Day One with Feminists for Life today. I woke up to thunder outside and a rather violent lightening storm, reminding me what Virginia summers are like. I missed thunderstorms. Not so much that I needed them book-ending my day, but since the part where I was walking outside coincided with the sun, I won't complain. The walk from the metro to FFL is enjoyable: a pretty walk and the perfect length, long enough to be a good walk, but not so long as to be annoying.
The small office is quiet and peaceful and I felt at home there right away. There's an FFL summer intern there already and another one coming soon, so it might get more crowded. But I have no doubt I'll continue to enjoy the office where I am surrounded by my foremothers.
I keep returning to these women when I try to define myself as a feminist, maybe because of the conflation of women's rights and abortion rights that arose in the '70s. But look again at that list of pro-life feminists. Some of them are considerably more modern than Susan B. Anthony. As I looked at the list earlier today, I felt cheated. Why don't we learn about these women alongside other feminist history? Why don't we learn that the vast majority, if not all, of the first wave of feminists abhorred abortion, and that women in the second wave dissented from the abortion platform? Even as we bring women into our historical narrative, the bias of the history simply takes another form: women who follow the new accepted way of being a woman.
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