Get our your typewriter ribbons, everyone!  It’s NaBloPoMo!

NaBloPoMo stands for National Blog Posting Month, brought to you in 2011 by BlogHer, the folks responsible for the flurry of exciting ads to the right of your screen. Inspired by National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo lets us blogging types in on the fun, for it’s very important that everyone with a computer write themselves crazy for the month of November.

As is typical of everything we do here at Radical HQ, I’m joining a day late.  Deal with it.

I love the motivation behind NaNoWriMo, for it recalls the sage advice within Natalie Goldberg’s classic guide Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, a book I’ve had in my possession for 25 years.  Drawing from her study of Zen meditation, Goldberg reveals that the secret to being a writer is….

(wait for it)

….to write.  Just write!   Tap on your typewriter, scratch on your notebook, click on your keyboard.  Write.

Some of what we write will be crap. Some will be good.  Some will be great.  But we’ll never know what will our writing will be like until we write, over and over again.

In 2004, I joined NaNoWriMo for the first time and wrote a novel that was four hundred pages of melodramatic garbage.  In 2005, I wrote two-thirds of a novel than was slightly better.  In 2006, my friends suggested that I start a blog on MySpace that accidentally led to a paid writing gig, which led to another, and another.  I discovered that I love writing nonfiction.  The work is better because I enjoy it more.  No longer an aspiring Margaret Atwood, today I am an aspiring Joan Didion! (but more on that later)

In November of 2009, I pondered the raft of blog posts, newspaper columns, and essays on my hard drive and wondered if my month might be put to good use in the service of what I’ve come to call The Radical Manuscript.  Named after that ancient MySpace blog, it would trace my journey from a quiet riot grrrl to a post-partum depression-addled mom to a feminist activist crusader determined up upend the myth of American “family values” one dirty diaper at a time.

This November, I am thrilled to announce that Medusa’s Muse, an independent press based in Ukiah, California, will be publishing The Radical Housewife: Redefining Family Values for the 21st Century in 2012.  Terena Scott is a fellow rad mom who started the press with the same DIY spirit that the creators of NaNoWriMo had back in 1999.  I’m very excited about collaborating with Medusa’s Muse to bring this November-inspired project to a bookstore near you.

So what are you waiting for?  It’s November 2nd already!  Unroll that ribbon, sharpen that pencil, plug in that laptop!  Do whatever you need to do–just WRITE!

What follows is an excerpt from the original draft of The Radical Housewife. Before I slice it away, I thought I’d share it, in hopes you’ll post me your thoughts on the matter. Note the second-to-last paragraph, in which I remark upon the twisted logic of what “pro-life” means in the Palinverse. It was disturbing when I wrote it, but it’s even worse now that Bristol claims her virginity was “stolen” while she was drunk (for a discussion on why Bristol may have resisted calling her experience rape, read this piece at the Daily Beast). As if we needed another reminder of the power of words….

The late, great Shirley Chisholm wrote the following in her autobiography Unbought & Unbossed, addressing men on her staff who tried to convince her to avoid speaking out in support of abortion rights:

“Women are dying every day, did you know that? They’re being butchered and maimed. No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women will have them; they always have and always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while poor women have to go to quacks? Why don’t we talk about real problems instead of phony ones?”

Rep. Chisholm wrote these words in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, when dying from a botched abortion was a very real threat to women across the country, particularly poor women of color. Two generations later, not a lot has changed. Accessing an abortion is easy for well-heeled urban women, the vast majority of whom (as it was in 1970) are white.

In Shirley Chisholm’s day, the term “pro-choice” was used to remind people of the personal matter of the procedure. The “choice” to have the abortion should be the woman’s, centering the debate on the right to individual autonomy, a concept that Republicans claim to embrace. Senator John Kerry declared in a 2004 Presidential debate that having an abortion “is a woman’s choice. It’s between a woman, God, and her doctor.” Oh, if it were only that easy, John!

God and doctors are often in very short supply when they are needed the most. If you get accidentally knocked up in Wyoming or Mississippi, you better pray as hard as you can, because your states have no provider at all. In fact, a 2008 report funded by the Guttmacher Institute announced that 87 percent of counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider. That’s a big enough number to put in all caps: EIGHTY-SEVEN PERCENT! That makes getting an abortion seem less like a “choice” and more like a forced road trip.

