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Guest
Guest
What book turned you onto feminism or into a feminist (however you define the term)? If not a book, what?
I’m posting the url below to a very fine essay by Dorothy Allison that asks this question and answers it as a writer. I urge you to read it, but if you don’t (thank me for not copying it here), she speaks of what turned her into a feminist—lots of authors and their books with “occasional glimpses of my real life on the page”. She also says, “I came to feminism as an escaped Baptist.”
Allison: “What was the first feminist book you read? Not Our Bodies, Ourselves or The Feminine Mystique. No, take me back. All the way back. Take me back to the trashy books you read. Take me back to the stuff that you read and that you wanted to be.”
I’m so glad she put it that way. I’ve read lots of “feminist” tracts and theory, but Allison made me recall the underpinnings of my feminist thinking. It began with the fairy tales I read as a girl, and identifying with Snow White, not because she ended up with a prince, but for me because she had black hair (vs. blond), an evil step-mother, and managed to survive a long time before being tricked into eating a bad apple.
Despite being a good-catholic-girl I never warmed to the virgin-mother, just could not see her as a role-model, not that I thought in those terms then. In fact I used to feel bad because I ignored her and even felt resentment toward her doormat persona. Eventually I became “an escaped Catholic”.
As I left off nursery texts I always gave a lot of thought to female heroines, even later when reading the classics in school. I paid close attention to the girls and women of Dickens, Dostoyesky, Hardy, the Bröntes, Shakespeare, and Greek and Roman mythology. I learned from all those femmes, they helped me build my own identity, and still do.
I remember very well in my early twenties (mid-sixties) learning about “Feminism” and realizing I had always been one, then simply feeling glad it had a name.
How about you?
Perdita
Notes to a Young Feminist
I’m posting the url below to a very fine essay by Dorothy Allison that asks this question and answers it as a writer. I urge you to read it, but if you don’t (thank me for not copying it here), she speaks of what turned her into a feminist—lots of authors and their books with “occasional glimpses of my real life on the page”. She also says, “I came to feminism as an escaped Baptist.”
Allison: “What was the first feminist book you read? Not Our Bodies, Ourselves or The Feminine Mystique. No, take me back. All the way back. Take me back to the trashy books you read. Take me back to the stuff that you read and that you wanted to be.”
I’m so glad she put it that way. I’ve read lots of “feminist” tracts and theory, but Allison made me recall the underpinnings of my feminist thinking. It began with the fairy tales I read as a girl, and identifying with Snow White, not because she ended up with a prince, but for me because she had black hair (vs. blond), an evil step-mother, and managed to survive a long time before being tricked into eating a bad apple.
Despite being a good-catholic-girl I never warmed to the virgin-mother, just could not see her as a role-model, not that I thought in those terms then. In fact I used to feel bad because I ignored her and even felt resentment toward her doormat persona. Eventually I became “an escaped Catholic”.
As I left off nursery texts I always gave a lot of thought to female heroines, even later when reading the classics in school. I paid close attention to the girls and women of Dickens, Dostoyesky, Hardy, the Bröntes, Shakespeare, and Greek and Roman mythology. I learned from all those femmes, they helped me build my own identity, and still do.
I remember very well in my early twenties (mid-sixties) learning about “Feminism” and realizing I had always been one, then simply feeling glad it had a name.
How about you?
Perdita
Notes to a Young Feminist
