept my responsibility to be a mother for our future children.
My perspective changed when it impacted me
I assumed that because I had a voice, and I had opportunities, and I was raised to expect that my gender was not an obstacle to pursuing every good thing that life has to offer, that women in general were similarly blessed. I thought the feminist fight was finished because I found myself in such a fortunate and privileged position of life. I bought into the most basic and destructive assumption of individualism: I am the center of the universe.
Of course my own privilege is compromised by the oppression of others. Of course my own opportunities must be used to make room for opportunities for others. Of course the work is not over when I myself am treated as an equal. This equality is not real, it is not powerful, it is not sufficient, if there are still countless voices not represented, not heard, not valued.
Feminism can’t be individualistic. It must be communal. It must be for all of us.
Here is the truth. I only started to care about feminism when I myself slammed up against the injustices of a society formed by patriarchy. I don’t need to detail those injustices here, because the point is that of course it was inevitable that I would eventually encounter the obstacles of living in a world where gross inequality still very much reigns in so many ordinary and extraordinary ways.
I’m not proud to say so, but I choose to admit that I opened my eyes and considered how much work still has to be done for all of us when I understood myself as implicated in that reality. I admit it, and ultimately I choose gladness over shame in doing so.
I am glad that we’re not finished products but rather works in progress. I am glad that I have had other voices to broaden my own horizons. I am glad for the possibility of repentance—literally, turning around, and seeing something new. I am glad for how the feminist conversation keeps changing and expanding and for how new voices continue to weigh in on what kind of world we want to create together and why that matters. I am glad to join my voice and witness to that conversation in some small way. I am glad there is room for me, even if I was late coming to the table.
I am glad for the new generations being born into this conversation: for my daughter’s willful and strong and self-possessed joy in naming herself as a feminist and for my son’s assumption that he can be a feminist, too, and that the willingness to be part of making the dream of equality real is a beautiful thing indeed.
Martha Tatarnic currently leads a thriving urban church in St. Catharines--the Niagara region of Ontario. Her book The Living Diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating explores the relationships between food, body image, community and spirituality.
