Until I was 5 years old, I wanted nothing more than to be a princess. I wanted to wear pink, puffy dresses, to sing like Ariel and to be as radiant as Sleeping Beauty. But by age 6, the dolls and crowns were replaced by jerseys, cleats and trophies. My plush pink walls were washed blue, and with them, so too was my mentality. The moment I first tied up my soccer cleats, writhed at the taste of blood in my mouth and ached from the turf gashes etched in my legs, I knew I would never want anything else. The brute strength, aggression and competition the soccer field provided me were liberating. They granted me invincibility, and eventually, feminist determination to bring that feeling to girls like myself.
The connotations engendered by contemporary culture for the word “feminist” are overwhelmingly negative — it’s a word habitually used to suppress outspoken, determined women. “Feminist” poses a threat to the patriarchy and subsequently, our male-dominated society designates “feminist” women as “selfish” and “angry.” When I drafted my first letter to Sports Illustrated at age 10, I was angry. I was angry that the only time I, a fifth grader and young athlete, had seen a woman on the cover of their magazine was in January, in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
I had grown up without paying mind to my gender — it did not define me. I climbed trees. I played soccer. I wore T-shirts and athletic shorts. I was loud and unapologetic — and proud of it. My ability on the soccer field, my capability to be a friend, sister and daughter, were what defined me. I did not need to buy ballet slippers to remind myself, and remind society, that I was a girl, and I definitely did not need to strut around in a skimpy bikini. I was proud of who I was — proud of my athleticism, my determination and my ungendered achievements. But six months 10 unread letters to Sports Illustrated later, I walked into Concord Middle School to begin my sixth-grade year, and I questioned everything.
My best friends had swapped their Adidas Sambas with UGGs and ballet flats, abandoned their tight ponytails for flowing locks and traded their soccer balls for iPhones. It no longer felt “cool” to be the one girl who scrimmaged with the boys during recess or whose knees were constantly bruised and scraped. I felt lost, confused and most of all, resentful. I felt as if my former teammates and friends had betrayed me, and in result, they were the ones with the problem. After all, I was the one who was still competing ruthlessly on the soccer field, and I was the one who still chose a game at Fenway over a sleepover and movie night with friends. But it did not matter — I was lonely, so I gave in.
The last dance of my eighth-grade year marked the first time I had worn my hair down, and worn a dress, in six years. The discomfort I felt as I walked into the steamy gym — a converted middle school night club — was overwhelming, but the exuberance I felt as I left two hours later was indescribable. For the first time in years, I did not feel invisible. Boys asked me to dance with them, my friends gushed over my wild hair that I had finally freed and teachers gawked — shocked that for once I “actually looked nice.” After the longest hiatus, I felt empowered to be a girl. But, little did I know that when I put on that red dress that night, I stripped myself of my feminist determination.
As I aged and navigated the high school social scene, I grew more anxious about the outfit that I would wear the following day than whether or not I would perform well on the soccer field. I still revered my childhood idols — gymnast Shawn Johnson, soccer player Carli Lloyd and tennis player Serena Williams — but they gradually became afterthoughts. I began to understand that in order to maintain my place within the female circle, I could be athletic, but not too athletic. Smart, but not too smart, and determined, but not too determined. As Bonnie Hagerman, an assistant professor of women, gender and sexuality at the University, would assert, I had to “do gender,” or be female in the way that society wanted me to be. Feminism, and all of its negative connotations and stigma, was to be avoided, and I began deliberately distancing myself from the word and group that I had associated with since a young age.
Subsequently, upon the conclusion of the 2016 presidential election, I realized that it was time to erase that distance, for the sake of other women less fortunate, if not for myself. Walking into a vast lecture hall alongside my ninety classmates in Hagerman’s “Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies,” I was ready to invoke my inner dogged fifth grader. Having “done gender” both poorly and successfully, I was done with sitting complacently as our patriarchal society determined the definition of womanhood.
Every woman’s definition of womanhood is different because every woman is different. We are not all the white, upper-middle class, cis-gendered “Rosie the Riveter,” and that is okay. While Merriam-Webster defines feminism as “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes,” feminism is not just about political and economic equality. Not only is it having the willingness to acknowledge that every person “does gender” differently, but feminism is also having the compassion to concede that our lives — no matter how different — are of equal worth.
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