What ideas of "feminism" prevailed in my family and community?
I was born in a working class black neighborhood in Philadelphia in 1970. My memories start around 1974. I have a sense that the US women's liberation movement was all around me. But in my memory it was something that surrounded me but was not inside my family or community.
I'm thinking about the strong black women who raised me: my mother, my aunt Frances, and my godmother Mrs. Wells. I don't remember them ever using the words feminist, even though they had careers, raised families, and their jobs were important parts of the family's income (sometimes making more money than their husbands).
They did things that in my naive childlike 70s definition a feminist didn't do; they took their husbands' last names, they called themselves Mrs, not Ms, and all the housework, cleaning and cooking was their responsibility. In addition, they were the primary parent, they did all this while working fulltime.
My parents were activists. I have many memories of getting on chartered school buses behind the Germantown library to ride to Washington DC or New York City to protest for disarmament, civil rights, human rights, and to stop US invasions in other countries. But I don't remember us protesting for women's rights.
I have a sense everyone was for the Equal Rights Amendment and even have a feeling there was an anticipation about passing it but what my family did about it, nothing comes to mind. My mother did have me read Gloria Steinem and Our Bodies Ourselves, and she may have subscribed to Ms. magazine for a time. I remember there being a struggle to pay for everything and there weren't many luxuries when raising three children. So if she did have Ms. magazine it wasn't for long.
My family and I were part of several communities: the neighborhood, the communist party (which was a big secret I was coached not to share and I feel nervous even typing it right now), and the swim team. The neighborhood I lived in was working class black. Everyone's parents were working. I didn't know any stay at home moms. When my parents went to their leftist meetings they took us children with them. The meetings rotated between their houses/apartments, and us children would play in other rooms, basements or on second floors while our parents talked politics and about how to change the world.
The swim team I belonged to was a lot of work for my parents but I heard them say that it was important for my brother and me to have something to focus on to keep us off the streets. There was a lot of gang activity in Philadelphia at the time and the police were not to be trusted. The swim team mothers organized carpools back and forth to nightly practices and Saturday swim meets. This took tremendous coordination and time from the mothers.
When I ponder why they never embraced the word feminist I feel confused because for me they were definitely feminists. Maybe because feminism implied for them "man hating", "bra burning" and "white" and they were black wives and mothers. Perhaps they didn't see themselves reflected in the world of feminism.
What is my personal orientation towards "women's movements" and "feminism".
I remember in the 70s my sister had a T-shirt that said, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." I think my admiration for my sister (who was 10 years older and from my mom's first marriage) led me to call myself a feminist from a young age.
When I wrote the first draft of this reflection, I asked myself if my sister called herself a womanist or a feminist then. But when I looked it up I saw that womanism was coined by Alice Walker in 1979 and my sister left for college in 1976. When my sister went to college in Pittsburgh she abruptly disappeared from my everyday life for a while. Before 1979 she must have been calling herself a feminist.
At 13 years old, I went to an all-boys high school, Central High, as part of a class action suit because I thought how can I be a feminist if I don't become part of the struggle. There was an announcement over the loud speaker in my ninth grade classroom, “Central High is now accepting girls, any girls who want to go to Central should come to the principal's office.” I picked up my bag and made my way down the stairs.
At Central, I met a bunch of feminists and we were a women's movement. The "original six" was the name for the six young women who had sued in order to gain entry to Central High, the second oldest public school in the country. My cousin Elena worked at the Women's Law Project, the law office that represented them. And there at Central, news cameras were on the front lawn every day taking pictures asking questions.
And inside, the boys called us whores and lesbians, threw food at us in the lunch room, and young men I knew since kindergarten wouldn't speak to me. In the basement, boys constantly dropped their pants to show me their penises. Women teachers, nurses, and administrators expressed disapproval of us upstart girls. We had no one but each other. By the end of the first year there were thirty girls and eighteen hundred boys at Central High. And I cry as I type this because my memories of high school at Central are horrific and they even include a rape.
And I think this brave act as a teenager was the first and last really strong thing I've done as a feminist. Since those years at Central, I feel I haven't put much on the line. I'm a woman marching with a dark colored pussy hat. I'm a member of Women in Film, Sisters in Film and Television, and Women of Color Unite. I make artwork about goddesses who work as part of collectives: The Nityas, the Nakshatras, even the many names of Mary, but it seems very casual. There's not much at stake for me in any of these organizations. They aren't more than social clubs. Would my grandfather who was a founding member of the AFL-CIO and who called wildcat strikes in the coal mine just laugh at me? Would my parents who protested for Civil rights, marching, riding buses, sitting in at lunch counters wonder what happened? Would 13 year old Nya be disappointed, absolutely yes.
