“You’re a girl, but you can overcome it.” My father would say in an encouraging voice. As if it is a disease I have to fight.
I suppose as a misogynist, it was a conflict for him to have a daughter he loved and wanted to encourage but believed was limited by her gender. He was right. I was. But not of my own doing. I was limited by the environment men like him created.
I was gifted a play kitchen while my father built a mock cockpit with my brother. That was fine because I flew my own invisible plane, courtesy of Wonder Woman.
I watched my mother struggle for respect when she decided to return to work. Her responsibilities at home remained the same and my father consistently criticized her duties while blatantly ignoring her accomplishments outside of the home. I remember the endless fights. She wanted equality, he wanted a subservient wife. She wasn’t going to cave.
My brother told her at age two that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. It’s been a “family joke” for years, but not to me, and I would bet not to my mother either. It was a product of my father’s view of women, and my mother had to watch it blossoming in the next generation.
She always says she wasn’t an active feminist when I talk about idols like Alice Paul and Shirley Chisholm. She thinks she would have had to be burning bras and marching on Washington to call herself that. But she was. She was my feminist.
I remember watching The Brady Bunch with her once when I was pretty young. In that episode, the boys had a “guy’s only” clubhouse so the girls had to build their own. They failed horribly and the boys had to come to the rescue. My mother was so vocally pissed it confused me. She told me the girls could have done it themselves and she was mad the show projected otherwise. That moment is an example of her active feminism. Social change ALWAYS begins at home.
I learned the fight a wife and mother must endure while working. I learned what it was like to constantly be treated as second-class, yet find the inner strength not to believe it. I learned how to fight for yourself even though everything in your vacuum world tells you otherwise. She was (is) an activist. The best kind of activist. She is my activist. I credit the feminist I am today to her. Thanks mom. I love you.
How are things with my dad, you ask? My mom divorced him decades ago. Wives two and three left their jobs to stay at home. He still tells me women are horrible managers and that the Chinese symbol for chaos is two women under the same roof. When I told him I landed a new job, he kept calling me an Administrative Assistant when I was actually a Production Assistant for a primetime news show. We rarely speak, but I do thank him for being the best feminist-boot-camp Drill Sargent ever.
I am a PROUD feminist; a loud one, a proud one and a vocal one. I am the product of a misogynist and a feminist.
This post originally appeared on hillarywarriors.wordpress.com and has been reprinted with permission. Photo via SassymamaHK
Amy Lappos has a background in news media, political science, women’s campaigning, legislation and Suffrage history. She works as a Congressional Aide by day and a blogger for HillaryWarriors.WordPress.com by night, while managing the the only political FB page with a ZERO TOLERANCE for misogyny: Hillary in 2016 & 2020. She believes that ever princess can save herself and as 52% of the population, women are not a special interest but the majority. She has dedicated her life to making our issues treated as such. Feminist. Liberalist. LGBT Ally. Equalist. Activist. Alice Paulite. Hillaryite. Hippie. Granola. Kripaluian. Kidult. Phan. Follow Hillary Warriors on the website, Facebook page, Facebook group and Twitter.
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