How and when did you become a feminist?

I was born a feminist. My maternal grandmother was one and so was my mother. Not in the campaigning way, but I was just brought up with the implicit rarely discussed assumption that I could what I wanted, be what I wanted and enter any profession I wanted. I was aware that there was some prejudice, but none that mattered and could not be overcome.

I went to a girls convent school. All the people in authority were women, one of my aunts was held a senior position in nursing, another was a successful civil servant, my mother worked for most of my childhood and had at one point been headmistress of a small private school.

Brought up what I expected, that I would not meet much prejudice, was broadly true because I never had second thoughts about just walking over any prejudice I met.

I married a man whose mother had been the main wage earner in the family and he was entirely comfortable with me working and pursuing a career and playing his part in family life.

Ilovecheese - don't get me started on domestic violence. I used to work across probation and women's aid ( not that long ago) and the men who perpetrated the violence got more sympathy and understanding than the women they'd beaten - they also got more public money and resources to rehabilitate them, whilst women and children languished in refuges funded by charity... I could go on forever!

I honestly think the divide is as wide as ever and in some ways seems to be growing. It sometimes feels like the more equality women gained, the more some men hated it (and some women too I think). Women have sometimes ended up exhausted by the fight to be treated equally, having children, holding down a career, running a home - having it all and sometimes breaking down under the pressure. It's like "here, have your equality, but don't expect to be supported with it".

I can remember doing night shifts, my mum used to come and pick the kids up and drop them to school - whilst my now ex husband lay in bed. I'd get home and she'd tell me I ought to make him a cup of tea and take it up to him in bed...he was unemployed at the time. Two women propping him up to do nothing!

This topic is really hooking some rage! haha.

Another one who had a feminist mother ( although that was before the term was coined). She’d suffered from having three brothers who were spoilt and coddled by her mother and always felt a searing sense of injustice about this . I then went to a single sex grammar school which strengthened all this - all those role models amongst the ( mostly) female staff and high expectations of us all getting as good an education as we were capable of and having careers with no mention of ‘home making’ or marriage. When I read The Female Eunuch it was with a sense of relief

I was quite young when I read The Women's Room, I am embarrassed now to say that I envied the women in the book because they all seemed to have enough money and didn't have to go out to work, but could stay at home with their children.

Like NellG I feel more rage now than I did when I was younger. Still two women killed every week by their partners or ex partners. How are these men being brought up that they think they are entitled to kill women who don't do what they are told?

I did some womens studies at uni too. I don't know if it was just the particular lecturer or the uni I was at, but I really didn't enjoy them. A lot of my work in my degree looked at the female perspective from a literary, sociological, psychological, historical perspective. I think I found the womens studies stuff a bit lacking in empirical evidence. Not that there is never a place for first person/micro accounts. There is, of course.

That reminds me - I read The Women's Room, and it blew me away. I think that of all the books I've read that one had the biggest impact.

I re-read it years later, and it seemed very dated, but it was so influential for me when I was 20 or so.

I think it started in school about the age of 14/15 in disputes with the my mother about things things my brother was allowed to do that I wasn't and what was expected of me in terms of housework etc that wasn't expected of him. I love my brother but he was brought up to be a chauvinist. Of course I got 'worse and worse' in my mothers eyes as I got more and more informed. During my first marriage I read The Female Eunuch and there was no going back after that. Womens Studies as part of a first degree at the the at Open University helped embed the ideals.
Unfortunately now I'm retired I see myself reverting to a Stepford Wife in some ways although DH does more than half the heavy lifting in this house.

Unfortunately for me Terribull, almost all the other women went along with the sexism. One older woman even told me it was understandable that a younger male (not much more than a boy) had been promoted ahead of me, because one day he would have a family to support.

My thoughts exactly Hetty58.

Yes Gaga Jo I was often called "bolshy" " yeah better to be bolshy" thought I "than let this load of nonsense continue" We were lucky me and the other younger women who just wouldn't co-operate with the washing up and coffee making rotas implemented by an older women my male boss who was the overall manager of our West End branch (life assurance company) was an egalitarian guy for the time and supported us, so we had the last laugh!!!!

I'm not sure that I had an epiphany, but I certainly wasn't brought up to be feminist. My mother believed that women should stay at home, and didn't encourage us to have careers.

When I started work in the mid 70s, the Equality Act had just come in. I worked in the civil service, and the boys who started at the same time as me had previously been on the same grade, but to circumvent the legislation they were transferred to a new grade with a different title, and enabled to progress to management grades whilst the girls were kept in more junior roles. The men's office had 'girlie' calendars and pin-ups on the walls, and when we had to go in there they would whistle and make comments about our looks - I thought it was horrible (some of them were old enough to be my dad, and I'd put money on them being very protective of their own daughters' virginity), but many women thought it was flattering. This internalised misogyny has stayed with me ever since, and still makes me shudder when I hear it (rarely now).

When the reality of all of this hit me, I left and went back to studying, ending up in an academic position. These roles are difficult to get, and involve years of temporary contracts which coincide with having children, meaning that women tend to stay on them for longer than men. As for so many women, the timings were such that by the time I got a full-time permanent role I had missed out on years of pension contributions, and I'm feeling the weight of that now, particularly because of the change to the pension age, which has added another 6 years to my working life. The gender pay gap at my last full-time employer was 20%, which is a disgrace.

