For a long time feminism has served as a kind of “F” word from which I hid in closets from. While my father from time to time warned me against being the “strong woman type” I found as I grew up, various factors including my parents, their religion and my keen interest in Black Studies pushed me towards feminism despite being exceedingly repressive to women. My rejection of what was expected of me as a woman is largely what shaped the feminist that I am becoming.
I became aware around the fourth grade that my assigned “gender” presented several limitations for me. At that time, the biggest wall was built by the constructs of my parents religion. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The religious services are organized so that each congregation has no single parishioner as in most churches. “Everyone” has the opportunity to be on stage and present prepared talks, based on biblical scripture, to the congregation. While men have several opportunities ranging from brief five minute talks to one hour lectures on Sundays, women could only give five minute presentations were they demonstrated how to use scriptures in everyday conversation through a skit with another woman . A woman speaking directly to the congregation and giving her interpretation was and still is unheard of. At the end of a talk presented by a woman, an elder would proceed to critique her publically on the errors she made and give her a grade.
This process had grown dull to me as this was all women could do regardless of age. I gave my first talk at age five and constantly received the highest grades. At the age of seven the elder doing the critiquing told me I needed to write my own skits instead of my mother. When I immediately informed him that I wrote all my own talks, I was chastised and later had to face a scolding from the elder for lying, though I insisted I had not. Rather than defend me to the man, my father remarked that I had been wrong to correct the elder publically. Because of the limitations of my understanding, due not only to my age, but also to the belief system of Jehovah’s Witnesses, I became convinced that God had made some terrible error in making me a girl. Obviously I should have been born male. My talks were so good, apparently, the elders could not believe that I wrote them myself. I was convinced that had I been a boy, rather than searching for fault with my talks, I would have been allowed to move on to the next level of presentations.
Without consciously being aware of my motivation, I began to reject all the expectations that the religion, as dictated to me by my parents, had set out for me as a young female. I did minor things like call my mother’s friends by their first names or request that they also call me with the common preface “sister.” I wore pants whenever possible which was a feat as my mother believed dresses and skirts were more suited for a petite person as myself. I began utilizing sarcasm, talking out of turn and talking loudly as I was expected to be quiet and polite. At the age of nine, rather than come home with a “nice petite thing like the flute,” as my mother said, on the day we were to chose instruments for the school band, I came home with a trumpet determined to be the best horn player ever. Though attraction to the opposite sex, or any sex for that matter, was strictly prohibited in the religion, by age eleven I had two boyfriend at the same time, not only rejecting the practice of sexual suppression, but also emulating my father whose extreme friendliness with my mother’s friends consistently required intervention of the elders to convince her to her express forgiveness to him. In high school, I spent many a discussion trying to convince classmates that my attitudes towards “boys” and sex had very little to do with being a slut and everything to do with being a “player.” Weren’t they aware that all powerful men had girlfriends in addition to their wives?
I eventually begin to associate exclusively with males. I was always the “girl” within a group of males. Though I never donned men’s clothing or attempted to alter the perception of my gender role, I demanded to be treated like one of the guys. I would succeed for short amounts of time, but the fight to prove I could be just as witty, smart and seemingly unemotional, in addition to constantly feeling as though I was putting on a performance, grew tiring.
Going away to college, I felt I had the opportunity to just be myself without the surveillance of my parents or my highly critical schoolmates. At that time, attending college for the sake of education and not to learn a trade was discouraged for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Going away to college as an unmarried woman was not allowed and though I had not been in regular attendance for close to two years, my association with the congregation had met it’s doom. Courses such as psychology and sociology had quenched a thirst I had never been able to previously define. I could have smart and thoughtful conversations with my acquaintances and professors and not be dismissed for having “worldly” aspirations or doubting what the bible said.
