In the diary “Did age play a role in it?”, eclare asked:
As I’ve been reading over all of these posts, noting all of the awesome women who keep referring to their battle scars and their experiences, I’ve been wondering….Could you guys maybe tell us those stories? I suspect that I’m not the only person here that would really love to here the stories of those who have done so much to ensure that we, as the next generation, have all of the opportunities that we take for granted. So, if it’s not too presumptuous, I would like to put in a request for some storytelling diaries.
Though I didn’t comment in that thread, my feminism goes back to the 60’s and telling a story seems to be a great way to do my first diary (i.e., write what you know). So here’s a story to get things started.
The Birth of a Feminist
In 1962 when I was 12 years, my father died without having made a will. So the many shocks my mother suffered after his death included the news that her children had no legal guardian. Only the father was automatically assigned legal guardianship and as such only he could assign that right to someone else. Mom went to court and was named our guardian. She would have to go back to court every six months until we were of age to show that she was properly feeding, clothing, sheltering, and educating us.
Even as a 12-year-old, I had no trouble recognizing how stupid this was but it took two more events to finish the process of making me a feminist (even if I had never heard of the word at the time).
The first occurred when my mother took my older sister to get her beginners permit and they immediately came back home. As my sister furiously told me, the man at the license branch told my mother that she was a mother not the legal guardian and couldn’t sign the required paperwork; when she tried to explain, he wouldn’t listen and just told her to go home and get her husband to come back with my sister. Mother was so upset she couldn’t tell him that her husband was dead.
The second event was an off-hand remark made by my mother’s lawyer. My mother was doing some mild grumbling about having to prepare the paperwork for the regular court appearance and her lawyer said “Well, be happy you are their guardian. After all, if he had made a will, he could have named anyone he wanted.”
Well, that did it. I realized that my mother kept getting treated unfairly just because she was a woman and I decided that I wasn’t going to let that happen to me.
Epilogue: In the 70’s, I was very actively involved in the campaign to get the ERA passed in my state. As part of the effort, the laws of the state were reviewed for gender bias and changes to make the laws non-discriminatory were proposed. Over 300 laws were either changed or rescinded and among those laws changed were the ones which made the father the sole legal guardian.
So who else would like to share a story?
Best story today! Thank you for sharing.
I don’t really have a story, as such. I’m a young (early 20s) Canadian male, and while I may be retconning my own memories, the idea of women as innately inferior just doesn’t seem to have ever been one I dealt with. Oh, sure, I went through the usual “cooties” phase, and I suspect I have a lot of lingering cultural Things, but… I have trouble with the concept of female inequality on a very basic level. Even people saying “men and women are fundamentally different, so women can’t X” or “so men can’t X” drives me nuts.
I suppose that too much philosophy and Doonesbury does that to a person, eh?
Ack! Sorry, I thought the bit at the start was a call for stories in this diary. If the above post is off-topic, I apologize. That’s what I get for skimming the front matter to get to the good part!
Great diary, AndiF. It’s funny how some things you just need to experience before you… not believe it, but know it to be true in a very basic way. I think discrimination is in that category — you can believe others when they say it exists, but you might not fully understand it until something happens in your own life.
I could tell lots of stories. I’ll spare you, though, and just tell you the one that outraged me the most. I don’t know why this is so, because it didn’t really affect my life a bit — I wasn’t planning on moving out of the U.S. anyway. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
I have these second cousins and we were raised fairly close. Their dad and my mom were born in the UK. Their dad’s mom and my mom’s mom were sisters, also born in the UK.
So the cousins and I were fairly close — lots of shared family history and similar experiences with having “old country” grandmothers, watching the parents struggle between the two cultures, and view our own culture as the fully integrated ones.
So I like my cousins, but our bond was more than just based on personality. It’s also based on being the same — having experiences that aren’t all that common in our immediate surroundings.
So one day I’m yappin’ with these cousins, and my cousin tells me he’s moving to the UK. I tell him I don’t think he can stay there for more than six months because of immigration law. He says he can. He got his dual citizenship.
I asked how the hell he did that? My uncle had tried to move there and couldn’t. I’d been offered a year there once and couldn’t take it — we were born in the US! And he tells me — that’s because you’re British through your mother. We’re British through our father, so we’re eligible.
