What Made You a Feminist?

Haley Motek asked a group of women about the books/music/moments that started them on the road to feminism, and the answers are funny and different and unexpected and great.

I think my first encounter with feminism was likely Mary Poppins. I remember while I was watching it my mom explaining to me who the suffragettes were, and repeating the line of the song that they sing: “Our daughter’s daughters will adore us/ and they’ll sing in grateful chorus/ hats off to the sister suffragettes.” I don’t think I quite got it at the time — I think because it was so hard for me to fathom that women were treated so differently from men and really didn’t have a right to vote. But I remember it very well, and experience is meaningful to me now. I had a similar conversation with my six-year-old daughter a couple of months ago while we were watching the same movie.

Maybe all babies are born feminists, and you can only fuck it up. And then those babies find their way back to feminism, ideally. Like, Phyllis Schlafly was once a beautiful little baby feminist. There’s always hope. If you were lucky enough never to have been fucked up, give thanks, and also give copies of good books to people who weren’t.