Please enjoy an excerpt from Huffington Post, where Sheila Moeschen; senior editor for I AM THAT GIRL; writes on feminism, conversations, and how a book can make us nervous—or serve as an opening for a conversation that is still vital and ongoing.
huffingtonpost.com – I had just been to one of the nearby bookstores where I had bought Gloria Steinem’s recent memoir My Life On the Road and was looking forward to pausing over some coffee to dig in and read for a while. Now I felt supremely self-conscious about breaking it out in front of this person. Would he try to engage me in a debate on feminism? Would he take it as an invitation to assume I was a Hillary supporter and pontificate on the laundry list of reasons why Hillary was bad for the country and even worse for women? Would he get angry?
In the zillion years I spent as an undergrad and graduate student studying literature, a book has never made me nervous. But here I was weirdly worried. I felt very much what it means to be an educated white woman during a time in our country’s history where the focus on women—on our bodies, our access to health care, our politics and our relationship with feminism—is like a powder keg rigged up to a hair trigger. Women are in a perpetual state of vigilance it seems, on guard against physical and verbal assault, crouched in a defensive pose in anticipation of backlash. No wonder women are confused and cagey about feminism. It’s risky and messy. It’s a lot of work. Isn’t there an app for this?
Read the rest here, and follow Sheila Moeschen on Twitter.