I couldn’t believe it. In fact, I didn’t believe it and looked it up. Sure enough, my cousins who were the same as me could go because we weren’t the same really. They had a British dad and I had a British mom.
That law is changed now, but only for those born after… 83 or 86 or something.
I’m not sure about citizenship, but UK ancestry visas still work that way — fathers and paternal grandfathers get you a visa, mothers and grandmothers (of any stripe) don’t.
“A girl’s just not safe in a family of men”?
When I was about 10 someone in my household said to me one day “well no one would accuse you of being pretty”. He was right, I wasn’t. I was at that awkward stage, all nose and long skinny legs. And you know I never was pretty, but what I didn’t know was that I was stiking. Sometimes I was even beautiful.
But I never believed it, all I saw were my flaws and the person who let me know I wasn’t pretty? He spent the next 3 years molesting me, seducing me and eventually I believe though I have blocked the memory, he took my virginity.
So I did what a lot of young girls who had been molested did, I became “easy”. I was looking for love and I was finding guys interested in “easy”. By todays standards I would be just like any one else, but then I felt a lot of shame, not because of the sex so much but because I was allowing myself to have no value.
So every relationship I had started by my trying to buy love with sex. I jumped into relationships with people I didn’t even know, who I had nothing in common with. I built relationships based on convenience with men before I even knew if I liked them.
I remember one time when a guy in HS hit on me and I turned him down. He told me I really didn’t have any reason to be so picky. I didn’t even have a right to turn someone down without being insulted.
So later when I was married and gave birth to a 10 1/2 lb baby and gained weight I was in for a big shock. Suddenly everything I had wanted out of life was sublimated by the responsibilities of being a parent. I lost myself and the one thing I had counted on, my body was not the same. I hated what happened to it. I hated being at home all day lonely and bored. I loved my son, but I hated suddenly being someones wife and someones mother and house keeper.
The one thing that I had confidence in, my acting and singing was gone. Later on when the kids were a little older and I got back to it, my husband hated it. He hated that I had this thing that made me happy and independent, something I might actually be able to make a living at that might cause me to stop feeling so dependent on him.
It was a gradual process but over the years I knew I deserved better. I knew I deserved to do something with my life and that I had lost myself. When I started to gain some self respect back and stopped being willing to fall apart and give in to my husbands every wish, he left. In his words “I can’t stand your bullshit feminism and I’m leaving because I don’t wan’t to wait for you to leave me”.
Leave him? I only wanted him to be nice to me and happy for me when I was happy. One of the main reasons he thought the way he did was because of interference from his toxic family, his father who worked on him every day picking away at our relationship.
The man was totally disrespectful to me and I just took it. I didn’t fight back in the name of family harmony. I was a fool.
Realizing that I had allowed myself to be victimized all my life, turned into an object, changed me.
I’d rather be alone than miserable trying to live up to someone else’s expectations.
someone in my family I am close to (I can’t be more specific because I think it would violate her privacy, even behind the veil of anonymity we have here) went through a similar experience: the childhood sexual abuse and then the sexual acting out. I only learned a few years ago, and I was blown away. I remember before this hearing the statistic that one in ten women are sexually abused as children and scoffing. But there is so much we don’t know, even about the people we are close to–all the pain. It is a hidden dimension of people’s lives.
I just want to say that I honor you for speaking about this experience. I wish you strength and whatever else you need to move beyond these past experiences.
One in 10. That would be a big improvement if it were true. It is at the latest (and I will have to go find the source again to vouch it true) one in 4 and may be as high as one in 3. Sexual abuse of femaile children is pandemic in this world.
Something has got to change!
Actually, sexual abuse of all children is pandemic. I don’t know if it’s just spoken of less, but boys suffer abuse as well. In my circle of acquaintance, I’m aware of 2 females and 3 males who have been abused. I know that’s not the nationwide ratio, but still.
You are so right. . .and I must be sooooo tired to not have acknowledged that as well. It is certainly true and it is certainly something that needs to be fixed!
