Here is the first half of my red crayon’s response to my 10 questions about your feminist motherhood. It is a terribly generous and open response, Pirra delves into each question with a thorough exploration of herself and her life to this point. I loved it and I hope she gets around to finishing her response some time soon.
When did you become a feminist?I was raised by a feminist. My mothers’ feminist style was (in my teen years anyway) much louder and angrier than my own was or is. For a long time I rejected the term feminist and rejected much of what it meant to be a feminist. Not actively or deliberately as a means of distancing myself from feminism, but more as a means of distancing myself from my mother.I was trying desperately to reaffirm that I am not her. That I am me. At that point in time, so much of my mother seemed to be about angry radical feminism. (it wasn’t. It just seemed that way.) So I pushed back against feminism in order to push back against my mother. I knew no other 14 year olds given a sports bag full of “wear black on thursdays, say no to violence against women” badges and pamphlets to hand out at school. I felt strongly about the cause, my mother is a domestic abuse survivor, but not strongly enough to be that girl. I was still unsure of what my own feminism was and how to be who that was. So feminism has always been a part of my life. we were raised to believe that even though we were girls, we were vital, intelligent and we could be anything in the world that we wanted to be. Anything boys could do, we could do too. My mothers greatest teaching was to believe in something, anything, but mostly, believe in yourself.
This post is part of the 10 questions about your feminist motherhood series. You can find all the many other responses in this series here. If you’d like to respond to these questions yourself you can either email me your answers and I’ll put them on blue milk as a guest post or you can post them elsewhere and let me know and I’ll link to them.
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