My Feminist Awakening

Seeing as this is my first post, I thought I'd start at the beginning: the moment I realised I was a feminist.

It began in a seemingly unordinary Games lesson when a thought occurred to me, why did all us girls seem to only ever do dance and gymnastics, when the boys always did football and rugby? Why couldn't we ever do football or rugby? So, in awkward 13 year old fashion, I asked my teacher. Her reply is something I will never forget. It changed my perspective on the society I lived in and how I viewed myself. She replied "Well, you girls have got a special job later on in life haven't you? You're going to have babies, we do this to protect you." My little world, the world I had so carefully cultivated around me, came crashing down and I entered a deep existential crisis. This would be my first, and certainly not my last, encounter with sexism. Growing up, I had never felt like I wasn't equal to the boys so this came as a shock to me. Was that all I was to the people who were supposed to encourage me, guide me and help me become ready for the adult world? Just a host for a future I wasn't even sure I wanted? Was this how the people close to me viewed me as? So I did what any teenager with unanswered questions would do. I turned to Google. While lots of articles popped up telling me I should want to be a mother because that's what girls are supposed to be, I found my safe haven in a no-nonsense post talking about stopping gender roles which led me into the wonderful world of feminism, a world which would let me know that my uterus does not define who I am and who I want to be.

Since then, I have redefined my definition of what it means to be a woman and taken an interest in lots of other issues that I didn't even know were issues to begin with because they had been ingrained in me since the day I was born.

So that's my 'awakening'. What was yours?