Surely I’m a feminist?

I am a feminist. I am a woman so of course I am. I always have been. 

Haven’t I?

Standing for all that I believed a strong woman stands for, I have never questioned that I stand strong for women. Over my 50 years on this earth I have strided. I have forged. I have beaten down paths less trod. I have argued. I have used my voice. I have believed myself to be a very modern woman; a feminist by cultural osmosis. How could I not be when the grim alternatives for women had now disappeared hadn’t they? Relics of suffrage rage and cutting the apron strings – a thing of the past?

As I approached my half century, it dawned on me (or to be more accurate, was shown to me) that my feminism has been a bit of a sham.  I have taken my understanding of the lives of women for granted, I have taken the history of feminism as rote, I have believed the journey near completion, and the rewards there for the taking.

It took the open eyes, minds and hearts of my children, Generation Z to their core, to open my eyes, mind and heart to this realisation. Through them I have learned words and phrases that question everything I previously knew. Through them I learned that you cannot talk about feminism without understanding the word ‘intersectional’. Through them I learned what privilege means, through them I learned how patriarchy, ‘male violence’  and ‘male gaze’ (amongst many other things) continue to affect everything I think, feel and do.

And so I want to start again. To relearn, to understand, and take the care to know. I want to hear how my daughters’ experiences are tragically not so different from mine as I was growing up. I want to understand how my old understanding of feminism has excluded many women, and thrown them to the sidelines. I want to become a better feminist. Or rather, I recognise that my feminism is unfinished- that it never really had the strong foundations on which to learn with the coming generations. 

As I write my own curriculum, led by my curiosity, my children, their friends and peers, I want to be open minded, and ready to relearn. It is only by remaining so that I can hear what problems today’s women face, and how I or we (speaking for my generation) may not have helped in our blindness or willingness to be blindsided.

Feel free to join me in this journey. I hope to gain more and give more in everything I learn.