Feminism

What da heck (as Frida frequently yells at us) does "feminist living", "feminist parenting" or "feminist unschooling" mean? It means that our actions are driven by feminist principles and a desire to bring about women's liberation. Radical feminism, in particular, underlies our family's values.

Feminist living is about holding one another accountable for our participation in misogyny and fighting against it. It can be as simple as telling someone a sexist joke isn't funny, or as complex as refusing to engage in harmful cultural practices such as fashion, dieting and "beauty therapy". It's about asking yourself why you do what you do...why you feel the dominant cultural push to remove body hair is your "personal choice" and what led you to believe it was a choice at all.

Feminist parenting is about giving children the tools to question the patriarchy for themselves in age appropriate ways (such as supporting them in challenging gender stereotypes such as "girls should have long hair/boys short", "pink is for girls, blue is for boys".) It's about refusing to push gender stereotyping onto your children, presenting alternatives not as alternative but as full and legitimate choices. Feminist parenting involves many discussions about male entitlement and male privilege and how to demonstrate respect for women.

Feminist unschooling, to us means keeping gender and women's liberation part of the conversation, whatever the topic may be. For example, when we're reading about history we ask "who wrote this? Who are we hearing about and who aren't we hearing about?", sometimes it's as simple as asking "where are the women?" (this happens a lot when we want to learn about art movements or have a movie night).

Feminist Principles

• Gender equality
• Social justice 
• Peace (not just an absence of war but guaranteed safety and freedom from violence/the threat of violence at all times)
• Health and well being for all members of society (this includes access to affordable health care with empathetic and respectful care providers, where the patient is empowered and sovereign of her body)

Radical Feminism 101

• Women's liberation should be the focus of the feminist movement
• We live in male dominated society 
• Women's oppression is based on our biological difference from men: patriarchy is premised upon the idea that because women menstruate, gestate, birth, and lactate/they are not men and this makes women are inferior.
• Women are a social group who share a lived experience that binds them to one another. These lived experiences stem from biological realities as well as social realities brought about by patriarchy (eg. every woman knows the fear of living under the male gaze, everyone woman experiences the threat of rape/violence because she is a woman)
• Being a woman is a lived experience and an embodied experience. We are treated female socially, but we also experience femaleness as a physiological reality of living within a female body with breasts, uterus, and vagina.
• The root cause of women's oppression is male dominance, enshrined by patriarchy in all institutions
• The root source of all oppression is the oppression of women, it was the first form of oppression from which all other forms stemmed.
• Women's liberation cannot be achieved as a bi-product of another social movement, we need a feminist movement that is run by women, for women.
• Gender is a system of oppression in which the masculine is valued over the feminine, and is valued because it is not the feminine.
• Men can be pro-feminsits or feminist supporters, but feminism is a women's movement and woman is a lived experience of subjugation, which men can't experience firsthand. As a white woman I can be supportive of black activism, but I can't be a black activist, I can only experience the world from within my white privilege.