‘One of Those Serious Women’ | Commonweal Magazine
When I was thirteen, I decided it was time to be a feminist. In my family, this wasn’t really something that needed to be announced, but nonetheless I felt compelled to claim the label as my own. From this point on, I would be buying the manifestos about patriarchy with my allowance money, thank you very much. My boyfriend—also, of course, a feminist and at fourteen, a year more radical than I—told me that women shouldn’t be ruled by men’s oppressive beauty standards, which I interpreted as a directive to stop shaving my legs. Wanting to be both a good feminist and a good girlfriend, I complied. And then I wore knee socks for the better part of a year because I hated the way my shins looked, but I didn’t want to disappoint him or the movement. I hadn’t heard of Andrea Dworkin then, but I did know that feminism was mostly about body hair and righteousness. As I got a little older and started shaving again, I learned that thinking about feminism this way was absurd, out of touch. Feminis