The “Click” Moment

At the inter-generational feminist panel at the New School last week, Deborah Siegel mentioned her “click” moment—that moment when she realized that the personal and political struggles she faced were not hers alone but were experienced by many women.

This got me thinking: what was my “click” moment? When did it happen? I began to label myself “feminist” when I was 21, but I can’t remember some grand, transcendental instance of awakening. If anything, it was just something that, almost inevitably, blossomed.

I was raised in what many would call a traditional household. My mom stayed home and took care of the children while my dad worked. No family member was a purveyor of feminist thought; my grandmother still considers “feminism” to be something of a dirty word.

Nonetheless, when I was young my mom showed me a news article about a woman suing a department store; they had fired her for refusing to wear a skirt. My mom made clear how “old fashioned” the store’s policy was. When some boys in first grade wouldn’t let me play basketball, my parents instructed me to call them “male chauvinist pigs.” I’m not sure if they issued this advice for their own amusement or whether they really meant it, but sure enough, the next day I told each boy that he was a male chauvinist pig.

We have also had very strong females in our family, though they combined traditional lifestyles with modernist strides. My paternal grandmother was one of the first women admitted to MIT, but after one year, she got sick, her father made her stay home, and she married my grandfather soon thereafter, abandoning her studies. My maternal grandmother existed in a standard 1950s housewife routine until she was 36 and decided to go back to college to become a teacher: a highly atypical, life-changing decision for an “older woman” of her time. But we never talked about these things as “feminism”—they were just “what they did.”

When I arrived at college my freshman year, I literally thought: feminism is over, it’s unnecessary. Why? Because if I, a woman, could attend a good university (how naïve I was back then!) what more needed to be done?

If I had a click moment, it was sophomore year when the campus was gearing up for “Take Back the Night.” Some boys on my floor decided it would be hilarious to put up “Take Back the Kitchen” posters (sample stat: “Over 72% of women don’t know how to clean dishes.” Classy.) I was stunned at such blatant, crude, and cruel misogyny–in the northeast! In New York! A seed was planted but it took years to grow.

Two years later I embarked on a reading campaign of all the feminist/gender classics (de Beauvoir, Friedan, Butler, etc.) Then I saw my academic interests turn that way. As I pondered what would make my academic ventures worthwhile on a personal and political level, I decided it would be through studying historical manifestations of feminism and gender, taking away lessons, learning about differences in experience. Thus, I decided to write my master’s thesis on a Weimar German feminist: the kick-ass (if inevitably problematic) Helene Stöcker. And here I am today. After a jaunt in England helping to teach sexual ed workshops, I am now working to lend my voice to reproductive rights and feminist issues in New York and the US–and hoping that change will be wrought so that women and men will recognize themselves as “feminist” at a much younger age than I did.

I wonder what other people’s “click” moments have been. I don’t want to constrain this to women. Both men and women, looking at fashion, heterosexual and homosexual romantic/sexual relations, or the way males and females behave in a college classroom, have realized that both men and women are constrained by social constructions that mandate how they act and live. When was the moment that you realized: this is a problem?