Odd Women

It remains one of life’s great mysteries, that moment of political readiness when the elements of experience and circumstance are sufficiently fused to galvanize an idea whose time has come. For me, and a few thousand others like me, discovering feminism in the early 1970s provided such a moment. I was born into an immigrant working class family that was also Jewish and left-wing so I don’t remember a moment when I was not aware of and moved by the political-ness of life; but it was only now, in the 70s, that I felt it viscerally. I was in my thirties and already twice married, twice divorced, when that first feminist trumpet was sounded and I awakened, as though from a dream, to the single most important realization of my life: the conviction that men by nature take their brains seriously and women by nature do not was an acquired belief, not an inborn reality.