The London air was cold and crisp; excitement, remorse, and worry all filled the air. I looked around at the men, women, and children surrounding me as a lump formed in my throat. I was terrified to be here. My family wouldn’t understand. Throughout the election season, the devoutly political members of my family posted outspoken memes of the glories of Trump; they cheered on his campaign and celebrated his inauguration. Yet, here I was, halfway around the world, doing exactly the opposite, marching in protest of all the things I perceived as evil within his administration and the world in general.
A sense of guilt and shame wafted over me, and I bit back the urge to run, to leave, to hide. But this, I’d already concluded, was bigger than myself. This was history. When I look at my grandchildren, I wanted to be able to tell them that on January 21st, 2017, I was in London participating with five million other human beings globally in an event that could change history. I didn’t want to tell them the story of my lost courage, and my failure. So I stayed. But why?
That was a question I’d long struggled with. Why was I here turning my back on fundamental tenets of my youth? Why was I risking the confusion and hurt of the people I held dear? What cause was worth it?
Freedom.
In 1897, Millicent Fawcett formed the National Union of Women’s Suffrage to fight for the woman’s right to vote in Britain, and for a brief moment, I was participating in her legacy, and continuing a legacy of my own.
I first made a stance for women’s rights when I was 15. Closed doors, to any other person, require the common courtesy of a knock upon entry, a warning sign that privacy is being revoked, and a request to allow this to occur. To my father, however, they meant nothing.
He constantly reminded me that my room was not mine; it was his, and I was allowed to live there rent free, but I had no distinct ownership. That, he reasoned, enabled him certain liberties, which he capitalized on often by swinging open my door, requiring my attention without permission.
I asked him to please knock first. I tried to explain that as an introvert, my room is a sanctuary free of people, that it’s a safe space to process complicated emotions, and it needed to be validated as sacred with a knock, but to no avail. He held to his double-standard. I must knock to request entry into his room; he could come and go into mine as he pleased, regardless of the privacy my changing body needed. Things only became worse. He would come early in the mornings and steal my covers to shake me awake. He would swing my door open in the middle of the day to “check in”. He opened my door for no reason whatsoever, using it as leverage for control. I felt violated the day he took off my doorknob.
Words rendered useless, I set to motion a peaceful protest of my own accord, one that involved a certain level of nudity. I vowed, from that day forward, when I was in my room with the door shut my top would be off, and my girls set free.
I was cleaning the day he walked in. It was supper time, and he wanted me to wash up. I remember clearly the shock on his face as his cheeks flushed bright red.
“What are you doing?” He stuttered.
“Cleaning.”
“But why?” He pointed to my chest.
“I was hot.”
He shut the door without another word. He never walked in without knocking again.
That story is an expression of my feminism, and it was the precursor to why I was standing with 100,000 people with feet just as frozen as my own, holding signs and marching down a street. A door opened in upper-middle-class suburbia might not seem like oppression, and looking back, I do see as ludicrous some of my underdeveloped emotions playing into the scene. However, the principle was there. If you believe something, fight for it.
I believe that “locker talk” should not be perpetrated by POTUS. I believe rape is not a joke. I believe women’s bodies are made in the image of God. In light of this, I believe we deserve to be treated with equal respect throughout the world. I believe that women globally deserve a voice. I believe in liberation from oppression and equality in speech.
I also believe that expression differs within each culture. I marched not for uniformity--my liberation from an oppressive household included a loosening of modesty; while in some cultures, it is the reclaiming of modesty--but for recognized diversity. Feminism defined in upper-middle-class suburbia, I learned, is different than that formulated in the ghettos. However, they are both equally valid forms of human expression. After all, at its broadest, feminism is the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes, which certainly presents itself diversity among cultures and subcultures around the world.
That is not to say I agree with the entire feminist platform. I am, at my core, still a child of two Texas-born republicans, and I certainly struggled with that as I decided to march. However, no one can believe tenants of something without first struggling through them, and aligning them with their own view of the world. I did not march because I drank the “kool-aid” of liberalism; I marched as a conservative because I had something to say and cause worth fighting for. A cause, in its different pockets of expression, that just happen to align similarly with the beliefs of five million other people globally.
