Growing up, I never really expected to become invested in feminism. Not that I ever disagreed with feminist ideals, but that I wasn't passionate about them, and took them for granted. Like many people, I didn't connect them to my own life, or understand that it takes real, conscious effort to protect them.
I attended a women's college. But I didn't really plan on going to one. Before college my school experiences were always co-ed, with the single exception of 9th grade PE. But through high school my great desire in life was to be a professional ballet dancer, and I spent most of my waking hours outside of school in the ballet studio. The ballet world is female-dominated, and most of the women I knew there were strong-minded and strong-willed. I enjoyed my time at the ballet studio, despite its lack of guys. So when I started looking at colleges, I didn't rule women's colleges out. I remember saying, "sure, I'll look at them," at some point during 10th grade or so. The decision felt inconsequential, almost like whimsy. I had no idea that it would shape my life.
By the last two years of high school, I was getting annoyed with the boys in my math classes. It wasn't all of them, it was subtle, and it probably wasn't conscious on their part, but I felt it. It wasn't that they had a problem with a girl doing well, but they had a problem with a girl doing well and being vocal in class. The other girls who did well in math were quieter in our math classes, even when they spoke up plenty in English or history. Maybe they'd remember it differently. I don't know. But given how I experienced it, the prospect of a women's college became more attractive.
I applied to three. When the time came to choose, I picked one of them. And I loved it. Going there was one of the best decisions of my life. But even when I got there, and loved my women's college, I wasn't really invested in feminism. I shared the idea of the world that feminists presented, but it was still passive and impersonal. Intellectually, I knew it affected me, but I didn't have an instinctive, emotional understanding that women's rights needed to be fought for.
Over my first two and half years of college, my eyes were slowly opened. Feminism became less abstract. I lost the illusion that the need for change was a thing of the past. But while I understood it better, it still wasn't urgent. It didn't yet pervade the way I understood the world.
Then I went to Hungary for the spring semester of my junior year, and it all became real. In many ways, going to Hungary was like stepping into a time warp to the 1950s. This was particularly true in terms of gender role expectations and TV variety shows.
I lived with a host mother and another American student. My host mother, while very nice, was a retired widow with a lot of time on her hands. She spoke literally three words of English (hello, come, and bye-bye), which was difficult. But even when my Hungarian improved and/or her (adult) daughters were around to translate, we were separated by vastly different worldviews. She would make comments along the lines of, "you can never be a good mother and work." But while such statements were jarring, it was the little, implicit things that bothered me most. The clear emphasis on domesticity was jarring--the hand wringing over the things I did badly (cooking) and the approval for the things I did well (crochet) were equally grating--as was the expectation that the women in the family must and should be caretakers of the men and children, demonstrated each week at Sunday's family dinner.
I'm sure some of it was just garden variety culture shock, which all American students abroad experienced to one degree or another. But it was more than that, too. Because it helped me understand, in some small way, what exactly that first wave of feminists was fighting for, back in the 1960s and 70s. It helped me see the expectations that they were fighting against--expectations that had never before been real to me, because they had never directly intersected with my life. It gave me a new context for the current debates. And most of all, it showed me why the past decades' progress needs to be protected, because it gave me a sense of what I (and my generation of women) have to lose.
When I got back to the U.S., I found myself more sensitive to sexism here. Feminism had become a conscious activity. It was real in my everyday life, and has remained so.
Which is not to say that I am fully developed as a feminist, in any sense. I'm not, and I never will be. I've continued growing as a feminist since returning from Hungary. Perhaps hardest has been recognizing the sexism implicit in my own expectations, both of myself and of others. Like most things, feminism makes us grapple with ourselves as well as with the world outside. But that's okay, because it's a journey I want to take.
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