A Life in Motion

9. Becoming a Feminist

— 229 — You say, there are few men who can stand to have a woman equal, upright. Janice Mirikitani, “Soul Food” During the decade between the mid-1960s and the mid1970s , perceptions of gender shifted dramatically. For the first time in history, Marilyn French has argued, women worldwide organized consciously as a “class.” My story is part of that historic shift, important not for its own sake, but because two institutions emerged from my perceptions and from my opportunities to work for change. One of them is the invention of women’s studies; the other is the founding of the Feminist Press. From the 1970s forward, my work in women’s studies and the Feminist Press emerged symbiotically from my experience as a college teacher. Through those years I remained focused on improving education for women (and men) through providing the materials with which to view and understand the history and culture of women. As an activist, I was consistently an educator and, until the 1970s, only reluctantly a“feminist.” Nonideological and historically uninformed , I had to experience sexism directly either in my personal 9 Becoming a Feminist — 230 — life or intellectually to become a feminist. Some of these new experiences awakened earlier ones, and I remembered my young cries to my mother of “It’s so unfair!” Overtheyearssincethe1970s,I’vetalkedwithotherwomenand published their descriptions about coming to feminism through one of these two channels, the personal or the professional. In my case, the channels mingled, even overflowed. I rarely pushed feminist views into my last marriage,for example,wanting to preserve its traditional boundaries, but they surfaced occasionally, sometimes privately and sometimes publicly, named or unnamed. I remember one incident when the idea and then the word erupted. One morning in 1969 my husband complained that I had not picked up the laundry the day before. I apologized and said I would remember to do so that day.We both left the house in two different cars for two different colleges located in two different directions.As I drove off, however, I realized that the laundry lay in his direction, not mine. Why had he not picked up the laundry? I handwashed my own things that could not be dry-cleaned. The personal laundry belonged to him. All day long, that question nagged at me. By the end of the day, when I drove fifteen minutes out of my way to get the laundry, I knew what I had to do. “Here it is,” I said to him rather formally when he arrived.“I’ve picked it up for the last time. From this time forward, the laundry is your job—to take it in and get it out. It’s mainly your underwear and shirts.” He was irate.“There are sheets and towels,” he said,“they’re not just mine. Why make a feminist thing of it?” I had no response but action. For several weeks I knew we could manage the necessary changes of sheets and towels. After that, I bought more sheets and towels. We never discussed the laundry. Seemingly, he dealt with his own personal needs, as I had always dealt with mine. Later, he bought a washing machine and dryer, and I kept my word—I did not touch those machines. I’ve never had to buy more double-sized sheets or pillowcases. But it was only a symbolic action, since I continued to manage the housekeeping, providing instructions for an occasional domes- — 231 — tic worker, gardener, or repair person, and lists for marketing. The “house” was my responsibility, though we both had full-time jobs, and I had many more projects than he did. The children (his biological children) were also my responsibility, as were guests and my own daughter. Descriptions of similar personal trajectories into feminism appear in Changing Lives: Life Stories of Asian Pioneers in Women ’s Studies, published by the Feminist Press in 1994. In one essay, Li Xiaojiang, for example, describes her life as a young girl, outachieving all the boys in her class, working hard at studies and sports and citizenry, and succeeding. But then, after gaining a significant academic position, she marries, has a child, and, as she puts it,“I was forced to . . . carry a load which would be twice as much as that usually carried by a man. . . . In an age that boasts of equality between the sexes, why do women lead painfully laborious and...