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Choosing Words Carefully
Remembering my mother, the Feminist
Last night as we enjoyed drinks and sandwiches at Bar Margaret in Greenville’s Villages of West End district, my wife commented on my mother who would have turned 90 today (Feb. 12):
“You know, your mom wouldn’t have called herself a feminist, but she was. She definitely was.”
I agreed.
“Yeah, she would have said something like ‘I’m not burning my bra!’ And we would have laughed and tried to tell her, like as not, that being a feminist embraced more than that particular sign of liberation. We would have tried to count for her all the ways that she embodied being an independent, determined, and able woman.
As if she didn’t know. As if we knew better than she all the things she overcame and accomplished.
It’s funny and sometimes disheartening all the ways we try to avoid being labeled — how we reject so-called political terms for fear of offending someone, putting someone off, or being somehow misunderstood. If my mother had used the word “feminist” to describe herself, she would have felt the need to explain and justify to her friends and acquaintances just what she meant, and that would have been so hard in Alabama where most people seemed to worship God and Jesus and Rush Limbaugh and not necessarily in that order.