Or a financial ordeal. The Hyde Amendment, passed in 1977 and reauthorized every year since, bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. Rep. Chisholm worried that poor women would have to go to quacks; she didn’t realize that when they won the right access abortions from a trained doctor, they’d have to surrender their rent checks. The Hyde Amendment, predictably, reinforces the idea that wealthy women have the “choice,” but poor women don’t. And lest we forget, the poorest women are the ones who lack access to contraceptive information and services anyway, dammit!

When I demonstrated with over one million other people on the U.S. Capitol Mall in 2004, the event was called the March for Women’s Lives, which made some mainstream feminists gripe. Wasn’t it usually called the March for Choice? Not so fast, declared a coalition of poverty activists and health care groups for women of color. The word “choice” obscures the “real problems” that Rep. Chisholm talked about: racism, poverty, and other forms of pervasive inequality.

I no longer identify as pro-choice. How can I, when Sarah Palin congratulates herself for the “choice” to carry her Down’s Syndrome child to term? Bringing a special needs baby into a tightly-knit, financially stable family that has access to health care and other forms of support is no big whoop, except for the baby in question—Trig Palin is one hell of a lucky kid. So is Tripp Johnston, the child carried to term by Trig’s seventeen-year-old sister. All four of them appeared on a celebrity tabloid in the early days of 2010, declaring “we’re so glad we chose life!” That’s that sneaky, slippery power of language again! Can you imagine a headline that read “we’re so glad we didn’t have abortions!” I can’t either.

Remember chapter one? I don’t deserve a medal for surviving life with the colicky, special needs baby I had in the year 2000. Accidents of fortune gave me everything I needed, and my child reaped the benefits. I don’t care if Sarah and Bristol Palin keep on breeding; that’s their beeswax, not mine. But under Gov. Palin’s leadership, Alaska’s rates of domestic violence and sexual assault were twice the national average. When Palin ran for office in 2006, she announced (in so many words) that if her then 14-year-old were raped, she wouldn’t allow the girl to have an abortion—a very likely scenario, considering Palin’s vocal support for parental notification laws. In yet another nimble linguistic twist, Palin averred that the issue was one of “parents’ rights.” Welcome to Palinverse, where a pre-born fetus had greater bodily autonomy than a post-born teen.

Feminists of any/every Wave, listen up: “choice” is over. It’s done. NO MORE.

Like it or loathe it, a woman’s appearance means something. Whether you wear heels or Doc Martens, no “choice” can be made independently in a consumer culture. Free will does not exist. Such was the revelation I found in my college media studies curriculum after Professor John Schott handed us syllabi that would challenge our deeply held beliefs about soap operas, Madonna videos and Cover Girl commercials. Symbolic language? The object and the objectified? Semiotics? Jacques Derrida?!! What the fuck??

Let us cool our Prada boots while we return to the thoughts that began our chapter, a consideration of the second wave’s flaws. Betty Friedan opposed lesbian leadership in NOW for many reasons, one of which is how they looked. Many lesbians of the time didn’t sex up their drag the way Marlene Dietrich did—they took off their bras, let down their hair, and rubbed off their makeup. I see no problem with this, but remember: I was born in 1971. My cultural touchstones were the rough and tumble kiddos on Sesame Street, not prim maidens like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. Once upon a time the sight of a woman in pants was so transgressive as to inspire revulsion: not because the pants were ugly by themselves, but because the act itself was so outrageous as to be unfathomable. Susan B. Anthony stopped wearing bloomers when she sensed they were distracting people from her suffragist message.

Her words didn’t matter as much as her clothing. Sound familiar?

Over time, the pants really did get ugly, and someone heard something from someone about the burning of a bra. The fact that no bras were harmed during the 1968 Miss America protest is a truth so persistently rejected that the story remains a long entry in the debunking website Snopes.com, right up there with alligators in the Manhattan sewers and death by Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola. The message was clear: FEMINISTS BURN BRAS. According to Newtonian physics, without the support of sturdy underwire, perky tits will eventually droop. According to the marketing department at Maidenform and the pages of Playboy, girls with droopy tits are gross. Therefore, feminists are gross. QED.

When I ask around for nominations for Best Feminist in America, no one names Friedan, who inspired the Second Wave, or Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who kick-started the first. Almost every single person will name Gloria Steinem. A fine feminist, to be sure: a powerful activist, writer, speaker, and thinker. But you remember her before all others because she is very, very pretty.

