Going back to my roots
All the reading I’ve been doing lately has made me think about my early awareness of women’s rights and first steps into politics.
I’ve always been aware that for many women in the world, things were not as they should be. I don’t know where this came from (possibly being an avid newspaper reader from a fairly young age), but I strongly felt that women should never be treated as ‘less’ - less capable, less important, less than equal. In fact, I can remember objecting to a school play I should have been in at the age of about 11. I had been given a role as one of several ‘Lords of Creation’. It was only when we were given the lyrics to our song that I discovered that the ‘Lords of Creation’ were just men. Men were important, creators, out in the world doing things. Women, well, weren’t. I didn’t do the play (although that may have had more to do with the fact that my parents were out of the country that week and we stayed with cousins who lived too far away from school - I was delighted to miss it though).
As a teen, I got caught up in grunge and rock music and through relentless magazine reading, discovered Riot Grrrl. Bands like Bikini Kill, Babes in Toyland and L7 just seemed so cool to me and seemed to be rocking just as hard as the guys, but on their own terms. In those pre-internet days, making contact with other Riot Grrrls had to be done the old-fashioned way. I sent away SAEs for zines from the UK and the US - delighted by the photocopied newsletters I got back, along with badges and stickers and invitations to meetings I couldn’t attend. I even answered an ad in The Zine (a shortlived, glossy ‘zine’ - open to contributions and sold in proper newspagents) and made friends with a feminist, Riot Grrrl supporting boy! We corresponded for years afterwards.
It was such a thrill feeling part of that community. I felt like I wasn’t alone in wanting to be given a voice and taken seriously and not dismissed as ‘just a girl’. That voice finally spoke up in 1993 when I read an article in the Irish Times about Young Feminists. It described, in fairly patronising terms, the ‘uniform’ of these young feminists and their apparent, collective beliefs. I wrote a letter to the editor dismissing the article as out-of-touch and deriding the notion that there could be a uniform when the whole point of Riot Grrrl was that there was no uniformity. It was about freedom to choose who you wanted to be and how you wanted to represent yourself, whether in Doc Martens and grungy t-shirts or the girliest of floral dresses. I still treasure the framed copy of the letter my father gave me.
So much of the passion that drives me to care about what happens to women around the world comes from these early experiences finding my way and developing my voice. It may have taken me a long time but hopefully this blog will be the next step in that ongoing evolution.
