Why I am a Feminist

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

—Virginia Woolf

The first conversation I had with my daughter about the F-word, feminism, happened one summer night some 30 years ago in Toronto. She was 14 years old. We were on our porch drinking chilled lemonade and slapping at the mosquitoes that were out for our blood on that steamy July evening.

“I’m not a feminist,” Jane declared. “I don’t need to be. We have equal rights now.” She paused, then added, quietly, “Anyway, boys don’t like feminists.”

And there it was, the same fear I recognized from my own teenage years in the 1960s.

The fear of being considered a frump. Ignored if you spoke up. Labelled shrill, a bitch or, worse, stupid. Accused of hating men. Viewed with suspicion if you were good at science and math. Despised for not plucking your eyebrows or shaving your armpits. These terrors kept me firmly in my place until finally, in my 20s, I found the courage to stop giving a damn.

“Why are you a feminist, Mom?”

“For several reasons,” I said. “Being forced to leave my copywriter job in a Dublin insurance company when my first pregnancy began to show because a married woman was not allowed to occupy a job that should go to a man. Many of us hid our wedded status until a baby bump forced us to fess up.”

I tell her about the day before I married her father when I went to confession in my parish church. The priest told me it was my sacred duty to produce as many children as God granted me. No using black-market contraception. I was tempted to tell him to stick his threat of eternal damnation up his cassock, but decided that a better response was to never again confess my so-called sins to a priest. And I never have.

I tell her about an aunt whose husband sold the family home out from under her in 1967. He then fled to Australia, where he divorced her. Divorce was not permitted in Ireland until 1996, but in the ‘60s, under Irish law, wherever the husband lived was deemed to be the wife’s domicile, so the divorce was legal in Australia. My aunt was left in legal limbo.

Finally, I tell Jane about my friend who could not get a restraining order against her violent husband. He sexually assaulted her, blackened both her eyes and split her lip. Marital rape was not deemed a crime until 2002.

Hearing all this, my daughter raises her eyebrows in disbelief. Her incredulity grows when I tell her that, at one time, women could not order a pint of beer in some Irish pubs. If they were accidentally served one (how does that even happen?), they would be asked to divide the beer into two half-pint glasses. Absurd.

I came of age in the 1970s, when Ireland was still dominated by an entrenched state and church patriarchy. Women finally began to rally against the injustices they had borne in pain and silence and resignation for generations. Once they found their voice, there was no shutting them up. They won the right to buy property, receive equal pay for equal work, sit on a jury, and have the government Children’s Allowance paid directly to them instead of their husbands.

Leading the charge was the second wave Irish Women’s Liberation Movement—a ballsy group of journalists, writers, artists and academics concerned about the sexism, both legal and social, that pervaded the country at that time. The charismatic leaders included journalists Nell McCafferty, Mary Kenny and Nuala O’Faolain, all at the top of their game. The women would come on the wildly popular Late, Late Show and be irreverent and funny and razor sharp. My mother and sister and I would be glued to the television.

In one widely-broadcast act of defiance, fifty feminists brought condoms by train from Belfast in the north to Dublin in the south where contraceptives were banned. The women were met at the station by hundreds of their cheering sisters. The ban was lifted in 1985, despite fierce opposition from the church. In 2015, Ireland legalized same-sex marriage, the first country in the world to do so by popular vote. Still, abortion did not become legal until 2018.

Jane and I have continued our porch conversation over decades. We like to crank up the volume and sing along to the Eurhythmics’ Sisters are Doin’ it for Themselves or Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar. We once lined up for more than two hours to have feminist rock star, Gloria Steinem, sign our books at a Toronto store.

My daughter had the good sense to marry a man who loves her for her smarts, not just her pretty eyes. She defended her PhD thesis a week before her son was born. She works as a human rights policy analyst, where her feminist values are being put to good use.

“This is fucking amazing,” she texted me from the Women’s March in Toronto in February 2017. I was marching in Ottawa at the same time. The photo showed a sea of women wearing pink pussy hats, with men and kids walking alongside them in solidarity. We were part of a massive global protest against the misogynist-in-chief who—unbelievably—has been elected to a second term. Roe v. Wade has been overturned by Supreme Court judges appointed by Trump. Women are once again denied access to safe abortions. An extreme right-wing ideology is working to bring back the dark ages, when women were silent, domestic servants whose place was in the home, subservient to their male partners.

But, make no mistake, no matter how hard or long the fight, women will never relinquish the gains feminism has brought them. Already, the resistance is showing up in street marches, like the recent ones where millions of Americans—women and men—pushed back against a fascist administration trying to silence them. As my daughter would likely say, “fucking amazing!” And as Virginia Woolf did say, they cannot take away the freedom of our minds.