MEGAN NICOL REED
On signs of womanhood
On signs of womanhood
It didn’t look like this, that’s for sure. Secondwave feminism, the feminism of my childhood, was righteous and hairy and bloody. It was workshops and Broadsheet magazine and Sue Lytollis self-defence courses in the school holidays. It was insisting we, too, would make a skateboard in Form Two woodwork class, not another frickin’ mug tree. Girls can do anything! We marched to reclaim the night and endured lunches of cottage cheese on homemade pumpernickel bread, and toilets painted purple and green. “Wimin” we wrote, or even better replaced the word altogether with cute little women’s signs. “Lady”? What an insult! You didn’t do your Standard Three social studies project on Captain Cook, no way. You did yours on the leader of the British suffragette movement, Emmeline Pankhurst; and attempted authenticity by hunger striking — even if you succumbed by morning tea. Later you watched Madonna’s music video Like a Prayer for a Stage I Women’s Studies paper and then enthusiastically analysed its representations of gender over pots of chamomile tea in the university’s Women’s Space.
Growing up enveloped in the 1970s’ sisterhood, I understood that while as females we could and should study calculus and physics, while we could and should call out sexism in all its insidious and invidious forms (chauvinist pig!), the ultimate expression of women’s liberation lay in the rejection of medical (read male) intervention in the cycle of life. That babies were born in paddling pools on your living room floor and breastfed until they self-weaned. That birth and menstruation should be celebrated, not feared, hidden or sanitised. The particular school of feminism on which I was nurtured taught me to be ambitious, that I could have it all, and that natural was always better and nature always knew best.
It came as a shock to me when I entered the workplace and realised that few of the women I found in positions of power held any truck with talk of period pain or struggling with going back to work after babies. It surprised me when many of my friends opted for a Caesarean and took a shortcut to formula as soon as they were able. That’s not what we fought for, cried my mother when I reported back to her from the coalface. And it threw me when I realised that the kind of glamorous, corporate career I had envisioned for myself did not sit well with the kind of parent I’d imagined I would be. That that handmade, organic version of mothering I aspired to was a full-time job in itself. Could I still call myself a feminist, I wondered, and yet be satisfied in the role of homemaker?
Usually when societal change is required, the pendulum swings dramatically in the opposite direction but, with time, as wrongs are righted, it finds a middle ground. Feminism today looks nothing like its first or second waves; some older feminists despairing when they see the choices young women make, the way they present themselves. And there are countless articles (written by both men and women) out there arguing feminism’s death — although surely the vigour of the #MeToo movement puts paid to any discussion around it being no longer required. Feminism may have lost some of its earnestness but what I have come to understand is feminism means different things for different women. And if it is truly about equal-footing, about women’s right to choose, then there is not just one conversation to be had.
I am married yet I am resolutely a Ms. After a lifetime of bridling I find I don’t mind so much anymore when the butcher calls me “darling”. I would rather I didn’t have to feel compelled to watch my friends make it safely to the front door when I drop them home at night. So-called modern fathers, who proudly proclaim they’ll be keeping their adolescent daughters under lock and key, royally piss me off. Why is it girls who need protecting? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to have sexual appetites as robust as boys? I wish we could see that abortion is about minimising harm and acknowledge its psychological toll, without fearing the removal of a woman’s right to safely terminate an unwanted pregnancy. And it troubles me when some feminists reject a transgender woman’s right to identify as female. Surely women, marginalised for so long, can afford to be generous to society’s most vulnerable. Do write. megannicolreed@gmail.com