Why I Am A Feminist

Why I Am A Feminist

Richard Zimler

Why I’ve been a feminist since I was about 10 years old.

It has to do with children – their basic rights.

Let me explain. 

My mother was born in New York in 1916, a child of Jewish immigrants from Poland.  Her father was  a tailor who lost all his savings in the Great Depression of 1929.  Mom went to public schools in Brooklyn and attended a wonderful public university – City College. City College gave a high-quality education to an entire generation of immigrant children in New York. She earned a master’s degree in biochemistry. She used to tell me that organic chemistry was a beautiful language. Her eyes lit up when she talked about science.  Even as a kid, I knew that it was then that she was the best version of herself. 

Imagine a woman trying to get a job as a scientist in 1938! A Jewish woman. Doors were closed in her face. But a laboratory at Harlem Hospital took a chance on her. She studied tuberculosis and published scientific papers.  She married my dad in 1942.  During World War II, when my father was a soldier stationed in Washington DC, she was hired to teach at the prestigious medical school of George Washington University. 

After my oldest brother was born, in 1946, she stopped working. My father wanted that. And she thought it best to concentrate on her baby. And yet that decision became the tragedy of her life.  She valued motherhood but soon lost her way – her purpose.  She had already discovered by this point that my father was emotionally violent, constantly undermining her confidence.  She admitted to me years later, after his death, that she had been frightened of him.

Imagine being married to a man who terrifies you? 

She hoped that having children would come to fulfil her but it didn’t.  My brother Jerry was born in 1954 and I came along in 1956.  Shortly after that, she asked her parents to take her in for six months so that she could re-learn her biochemistry, look for work, find an apartment and start on a new life. They refused. Her mother said, “You made your bed, now sleep in it.”

My mother had no bank account of her own, which is why I always tell young women – keep enough money in an account for you to start over if your marriage goes wrong. 

My mother grew clinically depressed over the coming years.  Her only escape was reading. Her library was enormous. She thought novelists were more important than prime ministers and presidents and everyone else – Proust, Faulker, Dostoevsky and many others.  And much later, her own son. Imagine that! 

Her reading for several hours each day was both wonderful and sad.  Sad because her unlived life – the one in novels – became bigger and bigger as her actual life diminished to nearly nothing.      

When I was about eight or nine, she stopped getting dressed. She almost never left the house. Her fear of going outside was diagnosed as agoraphobia, but the name didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to get any help. 

Her depression grew deeper.  And yet I maintained an unshakeable bond with her.  Though it affected me in very deep ways that I’ve no time to discuss here. 

I was the only person in the family who encouraged her.  Unfortunately, my brothers had interiorized my father’s contempt. My eldest brother would become emotionally and physically violent with his girlfriends. 

I don’t like to look at my photos of Mom from this time.  Her face is drained of life. And hope. 

Every day when I left for school, I thought, I’ll find her dead when I get home. She’ll take her own life.

Years later, once again, she told me that my intuition was right – she often had suicidal thoughts. 

Those hidden thoughts also made me into the person I am.

I’m happy to say that starting in the 1980s, she recovered a good deal of her confidence. She found herself again. After my dad died in 1990, she lived a free and independent life. And she had wonderful times with me and Alex.  Though she was still, in many ways, a broken person – only a fraction of what she might have been. 

My point is this….

I am a feminist because of my mother – because all women deserve to be supported and encouraged by their boyfriends and husbands and children. No one should live under the threat of violence. No one should have their confidence constantly undermined. 

I am also a feminist because of their children. I almost never hear anyone talk about this aspect of feminist, which I find odd and disappointed. Because all children deserve to grow up with confident and secure mothers. With mothers encouraged by their husbands, parents and friends. And their children, too. With women who live the life they want and not the life that others have imposed on them.  With women who have a chance to live out their dreams.

Chances are that the children of these dynamic, fulfilled mothers will also become dynamic and fulfilled. And will firmly distance themselves from anyone who does them harm – who doesn’t respect them. These children will strive to live out their dreams and will contribute to make a just and fair society in which everyone else can live out their dreams, as well.

I am a feminist because I believe that all children have the right to be nurtured and protected by their parents – and to be encouraged to live an authentic life.  To take risks. To love whoever they choose. To be themselves.