Last I heard, the statistics were something like 1 out of 6 boys are molested, and up to 75% of the abusers are also male.
and 1 in 6 males and is increasing. Having known the horrors of sexual abuse myself, I can relate to using sex as a means of acceptance and love. I can only hope that the incidence of child sexual assault will begin to decline rapidly in the near future.
I am past it. But something like that changes you and the person you are is always effected by the experience. That’s not so bad in a way because it made me very wise on the subject of sexual abuse.
When the person who molested me died, it was finally possible for me to forgive him.
It does change you, make you different.
I was abused by two different men when I was a child (three years old and then five years old). In effect, I never had the chance to experience what it’s like to be like other “normal” kids. From a VERY young age I learned that parents could let you down and not listen to you, adults could lie and get away with hurting you, and in general you couldn’t really depend upon or trust anyone but yourself.
This had (up until recent years and a good dose of therapy) good points and bad points in that it made me much more self-reliant and immune to emotional manipulation than your typical female child, but it also made me very much “my way or the highway” in my dealings with others (as I had been ingrained with the thought that people would lie and hurt you if they could and that sometimes no one would come to your rescue no matter how much you tried to get help).
There IS this lingering sense of hostility and impurity that never goes away, like a stain that never washes off. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve lived it. You get very bitter and sad sometimes that you’re broken in a sense and always will be. Eventually you come to see that many of us have experiences that make us a little “off”, though, and the normalcy you wish you had isn’t really had by anyone.
I am absolutely stunned. I am about 6 years younger than you so I can’t believe that this nonsense was going on when I was in first grade. What state was that in?
I’m in Indiana but the laws making father the sole guardian were pretty common — they were a leftover from couverture laws.
And a BTW for you — I took up your challenge in the ‘Explicit Content’ diary on answer why the one image was offensive and the other wasn’t. I’d be interested to hear what you think of my argument.
I will have to go and check now.
I was an easy sell. From about the age of 5 to shortly after my 7th birthday–in the mid-late 50s, I lived on a street with about 15 or 20 girls my own age–and not one boy. At that age, a year older or younger is a big age difference, and I don’t think there were more than one or two that even fell into that category. So, as a result, I played with girls a lot. This somehow gave me the idea that they were human beings.
All attempts to convince me otherwise subsequently failed, and made me quite suspicious, to boot. That’s all it took.
I am so happy that you did this diary – I had just sat down to write one in response to the same comment.
Some childhood memories:
I was also born in 1950, and have just one sibling, a brother 3 years younger. One of my most aggravating memories of childhood was when my father decided that he would take us fishing – separately. My brother would go first, of course. But he wouldn’t dig in the yard with my dad for the worms, they were too yucky. So I helped my dad dig worms (I loved yucky stuff) and off they went fishing.
One of my uncles (my dad had 12 brothers and sisters) had a house in Vermont, and a bunch of uncles, dad, brother, myself and cousins went for a weekend. The uncles were shooting targets, and we all got a chance to try it. I did so well that it was the last time that I was allowed to go (it made the boys feel bad that I was better than they were).
My brother got a chemistry set one Christmas. He didn’t use it, didn’t care. I begged my parents for one of my own – or could I use his – but that stuff wasn’t for girls.
When I was in 8th grade, I was part of a school bowling league. By the end of the year, I had an average of 187. No one cared that a girl could bowl so well, and in fact many people thought that I was cheating or lying somehow.
High school memories:
The best girl on our gymnastics team – and she was incredible – quit because her parents decided that she was getting too muscular in her legs, and boys would not like that.
The Homecoming Queen one year was not allowed to pass on her “crown” because she was pregnant. That was, of course, after she was expelled for being pregnant.
College:
Although I had solid A’s in sciences in high school (and the highest finals grades in my class all four years) I was sent to a liberal arts college to “find a husband and get a teaching degree to fall back on”. No one ever suggested to me that I could be a doctor or scientist, and it never occurred to me that it was possible, because women just didn’t do that.
I felt lucky to be at a school with a great dress code (I could finally wear pants to class!) and a newly progressive curfew system (only freshmen women had curfew – 10PM on weekdays, midnight on weekends!)
One disappointment was that I could no longer do gymnastics. The only mats that the school owned were in the men’s weight lifting room, and women weren’t allowed in there, and the mats were not allowed to leave the room.
