Feminist Reflections: Activists and Thought Leaders
“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
Feminism came relatively later in life for me. I grew up with a liberal view of feminism, in that feminism was only about women’s equality with men. Women could go to the same colleges, work the same jobs, vote, own property and thus, in my eyes, there wasn’t a need to call myself a feminist because equality had already been achieved. It wasn’t until I was well into my 30s that I began to really consider how feminism affected my own life. Through this paper, I will present my reflections on the events, activists and leaders who profoundly affected my understanding of feminism. My relationship to living a feminist life came about primarily through my exploration of feminist mothering, the connection between spirituality and activism and the realization that modern feminism encompasses issues regarding race, class, colonialism, speciesism and many others in addition to gender equality.
In 2009, when the economy was tanking, I was let go of the interior design firm where I worked. I was pregnant at the time, and in hindsight probably should have pursued legal action. But I’d hoped to stay home for the first few years of motherhood anyway, and so I settled into married domesticity, joking amicably about being barefoot and pregnant while taking on the majority of the housework.
During the last few months of my first pregnancy, I started to question my assumptions about equality. Yes, men and women could have the same jobs now...but what was going to happen to my career after taking a few years off to have children? And how did pregnancy, birth and motherhood fit into the equation? I was the one who spent almost 10 months with the physical and emotional labor of carrying a child. I was the one who had the traumatic emergency cesarean section and spent weeks healing. I was the one who spent the next two years breastfeeding. I was the one who, barely able to care for myself and a newborn simultaneously, was encouraged to start birth control at six weeks postpartum so we could “enjoy our marriage” again. (This was the exact euphemism my OBGYN used.)
I eventually went back to work, and had two more children. In 2017 I found myself working in a stressful yet lucrative sales position with three children, ages 7, 4 and 2. Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In was all the rage, and it represented feminist activism to me at the time. Women needed to start negotiating more like men, we needed to ask our partners to step up, and we needed to stop holding ourselves back with our own low self-confidence. The fight for equality needed to continue, and women needed to lean in to get it done.
It was all entirely too much.
I remember sobbing to a girlfriend one evening that feminists had this all wrong. Nothing about this was equal. My body was physically drained from 8 years of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and sleep deprivation. I wanted to succeed at my career but I kept missing important work events for my children. I wanted to be the involved mother I envied on social media, but I was too tired and too busy. Inwardly I railed against the feminists who had insisted that we should try to “have it all;” I didn’t want it all anymore. I just desperately wanted a good night’s sleep.
In 2018 my husband received a promotion that required a move across the country. We discussed it together and decided that once again, I would step away from my career to support the family. Almost instantaneously I began to struggle with this decision. Maybe I didn’t want to “have it all,” but what was I teaching my children? My own parents had both worked and shared parenting and housework equally. How was I supposed to teach my children about sharing responsibilities when every day I was modeling stereotypical gender roles? Were there any feminists who managed to be mothers too? Was there a feminist model of mothering?
I began to do some research and discovered the term “matricentric feminism,” coined by maternal scholar Andrea O’Reilly in her book of the same name. I read Practicing Feminist Mothering by Fiona Joy Green, a student of O’Reilly’s. Green’s book focused on interviews she did with mothers and daughters as part of a research project that “explores how feminist mothering can actively empower women and children to create social change, and provides new insights into understanding the interconnections between feminism and mothering in the lives of feminist mothers and their children.” Green’s work was much influenced by American feminist, writer, and mother Adrienne Rich who wrote the book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution in 1976. As Green writes, “the work of Rich, in particular, helped to shatter the previous taboo of not honouring women’s own honest descriptions of the emotional complexity of mothering and encouraged others to explore their genuine experiences of mothering.”
Reading Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich on my own was the catalyst for my feminist transformation. I had never read anything like it before. The line, “the physical and psychic weight of responsibility on the woman with children is by far the heaviest of social burdens” sent shock waves of validation through my body. Rich explained the system of patriarchy, and a mother’s role in upholding it. When Rich declared, “at the core of patriarchy is the individual family unit” and “patriarchy depends on the mother to act as a conservative influence, imprinting future adults with patriarchal values even in those early years when the mother-child relationship might seem most individual and private,” it forced me to confront the very ways I was indeed upholding this system in our heteronormative nuclear family unit.
My concurrent deepening spiritual practice at this time furthered my activist worldviews. I was enrolled in an advanced yoga teacher training and spent much of my time in meditation and spiritual study of the Yoga Sutras. A friend recommended the book Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom Through Yoga and Tantra by Uma Dinsmore-Tuli, and it remains today one of the most influential books I’ve ever read. Within this comprehensive tome, Dinsmore-Tuli “explores the sexual politics of yoga from the perspective that women’s spiritual transformation is the most potent force.” It includes womb-friendly asana and pranayama practice, a history of yoga that includes women’s contribution to the practice, and a reimagining of the Tantric mahavidyas as representations of a woman’s life from menarche through post menopause. She ends by positing the world as a womb, and she was the first author to introduce me to ideas of eco-feminism, spirituality that centered woman’s perspective and using my yoga practice as a force of activism.
I was lucky enough to study with Uma in person in the spring of 2019, at her Circle of Womanhood workshop held in Wisconsin. The workshop, led in part by women of color, was an eye-opening and life changing experience. We went far beyond practicing womb-friendly yoga and explored concepts around racism, decolonialism, and cultural appropriation. Her co-teachers, Yoli Maya Yeh and Chanti Tacoronte-Perez, were patient but firm as many of us struggled against our own white fragility and white privilege, often for the first time. I left that workshop feeling raw and exposed, shaken to the very core of my being as I had to reconcile what I was learning about the world with my own naive and limited perspective.
I came home and started researching about racism. The two most meaningful books I read were So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo and Me and White Supremacy, by Layla F. Saad. The podcast Yoga is Dead, specifically the first episode, “White Women Killed Yoga,” hosted by Desi yoga teachers Tejal Patel and Jesal Parikh furthered my education in inclusivity and equity in the yoga and wellness community. It was the beginning of my understanding that there were multiple feminisms; that feminism didn’t just mean equality for straight, white, middle-class women. Fighting for equality for all women was nothing if it didn’t include fighting against the injustices of white supremacy, colonialism and ableism.
In addition to these revolutionary ideas around racism, Circle of Womanhood workshop had prioritized vegan offerings. I was amazed at how steady my energy was and how light and clean I felt after eating vegan for almost a week. I decided to pursue a vegan diet at home, and (as was becoming my new habit) began to research veganism. I discovered the podcast Vegan Vanguard, hosted by Mexie and Marine, two self-described revolutionary vegan women. Their initial episode, “Why Leftists Should Be Vegan,” introduced me to the concept of anti-speciesism and positioned veganism as part of a decolonial and anti-racist ideology.
It was around this time I discovered the MA program in Women, Gender, Spirituality and Social Justice, and in researching the program found the CIIS podcast featuring Dr. Arora’s talk “On Feminism’s Fourth Wave.” Dr. Arora explained that feminism was “not just about political equality but about spiritual and psychological collective healing” and that “feminism of the fourth wave is not just about humans.”
It was through these books, workshops and podcasts that formed my modern understanding of feminism, and I began to embrace it as a personal ideology. I still have much to learn about queer theory, indigenous and other cultural feminisms, my relationship to ableism, classism, and other standpoints, and what it would mean to create a decolonial world. I welcome the opportunity to learn these things, and look forward to the next wave of activists and thought leaders who will inspire me.