Or maybe what I really want to know is: Who am I ? Am I a feminist? <\/p>\n
Most of the time I’ve got a pretty clear self-image, subject to no more than the usual distortions of vanity and my particular forms of perfectionism. I’m a human being, and a woman: nature makes this blessedly clear through the requisite forms of biology and subjectivity. I’m a mother, wife, daughter and sister: social obligations, some acquired by choice and some by chance, supply the specifics here. I’m part of the white middle classes, courtesy of certain social structures of race and class largely outside my control. I’m an American and a Mormon: cultural heritage provides these crucial narratives of self. I’m a Latter-day Saint, and a stay-at-home mother: personal choice and voluntary identification give me these. I’m smart, reasonably well-read and well-written, a hard worker, responsible, and a dappled host of other things (many not as complimentary as those I’ve listed here, of course) by personality and inclination. I’m also a feminist, I think. But who or what acts as the guarantor of my feminism? <\/p>\n
I’ve considered myself a feminist since I was in high school, long before I was introduced to formal feminist theory. In college, on my mission and in graduate school the strength of my identification with feminism waxed and waned, depending largely on my social context and its effect on that streak of contrarianism I’ve always had: the fewer the feminists around, the more likely I was to self-identify as one, and, conversely, the more feminists there were around, the less likely. I read and understood academic feminist theory, I learned about and occasionally participated in feminism as an American sociopolitical movement, I consumed and analyzed feminist cultural objects—but none of these really made me a feminist. I called myself a feminist, I think, simply because the women’s voices with which I felt the strongest personal identification almost always called themselves <\/em>feminists. This didn’t always mean that I agreed with everything I heard. When I read Mary Wollstonecraft, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Adrienne Rich, or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, or Kristine Haglund Harris, I found plenty to criticize or correct—but I identified with their perspectives and their ways of living gender so strongly that those critiques and corrections felt secondary to the shared fact of our feminism. <\/p>\n