Mike Shayne was the first boy to ever ask me out. I was 13, too young to drive, so it was the sort of date where someone’s mom dropped you off some place and picked you up a couple of hours later. I was not attracted to Mike, but nonetheless went roller skating with him (indoor […]
Feminist Click Moment
Click! My Church Is Against Battered Women’s Shelters?!
“We’ve got to stop those feminists from setting up a battered women’s shelter!” So proclaimed my piano teacher in numerous post-lesson conversations with my mom. When she wasn’t grumbling about shelters she was remarking on how lovely Phyllis Schlafly’s bouffant looked alongside those long-haired feminists. I didn’t get it. “Why doesn’t she want shelters?” I […]
Click! Go Ahead, Call Me a Bitch
Call me “castanets,” because I’ve had a gazillion “clicks” since I first declared myself a feminist. I was a teen in South Dakota, and after reading Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful in the early 1970s, I’ve been doing a joyous feminist flamenco ever since. But my first “bitch” click came a little later. Standing in […]
Click! Teaching Feminism to Boys
There is nothing in the world more infuriating and yet more life-affirming than attempting to teach a room full of 15- and 16-year-old boys why feminism matters. Yet, as an 11th grader in high school, this is what I’d set out to do. My sophomore-year history teacher had given me the opportunity to teach two […]
Click! Not a Knight in Shining Armor
As a teenager coming of age in the 1970s in mainstream culture in the upper midwest, I missed the United States’ radicalizing movements by a decade and several hundred miles. I developed conventional liberal politics in reaction to the conventional conservative politics of my father and his generation. But in a more basic sense, I […]
Click! A College Grad Strips on Bourbon Street
I was dancing in a G-string and pasties when I first realized I was a feminist. Backtrack: I was a young woman experimenting with the boundaries of freedom. It was the sexual revolution, the time after Roe v. Wade and before AIDS, and there was enormous confusion about what it meant to be free. I […]
We Are Feminists Because…
This last week, Natalie Hart wrote a post about Reclaim The Name, a project she undertook in school to replace “I’m not a feminist but…” with “I am a feminist because…” Natalie notes that her idea behind the campaign was to: remove any damning myths associated with the feminist movement by coming out, loud and […]