So, after reading about feminism here and here, I was thinking about feminism and how I came to call myself a feminist. When students ask me, “Are you a feminist?” I always answer with the Margaret Atwood quote “If a feminist is someone who believes women are human beings, then sign me up!”
My two “isms” – feminism and environmentalism – started out grounded in very practical, real-world issues. I worked with my Dad on his grant proposals to clean up a Superfund site in Ohio called Fernald – and learned about the difficulty of containing nuclear waste safely. Of course, my study in “Ecotoxicology” – I had a great professor in my undergrad at U of Cinci who taught this class – has come in handy lately, as I research my childhood home, which was a few miles from the Oak Ridge National Laboratories. And this has come to be important in my poetry, too.
Anyway, the origins of my feminism really came from volunteer work I did early on with high school girls. (Note: some of you may already know, yes, I was a youth counsellor AND a Sunday School teacher. Squaresville!) But what I found out was, a LOT of the girls I worked with had been abused. I also found that parents weren’t talking to the girls about anything practical – drug use, what to do when a boy hits you or pressures you to have sex against your will, or contraception, for instance. This was in urban, rural, and suburban settings. A lot of girls who had been abused or raped were suicidal. It really sucked that I didn’t have enough answers for them, that I didn’t really know how they could protect themselves. (Although, note: I did find out the police – through several phone calls on behalf of teenagers – won’t do diddly squat if you’re harrassed and abused – a restraining order provides very little practical safety. A bit disenchanting to find out when you’re 19 or 20, but I guess good to know.)
A lot of the poems in Becoming the Villainess were written after these experiences left me frustrated – “Okay, Ophelia” is one of them. I started noticing that the culture does a great job of portraying women as eye candy, as victims and villainesses, but not a great job of portraying them as anything else. I started thinking about the mythology and fairy tale stories I grew up with, and how women today could or couldn’t model themselves after those characters. I took a class called “Intertext and Modernism” for my MA at U of Cinci that introduced me to deconstruction, how to read a piece with an eye towards how it addressed class or gender. But for me, theory followed my experience. The poems grew out of my increasing awareness of how women are treated now, in myth, and in our culture.
I grew up around guys – I have three brothers, I dated a lot of great guys and had mostly guy friends – and I’m happy to say I have a terrific, supportive, dare-I-say feminist husband. But I look around me and wish for more positive role models, for some support for women who need to be protected, for a place where girls don’t have to worry about what they wear for fear they will be attacked. For a world where women are paid equally for equal work, where a woman CEO or senator isn’t an oddity. I will say that a lot of my work doesn’t fit in with traditional ideas about what being a feminist is or isn’t – what with my having a bleeding disorder and all, you’re not going to see any poems about celebrating the glories of “that time of the month” or the wonders of childbirth. Some of my female characters are unequivocally “Bad Girls” – because if you can’t explore the dark side of being a woman, you’re not allowing your female characters to be fully human. (I think I might also have stolen that from Atwood.) And that’s the story of how I became a feminist.