How To Raise A Feminist

As of right now I wouldn’t necessarily label myself as a feminist, however I know deep down that I definitely have the potential to be one. I have always been more rebellious than most girls and I was never afraid to get in your face when I had a problem. This may or may not mark me as a feminist.

I have always wondered what it takes to “make” a feminist. Is it how children are raised or perhaps are they born with certain attitudes? Is it what they were taught, or what they are not taught? I reasoned that it probably has much more to do with nurture rather than nature but, to get to the bottom of this question; I turned to Google, of course, and found two interesting articles…one written by a mother and the other written by her daughter. The mother’s article provides guidelines of how to raise a feminist, while the daughter’s article confirms that she is indeed a feminist because of how her mother AND father raised her. Here’s the link below:

http://www.feministing.com/archives/017512.html

After reading this article I found some disagreement. While the mother’s “rules” on how to raise a feminist seemed to work in her case, I believe there are many other ways that a feminist can be raised. To make it easy, let’s say that I am a feminist. The way that I was raised was ENTIRELY different than how Eliza was raised in the article. For me, I was given more of a “lack of teaching” rather than being taught all of the rules. When I was about 11, my father fell into the cycle of drug addiction. He would often come home high and angry, and would always feel the need to cause a scene. At the time, I was just beginning to come out of my shell and question the authority in my house, which made me a prime target for my father’s angry outbursts. Rather than my dad giving me “a hug and a kiss and bowl full of strawberries,” by dad gave me violence and anger. My mom, who was supposedly at one point a HUGE feminist who never let a man get in her way, was blinded by her love for my dad and never really did anything about it. Still to this day it infuriates me to think of the dominance that my dad had in our house and my mom’s willingness to submit to him. I thought that the only thing that I had ever learned from my parents was how to not live. However, maybe this was my way of learning to be a feminist.

Obviously my story and the article contrast each other greatly, but they both produced the same outcomes. So it seems that there are probably several different ways to raise a feminist. I’m very interested to hear other people’s stories of how they were “taught” how to be a feminist so please comment!