My dad: Feminist hero

My dad would probably not admit to being a feminist. More’s the pity, as far as I’m concerned.

My dad is probably the biggest reason I’m a feminist. He used to tell us that he’d had this dream before any of us were born that we would be these fierce warriors. For as long as I can remember, he planted this idea that all of us were going to be these amazing, strong women. When I was a kid, I always imagined a line-up of Amazons; long before Xena and Buffy, I pictured She-ra and Wonder Woman type bad-asses. It was an empowering image.

I grew up thinking that was how I was supposed to be. My dad taught me to camp, build a fire, change a tire and my own oil, do calculus… I don’t think it ever occurred to him that I shouldn’t do these things because I was a girl. Rather, because the world so often expects women to never really grow up, to always rely on a man and that this would be used to hold us down, he made sure we were able to take care of ourselves.

I know both of my parents don’t quite get where I’m coming from when I say I’m a feminist. It doesn’t exactly mesh with the religion. They can get down with equal pay, but I see the squirming when faced with my full-on radical feminist ideas that one day no one will question what you were wearing, rape is as bizarre as human sacrifice, the idea that parenting was ever seen as women’s work is a weird, antiquated fossil of a bygone era, abortion is no one’s business but your own, women aren’t subjected to daily intimidation from men on the street and are then told it’s a “compliment”, no one thinks twice when you choose not to parent and under no circumstance should we ever, ever be afraid to speak out against our oppression. I get that it doesn’t mesh with what they expected, having raised me in a religious home. I get it, I do.

But let’s make one thing clear, it was when the message he taught us of “you can conquer the world” ran into the “but you’re a girl” bull-shit-of-the-world that I became a feminist. Whatever else I might say about the way I was raised, that’s a pretty amazing gift.