“You are feminists,” he said before he commenced the slaughter, “I hate feminists.” Natalie Provost trying to save the lives of her classmates answered “We are not feminists.”
–From a blog entry forwarded to me by one of my brilliant friends, written by Judy Rebick on Rabble on the 20th anniversary of the murder of 14 women by Marc Lepine.
It’s uncomfortable for me to talk about feminism. Always has been. Each attempt I’ve made to locate myself in this intense and (from my own experience) often-divisive movement has led me to a dead end, or at least a humiliating one. Is my inadequacy as a feminist indicative as some sort of failing as a woman? Can someone be a better feminist than another?
As a child, I had the privilege of being raised to believe that I could do anything. I was a bright, lively and tough little girl. I could out-sprint most of the boys in my class, often sang out at the top of my lungs (ask my sister about the ‘Oh Canada’ incident), and learned CONSTANTLY. My cheeky attitude towards formal education didn’t stop me from absorbing and synthesizing as many ideas as I could find. Though liberating, the freedom to do anything always came with a great responsibility. Surely, if I had the capacity to do ANYTHING, then I should do something that was, ultimately, ‘good.’ I’ve spent the better part of my life figuring out what ‘good’ means when we live and work in a terrifyingly complex world.
Recently, I’ve spent some time listening to the wiser members of my family, and have learned (a bit to my sheepish surprise) that I’m one of many women in my family who have had this same drive, this same inclination to DO something. One story came flooding into mind when I read the above quotation this morning. My dad’s mom, my Grandma K. was a single mom and a farmer–a helluva farmer at that. In 1980, the Lethbridge Herald wrote up a full page article on her life’s work. The scanned version is a bit chopped up, and I don’t have the patience to weave it together, but it’s an interesting read for a soul-searching granddaughter.
Lethbridge Herald, February 25, 1980
The article describes her highly successful career in a male-dominated industry, keeping the focus off of her separation from her husband some twenty years earlier. And then the little paragraph that consistently grabs my attention:
She doesn’t feel handicapped by being a woman, and she doesn’t have much sympathy for women’s movements. Prejudices work against men and women, she says. ‘A lot of talent is wasted because of closed doors.’
“We are not feminists.”
Then what are we? I have never taken a course in Women’s Studies; I have never been all that good at following academic movements, feminist theory included; I have never participated in the Women’s Memorial March, or the Women’s March for Housing; as a museum anthropologist, I have chosen to enter a field which is populated by many women, despite its colonial and male origins; I am, in practice, a bad feminist. But I am still searching to understand why both Natalie Provost and Grandma K. did not feel it necessary to associate themselves with feminism, when what they were doing was decidedly feminist in nature. In my opinion, any social movement requires direct action not only by self-identifying activists, but also by those unique ‘common people’ with the courage to simply (and with tremendous strength) live the path of change.
If we can realize that we are, in fact, on common ground, that we are all feminists, then I will be excited about the future for my mother, sister, aunties, niece and friends. Or, as my Grandma K said, I might just go “plum cuckoo.”