I remember things like the so-called Yorkshire Ripper case, when women were expected to stay indoors at night, so as not to bring murder on themselves. I was a teenager then, and strongly objected to the narrative that it was the women's fault. Round about the same time, the IRA had its campaign of terrorism on the mainland, and people were searched on their way in and out of venues. I well remember bouncers 'frisking' girls on the way in, and using this as an excuse to feel us up, and 'checking' our bags, then making 'jokes' about tampons or condoms they found in them. Hilarious.

I have a son and a daughter, and I'm pleased to say that both of them have feminist views. I sometimes think that my daughter is unaware of how much there is to lose, as she was brought up with equality all around her, and has never known discrimination (yet - she may find that this changes if she has children). I hope I'm wrong, but I worry that this has led to complacency in her generation of women, and that they will end up having to fight all over again.

I am reading Difficult Women by Helen Lewis at the moment. All the women who got things done and made changes were considered difficult or bolshy.

Yes, I recognise that from when I worked at Lloyds, Terribull. I refused to go along with it and got a reputation for being bolshy. Better bolshy than a doormat though.

I have been the opposite NellG. I have calmed down a lot since menopause. I know the inequality is there but as an introvert, don't have to rail against it as much, because I don't participate anymore than the bare minimum anymore. If I come across it, obviously I still challenge it.

Yes, Terribull, I agree. The discrimination most western women face pales into insignificance in comparison to what goes on worldwide.

This might sound like a daft question, but did anyone else start to feel much more rage and disgust at how imbalanced it all still is once they entered menopause and all the hormones settled down? I am convinced that female hormones make us into borderline Stepford Wives - all compliant and tolerant! I have long been a feminist in many ways but I was never this bloody angry about it all.

Various flash points in my life, apropos of being brought up a catholic realising mid teens that most religions are deeply patriarchal, with a male hierarchy and a raison d'etre to keep women in their subservient places.

Working in offices and feeling that there were a whole host of men, this was back in the sexist seventies, who were happy to sit on their arses and let women, often busier than they were, faff around them bringing them cups of coffee and washing the cups up afterwards. I was part of a protest group who refused to do that, sometimes undermined by older women in the office who thought that's what female members of staff were there for

Realising that I didn't want to be one of the appendage type girlfriends who were prepared to troll along behind a boyfriend watching sporting activities that bored me stiff, coming to terms with the fact there are "some" men who have an expectation, of love me, love my interests. Not for me!

Riling against the page 3 culture that was very prevalent in the '70s, although on reflection of what's around now that all seemed quite mild.

Feeling deeply that women of all cultures should be in control of their own lives and destinies, sadly that doesn't happen for many women. Since learning about atrocities such as female genital mutilation for example, in retrospect I feel some of the things that gave me rage back in the dim and distant past pale into insignificance

Realising how important birth control is for women,

And of course all that's not just a feminist idea.

I'll get my coat.

Don't tear me to shreds. I'm throwing out ideas to be discussed if anyone wants to ?

Hetty58

Of course, with true equality, the concept of feminism is redundant.

Absolutely, but are we defining true equality as equality of opportunity (with all necessary encouragement) or as 'equity' where everything is shared out equally despite differences in – thinking carefully how I put this – effort and ultimate value to society. The latter is sometimes called equality of outcome which, I think, is impossible anyway.

Still on the fence about the idea of universal basic income. In many ways it seems like a good idea but I can imagine problems arising because of some people making more of their basic income: thinking of the parable of the talents here.

My father. He was a true feminist well before it became acceptable if not fashionable, for men to believe and promote women’s equality. I was allowed to do what a boy would have been allowed to to, I was allowed to study and travel abroad on my own, never judgemental just told me the facts, unusual for a man born at the end of WW1. Sadly my mother was the one to reinforce gender roles.

My mother has always had a preference for males. My brother was the favourite, but even when she had cats, she favoured the boy! Weird.

I'd always noticed that my brother got free passes and the rest of us didn't. Looking back I think my father was more egalitarian than my mother, she was the one who unwittingly reinforced the gender roles and divisions.

I was a single parent to my eldest, when I got married my husband wanted to formally adopt him. The only thing was that I had to formally adopt him too. That was the point at which I became an active feminist in a thought out way.

I was born into a family where both parents worked - via a complicated system of alternative shifts such that one or other was at work and one was at home with my sister and me. Dad taught us to 'grow your own' DIY and Cooking. Mum was the baker, seamstress, painter and decorator. Of course the roles were not set in stone and all four of us pitched in when needed.

It was only when I entered the world of work that I discovered that I was a second class human being, not allowed to enter various professions, kept down under a glass ceiling, paid less than a male colleague, and not in the pension scheme. forced to leave when I was pregnant (no maternity leave then) etc. etc.

The injustice that still resonates with me, is that my Mum, who was 2nd to her female cousin in her last year at primary school, was denied her runner-up Dux medal, when the school, for one year only, awarded the medals to Best Boy and Best Girl. It was some compensation when both my sister and I won the Dux medal outright at the same school.

Spot on Hetty58.

I think many of us will have been feminist from a young age, but not identified it as such or given it a name until we were older. Even if home life was absolutely equal treatment, unfairness based on sex would inevitably have been encountered in the wider world.