Born in the late 1950s, I came of age in the mid-morning of the women’s movement. As a living, breathing, puzzling teenage conglomeration of old fashioned values, geekiness, and a passionate embrace of sexual liberation, I was alive to witness feminism’s rise to ascendancy during the assertively freedom-seeking energy of the 1970s.
But one source of so many of my life regrets is my predilection for embracing a movement a decade or more after it had peaked. You see, I can also be reactionary; I have sometimes come to embrace movements only after years of balking at them, and feminism was one of them.
My contradictory youth
In the 1980s, while I eagerly embraced ’60s Counterculture sexual liberation and the expansion of women’s rights, I shortsightedly found the feminist movement‘s emphasis on abortion off-putting. Empathy being a strong, innate part of my being, I was driven to want to protect babies, both unborn and born. For several years, I was anti-abortion.
You see, I was politically very clueless in my youth. I paid no attention to politics. Little did I know that I was about the only person who based her anti-abortion views on actual empathy for babies and not on misogynist religious dictates.
I was a feminist at heart, but one who questioned some of the approaches of the movement. If that makes sense, right?
Called to active duty for women’s rights
Fast forward to today. After decades of American society believing that women’s rights were a done deal, never to be undone again, along came the 45th presidency, and two Supreme Court appointments later, the Constitutional protections that my generation (and Generation X) had counted on were suddenly dead and gone. Almost all of our basic rights now lay unprotected against malicious, malevolent legislative attack.
Curled up in my bed with the current issue of Ms. magazine on my stalwartly pro-choice lap and a three year prepaid membership in the National Organization for Women under my garter, for perhaps the first time in my life I am entering a critical, relevant sociopolitical movement in its reinvigorated beginning rather than hitching my devotion to it after it had already run out of momentum.
And it makes me feel young again. But this time, my new youth is powered by the wisdom of age.