Where I Started
I was the oldest of three siblings: my sister and me (two girls) and a youngest brother. My parents were both what I would consider feminists, but my dad seemed to put it more into action than mom did...or maybe he simply did it in a more public way. (I was born in the early 1950s, when "Father Knows Best" was the norm.) My dad would constantly tell me, "The only thing a boy can be that you can't is a dad, but a boy can't be a mom. Everything else (as far as what boys or girls could or should do) is B.S." (This was the only time he used "B.S." when I was a kid.)
What Influenced Me
As I said, my parents, especially my dad, were catalysts in shaping what I thought about many things. They taught me to question things, rather than blindly accept the norms of the day. They taught me that if some accepted norm seemed wrong, I should question it and attempt to change it. These norms included racism, sexism, ageism, dis/ableism...
Now that I think of it, they tended to question the "isms", too. My parents and I are classified as "white", which is to say (in modern terminology) "European-Americans." Since my parents were unable to have any more children after me (I'm the oldest of 3 siblings), they adopted my sister and brother. My sister's birth mother was of Chinese decent, while her birth father was white. I have blond hair and blue eyes, so people who didn't know us would do a double-take. "She's your SISTER?" was something Amy and I heard more than once, to which we'd both answer, "YES!" Loud and proud, we are sisters!
In 1980, I was hired (along with another woman) as the first two female firefighters on a local fire department. At the time, there was only one other female firefighter in our county; she'd been on the job less than a year. The local newspaper sent a reporter and photographer to follow us around. Turns out, we worked a HUGE brush fire that day, involving three fire departments. When the photographer later handed me a photo of me at the scene, dirty, tired from working the fire, but definitely a woman, I sent the photo to Dad as a Christmas present. He brought it to the office with him.
A month later, Dad called me. He and several coworkers had been talking. After listening for several minutes to the others telling of "my son the doctor," "my son the lawyer" and "my son the police officer," Dad went back to his office, grabbed the photo and came back to tell them, "This is my DAUGHTER, the firefighter!" (Yay, Dad!)
Lessons Learned
- What I have learned, from having strong parents, from questioning the norms, from having my sister, and from being a feminist, is that we need to support each other in being the very best person each of us can be. This means getting the "ism"s out of our lives, whatever those hateful "ism"s are.
- Am I a feminist? Oooohhh, yeah!
