My Ever-Changing Definition of Feminism
Ella Anderson
AN ISLAND NEAR PORTLAND, ME— Today I am sitting in the Portland Public Library, scrolling through updates about impeachment day. I have been waiting for this day for a very long time. Three years and a few weeks. I know the facts, what people are saying, he most likely will not be removed, but I still find the idea of impeachment quite frightening: because years of taking advantage of women is not enough to be removed from office.
On 2016’s Election Day, I had a normal day, gossiping at lunch with my friends as the usual eighth-grader does. Maybe a deep conversation with my best friend on the bus about how much we loved Hillary. I went to bed thinking it was impossible. Repeating the words of my mother as I drifted off to sleep, impossible. I remember not being able to sleep. I then imagined a woman as president, felt comforted and eventually allowed the blurry feeling of sleep to consume my thoughts and drifted off. I woke up to the alarm on my mom’s phone in the other room. We wake up at 5:30 every weekday to get the 6:45 ferry so I can go to school, I live on a small island in Maine, small, safe, and fairly conservative, although Hillary did win here. We went on normal for about half an hour and then I walk upstairs to get some socks, but she was staring at her phone screen, crying. Trump had been elected. What we thought was impossible became true. That day was hard. Hard to understand how someone who is filled with hatred and sexism could be the President. How does a fourteen-year-old girl simply trying to figure out what femininity is to her understand a country that wants him as President? I remember sitting in my history classroom, as my teacher told us what the results were, something about how the popular vote was in favor of Hillary. It didn’t make sense to any of us.
Now… back a few years. Somewhere around six years old, I realized I was a feminist. Kindergarten was not the best, I was the only girl out of six in my class and my dad died before I moved to the next grade. I now had two groups. My elementary school was twenty kids, there were not many choices as to who your friends were, you just were. My class at the time was all boys. I spent my time with girls two years older than us who I idolized. My thought process in those years was simple, I realized that being a girl meant something. People started to talk about it saying the normal things but adding because you’re a girl to the end. I knew that I was just as good as the five boys in my class, and then it was decided, I was a feminist, although I did not use that terminology, and I moved on, keeping that notion.
As my life had been imploded with the idea of unreliability, and my friends got a glimpse, all of us were now exposed to the fact that everything might not work out. I felt more grown-up, and more separated from the five boys in my class, and the other twenty kids I had grown up with. We still built fairy houses and played games together, after all we were just kids. Nobody could tell me I was less than, but every once in a while I still felt it.
Somewhere around second grade, my best friends I still have today came along and joined our school, both girls like me. We loved to dance and wanted to be Taylor Swift. But I still loved river building each spring when the dirt roads of our island began to thaw. Middle school changed us all again too. Nobody knew anything about me. Now I’m a junior, and I hardly speak to the same boys from elementary school. And to be honest, we don’t share any values or views anymore, I wonder what changed in them, do they see me as an equal? Did they ever? Maybe when thinking of feminism, we should all just pretend to be kindergarteners and it would all work out.
My mom keeps saying that her decision to live here doesn't make any sense anymore. She now thinks it is crazy to live on an island forty minutes away from the rest of our lives. Maybe that's because everyone has always questioned her decision, always questioned a woman’s decision. I, however, think it was right. She kept me somewhere safe. She sacrificed her livelihood for mine, kept me in my small school with kids who knew me, knew what had happened and were a little crazy. She surrounded me with small-town characters, people who would hug me and kiss my cheeks just because they knew I was sweet and was going through a hard time.
For any Gilmore Girls fans like myself, I like to think of my mother as Lorelai Gilmore of real life. Just as Lorelai did, she never dragged men through my life, she kept me in a safe town, told me stories of strong women, exposed me to good movies and long books. Most of my friends I made that I made once I started group grief counseling have new families now. Not to say that is wrong, I often found myself often wishing for a step-sister growing up. But for the most part, they have had to let go of their grief and keep it from their new family. They don't see the pictures around, I still see mine every day. I guess that’s a part of my feminist beliefs too, the fact that I feel safe among other women.
As much as I love to call myself a feminist, I’m not quite sure what it means to me yet. To my mom, it means supporting other women, putting her daughter above all else, and equating women and men. I think I know what feminism should be: equality of the sexes and the races and everything else. But then you develop your own half. Some pieces of my feminist collection are my mother and her strong collection of women friends who, when I was little, I would call my second mothers. It is my oldest friends, along with the strong women I’ve read and wrote about, and characters on TV and film that define feminism for me.
My definition of feminism is not necessarily my own. To be truthful yet again, it is a compilation of all the people I’ve looked up too, grew up with, including those five boys and the girls just a few year older then me, that I idolized. When I was little, I felt my greatest when I correctly answered questions, won rock, paper, scissors, or stood in front of the line. Now I’m not sure what makes me feel great, things are not as simple as they used to be. Back when I was younger, the only inequality I felt was when someone had something I wanted. It felt good when I was able to read at a level higher level, or anytime I had the upper hand.
I like to jokingly pride myself among my friends on the fact that I am the Women's Rights club treasurer at my school. It is truly a do-nothing title, but I participate in every meeting. I think that title provides me with some sort of authority, confirming that I am actually a feminist. That feeling is far too common, why must we validate our beliefs, proving ourselves in a society that won’t just believe you in the first place. Because as far as I know right now, the research hours I put into my papers on strong women of the past, the time spent reading about women, drawing women, and talking to amazing women, I still don’t know it all. Nobody knows it all, and I‘m still learning what it means to be a feminist. I guess this is just what I know right now.