It was 1985. I was fifteen years old, a student at Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama. (Yes, the school was named for Robert E. Lee; a larger-than-life painting of him on horseback overtook one wall in the gymnasium and a portrait of him hung in the school vestibule. At school football games, administrators led students in the "rebel yell". Ugh.) In the spring of my sophomore year, I was taking a psychology elective. The course was taught by the high school football coach. In one class session, we talked about gender roles, which in hindsight was somewhat progressive. But the teacher, who was a fundamentalist Christian, emphasized how women had God-given roles that included submissiveness, domesticity, and ultimate respect for the authority of the man in the house, be it father, husband, older brother, or son. He repeated and reinforced various cultural roles for women vis-a-vis men--men were breadwinners, women were homemakers; men did yard work, women did housework; and so on. He made the comment that divorce was a sin. I told him and the class that my mother was divorced (and had been then for five years) and that she did both housework and yard work, in addition to holding down a full-time job as a bookkeeper. I remember it vividly: his head whipped around and he spat out, "well, you must be a feminist" because I lived in such an "unholy" and "radical" household. He told me after class that he felt sorry for me.

There it was: the "F" word. I'd never really paid attention to it before, but now, hurled at me as an insult, I felt it--my "click" moment. Although I'd never heard of Jane O'Reilly's article in Ms. magazine, I knew exactly what it was. And it felt less like a "click" and more like a "wham!" "Feminist!" I realize now that I initially embraced the label because it was another way to rebel. Many other kids were drinking beer at parties our parents didn't know we had; some were smoking cigarettes and/or pot. That was fine for them; I now had a different way to rebel. No one else at my school was a feminist! So there I was: "Feminist!"

Now that I'd subverted the insult and reclaimed it as a badge of pride, I wanted to know more. (I realize it was a little "ass-backward" but that's ok because history is rarely linear and I don't want to rewrite my personal script to fit some neat trajectory.) Finding information about feminism in Alabama in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the ERA (which never had a snowball's chance of passing in the state) and prior to mass usage of the internet was a difficult endeavor. There were some feminist books out, I now know, but none of them were in my school or city public libraries. I had never seen an issue of Ms. magazine or any other feminist rag. We certainly did not have a feminist bookstore, and I did not hear feminist music until much later. So I asked my mother if she was a "feminist" and she said "yes, I am." I asked her what that meant to her, and she told me that it meant she could do anything a man could do and that no man was going to dictate her life to her again. She said that she felt "liberated," another new concept to me. (After all, we'd never learned about feminist or civil rights activism in my classes.) One day shortly after our conversation, my mother received a new box of checks in the mail; her name was listed as Ms. Jilda Gilmore. She kept her married name but subverted it in a sense because she used her own first name instead of his, and she used "Ms." as her official title.

Back in the classroom, but also in my circle of friends and to my extended family, I identified as a feminist. I asked my school's vice principal why we did not have girls' sports teams and asked my teachers why we didn't know more about the things women wrote, the histories women made, the contributions women made to science. I told my mother that I would have an abortion if I got pregnant; she agreed, and told me she would take me to get one if I needed a ride. I told my grandmother the same thing and she nearly fainted. I saw the women's liberation symbol somewhere and graffiti-ed my school notebook with the woman symbol with a fist in it. I went on to college, also in Alabama, and helped organize students on campus and people in the city (and at times, at the state house in Montgomery) for abortion rights, access to birth control, women's studies, peace, anti-racism, and gay/lesbian rights. And I came to realize how rebellious being a feminist is. I got a reputation for being "pushy" and "demanding", "loud" and "out of my place" as a woman. It was threatening to some people for me to be a feminist -- and I loved how rebellious that felt.

Twenty years later, I still identify as a feminist; I also still work for the same issues. (This statement gives me pause.) And I realize that, even here in the 21st century, identifying as a feminist is threatening to some. I've had people spit the word at me -- "oh, she's a feminist" -- in that condescending tone and with that look of disgust. Various people -- students, colleagues, family members -- tell me that they would never identify as a feminist; some express surprise, even alarm, that I do. Over the past year, some of my students have told me that "feminist" is passe, it would be sort of like identifying as "Victorian." Other people have told me that feminists are man-hating bitches, and I surely don't "look like" a man-hating bitch, so I must not really be a feminist (right?). One colleague wondered aloud, "can't we find a better word?" Why, when this word conveys so much?

I use the word nearly every day, in the classroom or in faculty meetings or in casual conversation, especially now that Judith, Kim, and I are working on this project. And I often think about being in that psychology class. I hope to inspire other young women, and men, to identify as feminist. I want them to rebel. Now that's a rebel yell I can get behind!

2006, Stephanie Gilmore