I am a Baby Boomer and have been a feminist since the 7th grade. (It’s a long story.  I may come back to it later.)  My mother is largely responsible for my feminist perspective.  Though she — being a housewife and mother in the 1950s and 1960s — did not participate in any nascent feminist groups — did encourage me to explore the world through science (and public speaking, music, whatever).  She bought me a telescope, a microscope, a chemistry set (which had lots of substances that, when combined, could make delightfully horrendous smells), an “invisible” woman kit (which was a plastic model with all of the body parts, I think) that I put together.  She bought a piano and paid for lessons for my sister and me.  She bought me a real-hair “fall” (now called an extension, I believe) so that I could play the lead role in the Junior Class Play.  Anyway, my mother believed in me and told me I could do anything I wanted.  My world crashed in 1969, when my mother died at age 41 from systemic lupus. I was in high school and had absolutely no idea about the future.  The US had landed a “man” on the moon just a few days after my mom died.  I don’t remember any of the historic moon landing. But I did later write a poem about my mom’s death (one of many), which references it.   (Not sure why I put the word  man in quotation marks because it was, indeed, a male astronaut.  Later, I’ll talk about the rampant sexism in America’s early space program…)

Of course, now that I am an adult with a Ph.D. in Sociology, I realize that a young girl from a blue-collar family in the upper reaches of Appalachia cannot always be what she wants to be. My high school had no language lab — and I was a French major.  We had only one women’s sports team — softball — which was not my thing.  This was pre-Title IX, after all.  We had very caring teachers but most had been educated at regional teacher’s colleges.  We did have a great drama teacher and that became my thing — which paid off later when I became a university professor.

So now I’m a professor at a large public research university — in the South. Well, Florida.  OK — It’s the University of Florida.  I’ve been studying, learning about, teaching about, and experiencing feminism here for more than three decades. Oh, do I have a lot of personal stories about sexism.  But that, too, is for another post.

I teach and study  women’s lives, primarily in the spheres of work (in and out of the home) and families in all their variations.  I’ve also written about women’s bodies as a social and cultural battleground. (Examples of which are abundant in the world today. 24-7, in fact.)  I am a feminist, but I don’t limit myself with a specific branch of feminism or identify with a specific wave of feminist thought and action.  I actually don’t subscribe to the latter.  I came of age as a young woman and a feminist after The Feminine Mystique was published.  And after all of the ground breaking legislation of the 1960s.  I missed the Summer of Love (1967) because I was a young teenager who lived in a town where there was a very embedded double standard about sexuality.  Roe v. Wade hadn’t been passed yet.  My decade was the 1970s.  Which is fortunate, because that was truly, IMHO, a breakthrough decade for feminism.  If you just watch reruns of some of the old TV shows from that decade (i.e., All in the Family, Maude, Mary Tyler Moore) you’ll catch a glimpse of some forward thinking that came to a dead halt in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected President.  (Things weren’t perfect, of course.  Mary Tyler Moore’s character was regarded as an old maid because she was a “single girl” — at age 30 — with a career.)

Before and during the period in which I was coming of age, feminist activists and intellectuals (sometimes the same people were both) were fighting for — and winning — victories, small and large.  And this is what, indirectly, has motivated me to write this blog with this name.

I am a woman — and a FEMINIST — of a certain age.  I have benefitted personally from the valiant efforts of those who came before me.  I am well aware of the limitations of the early, “second wave” feminists.  But without them, where would we be? Ranked at the bottom of the world’s list of countries in terms of women’s status, just as we are in terms of paid maternity/parental leave?  So, when I hear, as I have often over the previous year as the Democratic primaries were being held, very dismissive comments about “second wave feminists,” I am surprised, discouraged, and frankly, pissed off.  The media love to play up any type of “division” among feminists.  They believe it’s a way to divide and conquer.  So it is my purpose in writing this blog, to provide some historical background about the women’s movement as it played out in the 1960s and 1970s, reflect on my own personal awakening to feminism, and start a fruitful conservation with feminist of other ages about our shared goals… That’s it.  End of Post #1.  Mic drop.