My “click” moment came as a resident assistant my junior year on a floor of freshmen women. These women were questioning (!) the curfew system. They were told that the reason that freshmen women had curfew was that it kept the freshmen men from staying out too late. One of the women said to me,” If the men are the problem, then why are the women the ones who are restricted?” I remember just staring at her for a long moment…then helping them organize an after curfew walkout for all the freshmen women. After three nights, the administration caved.
My senior year, I took the only black studies course that was offered, and the only women’s studies course concurrently. I convinced both professors to allow me to do a paper that related civil rights and women’s rights – the women’s studies prof agreed in a heartbeat, but the black studies prof took a lot of time to agree, because he really did not think that there was much of a relationship at all. To his credit, not only did I get a phenomenal grade on the paper, but he really opened his mind – and accepted my premise – his “click” moment.
I was very lucky that other than the “date rape” that was my first sexual experience, I’ve never been physically abused. I realized in my late 40’s that I had indeed been lucky, but didn’t want to become a little old lady victim someday – so I’m grading for my second black belt in karate in a week and a half.
I was also very lucky that NY state had just legalized abortions when I needed one, as opposed to one of my best friends who was unable to get one just a few months earlier.
I want to thank everyone for their stories. It makes me appreciate how much I have taken for granted. AndiF, the idea that your mother wasn’t automatically your legal guardian absolutely blows my mind. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it, since both times that I went to the DMV with my mom as a teenager (failed my driving test the first time. I’m a terrible driver) are such strong memories for me.
I’m fortunate enough that both my parents were adamant that I could do anything I wanted growing up, but it was really my dad who insisted that I could do anything that boys could do. I will never forget the day he told me that I shouldn’t be a cheerleader, I’d be better off playing sports for myself (we didn’t have competitive cheerleading where I grew up). I was kind of pissed off at the time (I was 11 or 12), but looking back it strikes me as his way of telling me to expect more of and for myself than to be an accessory for men. He’s the one that taught me about sports and politics and lots of other things that could easily have been “boys only.” Funny thing is, now whenever I talk about feminism he shakes his head and wonders out loud how all his daughters (there are 4 of us) turned out to be feminists. (Despite all his awesomeness he’s still fairly conservative.) I just look him in the eye and tell him it’s all his fault for raising me to believe in equality.
Congratulations on your efforts to change the laws! It’s so nice to see someone actually make a difference.
I confess to being appalled that your mother didn’t automatically have guardianship of her children in a time as recent as 1962! That, frankly, would have surprised me if it had been the case in 1862. What state was this? Were laws like this common in other states? Are there any states where this is still the case?
I well remember the incredible myriad restrictions on women in those times. My mother was a school teacher, and for her that was fine–but there was almost nothing else open to her. It was big news in the mid 60’s for my dad to encourage her back into her career when we kids were nearing teen age. In the end it gave her a life and a retirement she’d never have now.
One of my pet peeves is most any modern drama set in those and earlier times. One of the things that glares at me when modern women portray women in times prior to the 70’s is the boldnes of language, posture and behavior that would have gotten women of those times instantly ostracized from polite society. And there were all sorts of public places women couldn’t even attend unchaperoned. I didn’t see the inability to get credit cards mentioned at the time I started this comment.
I think the modern feminist cause would be better served by an attempt to show gender behavior from those times more accurately.
I have one story of my own. I’ve posted it before so I won’t elaborate, but in the early 70’s I showed how coed classes of novice sailors could graduate female skippers at the same rate as the males. It was an accidental side effect of trying to support students who naturally hang back to watch others try new tasks first. They seemed to me to turn out weak in leadership and self-sufficiency.
In coed classes, women hold back more than men. The sailing industry like some of the education industry has addressed the problem by isolating the women in segregated classes, but I found it exciting to see that with a few tricks (and not even a mention of philosophy) we can learn and work together.
It shows there are ways to work around the subtle behaviors and perceptions we all complain about as subconscious racism and sexism. It’s not all policy, it’s not all hard wired, it’s not all the victim, it’s not all the oppressor–it just is, and we can be smarter than “it” is.