Let me just say this: I’m a feminist today not because of my mother, but because of my father.
Although I’d need to check my birth certificate to be sure of their exact ages, I know my mother was in her mid-40s and my father was in his mid-50s when I was born, the final baby to a very large family. I also know that my father, who was planning retirement, wanted more than anything for me to be a boy. Without the pressures of work, I think he believed that he would have opportunities to teach a young son things that he didn’t have time for with the older siblings.
Well, leave it to me to arrive with a vagina and mess up his retirement plans! To my father’s credit, however, he never once let the fact that I was female prevent him from teaching me things. We went fishing more times that I care to remember. I learned how to sharpen lawn mower blades, and helped change the oil on the car. By the time I was three, I knew how to tie bacon on a string and catch crawdads in the creek down the road.
It is difficult to fully describe my relationship with my father, a man who held only a sixth grade education. I know it wasn’t typical father-daughter interactions, especially not given society’s viewpoint at the time. As I found out years later, he took a lot of bunk for the independent and self-confident way he raised me. Family, mostly uncles of my father’s generation, was convinced that no man would ever want such a head-strong, independent woman who had been taught “men’s work” instead of “woman’s work.”
Since Dad never explained to me why my upbringing was so much different than that of my sisters, I’m left to speculate. I think, in the beginning, he was just stubbornly not going to allow Mother Nature to screw with his plans — to give his final child all the things he couldn’t give to the older children. As time passed, however, it became less about him and more about me.
People have asked me why I was so concerned about Kyle Payne, an self-proclaimed male feminist and Iowa blogger who sexually exploited a young woman in his care. I expended energy to reveal what Payne did because I’ve had opportunity to learn from a man who rarely spoke about hot-button women’s issues, but lived his entire life believing that women could do and should do anything they wanted. I wanted to expose someone who liked to preach my father’s words while refusing to live up to their high standards.
What I learned from my father, and what good men bring to the feminist movement, is an undeniable piece of their soul. They freely give of themselves, because they are strong enough to not feel threatened by lifting another person up to his/her highest potential.
While women have come a long way, just as other civil rights movements have come a long way, we need to realize that there will always be loud scratching from men and women who are afraid. We need to look past the noise to those self-assured individuals like my father who understanding that providing a clear path to another person doesn’t require blocking your own.