After enrolling in an African Psychology course, I felt as though so much of my life had been a lie. My religious background allowed for racist jokes and stereotyping at the same time dismissing those who brought attention to any prejudice expressed by the members. I remember having attended a talk at my aunt’s majority black congregation which admonished the women to refrain from wearing braided hairstyles as they associate the wearers with pro-black and divisive ideologies. I met another women online a few years ago who was disfellowshipped for wearing a small Afro after cutting off her chemically damaged, relaxed hair.[1] The elders told her the Afro could make other members of the congregation uncomfortable as it communicated black nationalist sentiments.
I took up Black Studies as my minor only because it was not available as a major. The department became a second home and the professors replaced the loving elders. In return I was rewarded for my eagerness by regularly being called to serve on student committees which meet with administration to prove students desired the Black Studies major. These meetings became routine. I was usually called the night before and instructed to come dressed for business to the director’s office. Upon my arrival, I’d find the director with two to three other male students and was mockingly chastised for being late. Every time, I had been told to come at least half an hour later than the other students. I got filled in on details the other students had been aware of for several days, if not weeks. Then, I was instructed on my pitch for the meeting, as a female representation, and even encouraged from time to time to put on the water works. Somehow, I again found my way into the boys club, the “girl” who got let in on the discussions that even where withheld from the single female professor in the department.
After experiencing what my mother calls a “nervous breakdown” due to depression shortly after being married, I shared with the director that part of my self-therapy included reading bell hooks’ All About Love.[2] Though it’s no surprise now, I was shocked when he wrinkled his nose in disgust and told me the author of the book I felt was helping me heal was utterly full of herself and a waste of breath. Though I weakly tried to defend what I had read and the positive feelings I had gained from it, I never picked up the book again after that meeting.
I recovered from my depressive episode largely due to the constant efforts of my husband and the eventual birth of our son. As a new mother, I was sure to read all the baby handbooks available at the local bookstore. While I planned to be a spectacular parent, my own parents grew nervous as I refused to buy my child blue clothing, allowed his hair to grow long, and bought him the Tinkerbell movie he asked for just as quickly as we bought him Transformers toys. I felt the pressure of the world he’d experience to embody male as a gender was more than enough for me to be concerned about whether or not my son owned a “girl” movie and toys.
Despite my conscious and unconscious rejections of gender and religious expectations, it was not until my first year of graduate school that I began to remotely consider the possibility that my inclinations could be called feminist. After all, somewhere along the lines, the rhetoric of Black Studies had convinced me one of the main objectives of feminism was to empower black women so as to continue to disenfranchise “the black male.” Feminism was blamed as the reason educated black women didn’t get married and why uneducated black women did not respect “their men.” All the while no one said that this idea revealed that many scholars of Black Studies viewed women as objects to be manipulated as required for some greater aim. If black women did not go along, they became “angry black women,” which also happened to be the focus of my first seminar paper.
Though I was concerned with “the angry black woman” and it’s cultural diffusion across the globe, I found myself knee deep in a historigraphical paper on various black feminisms. There were black feminists, Womanists, African feminists, and Africana Womanism. To understand any of them, I felt I had to understand feminism itself. Imagine my surprise when I realized the boys club I’d been searching for all along wasn’t a boys club after all. It was full of women, witty, smart, and rejecting all sorts of imposed expectations for the sake of being themselves. I immediately enrolled in the Women’s Studies’ graduate certificate program as a means to force myself to come out of the proverbial closet.
While I’ve yet to use the “F” word in front of my parents, I have recently reassured them that what they refer to as my rebelliousness as a child was not against them, but about refusing to limit myself based on others perceptions about my race and gender. Feminism for me, serves not only as a means to label my inclinations to reject expectation, but also as a means to evaluate the world around me. It has served as a means to be the kind of wife and mother I am most comfortable being and has laid the groundwork for me as a future feminist scholar.
[1] Disfellowshipping is a method of shunning by Jehovah’s Wittnesses. One must be baptized to be disfellowshipped and the process only is applied to a person who has performed an egregious sin such as fornication or adultery and have not shown sincere repentance as is determined by the elders. Members of the congregation are not permitted to speak to a person who has been disfellowshipped at the risk of reprimand.
[2] HarperCollins, 2000.
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