Much of the Third Wave has consisted of studiously breaking down this feminists-are-ugly stereotype, and not just because heterosexual feminist women were getting desperate for a lay. Women of the Second Wave who rejected consumer culture were brave in numbers. The times were a-changin’, and plenty of men were breaking down long-cherished beliefs themselves—resisting the draft and militarism, embracing androgynous hair and clothing, recognizing their part in perpetuating discrimination.

Reagan’s election in 1980 and the defeat of the ERA in 1982 brought all the marching to a grinding halt. The communal spirit of the Second Wave fragmented. Reaganites declared a new era of rugged individualism, of freedom. Not the freedom that comes from constitutionally-enshrined gender equality, though; this freedom was that of the lone cowboy riding into town with nothing but a knapsack and a gun, free to blast his way to prosperity in pursuit of the American Dream. There were no cowgirls in Reagan’s America. His pal Schlafly made sure they were all at home, boiling diapers over an open fire.

Second Wavers in Reaganland soon realized that opposing the forces of capitalism required a lot of difficult emotional work. To delve inward for clarity is much more challenging than, say, purchasing a finely woven shirt that telegraphs that confidence for you. If self-acceptance is available at Macy’s, in a Chanel bottle of beveled glass, then to the mall we shall go! Sitting in the lotus position is for suckers.

Oh my god……I can’t believe I use DEODORANT. I want to smell pretty. So much for being radical.

*Come on, could that REALLY have been said by anyone other than Courtney “Pretty on the Inside” Love? She may not understand sobriety, child-rearing, or anything else about human relationships, but she sure as hell knows about power, baby!

An excerpt from The Radical Housewife, chapter four, shared in honor of the 12th anniversary today of my civil marriage with a fella who is not, fortunately, named Mattias Schwarz:

….neither youth nor hormones last forever. Somewhere around our ten year college reunion, everyone’s attention shifted from desire to domesticity, so it seemed natural that marriage would dominate our discussion of gay rights in the 21^st century.

Unlike the college come-outs and come-ons, Kelly and Gretchen came out by moving in next door. No one could misunderstand two women, a toddler boy, and a hyperactive mixed-breed terrier moving a truck full of furniture into a tidy Minneapolis bungalow—they were a family. For once, identifying as gay had nothing at all to do with sex. Hell, they were new parents, so we knew from experience that they weren’t doin’ it! Instead, the story of their lives together was a lesson for Matt and me on a topic far less arousing: good old-fashioned civil rights.

The battle for same-sex marriage first made Minnesota headlines in July 2002, when our friendly, toque-wearing northern neighbors on the Ontario Superior Court ruled that Canada’s current marriage laws were discriminatory. Gay marriage was legal right in our backyard. “We could get to Thunder Bay in eight hours!” I exulted.

Kelly and Gretchen glanced at each other warily. “I don’t think so,” Gretchen said.

“But I want to buy you a melon baller,” I said. “Or a Jell-O mold in the shape of a giant strawberry.”

Kelly crinkled her nose with distaste. “Is that the kind of stuff you two got?” I told her that Matt and I opposed the idea of a wedding registry on principle. I went further and explained that so much of the modern American wedding constituted re-enacting traditions put in place when women were considered property to be handed from man to man in a ritual financial exchange. When Kelly regained consciousness, I returned to the subject of her Canadian marriage.

“Go ahead and buy us a melon baller if you want to,” Gretchen said. “Just don’t make us drive to Thunder Bay for it.” Her stern face told us that the discussion was over.

I cursed myself for weeks for being such a fucking idiot. The Happy Hetero just told two sensible adults that all of their problems would be fixed after ten minutes in an Ontario courtroom! I thought they’d be freed from discrimination once they signed a provincial paper, produced in a country not their own, that would mean less than nothing to the border guards they would encounter on their return trip, guards who would still log them as two single persons: one an American citizen, one a Permanent Resident. Nothing would change.

Gretchen, unlike Kelly, was not born in the United States. When we first got to know one another, she was studying madly for her citizenship exams, a series of quizzes on Constitutional trivia that I might have passed if I were still a 17-year-old student in AP American Government, but would definitely flunk today. “A test she wouldn’t have to take if I’d been a man,” Kelly grumbled.

Kelly and Gretchen didn’t intend to offer me more than friendship, but they inadvertently gave me something nearly as valuable: an education in discrimination that this naïve straight woman sorely needed. For years, I thought that being an ally was about getting vogueing invites, ending the use of “gay” as a catch-all slur, and dropping my heterosexual assumptions. Through Gretchen and Kelly, I learned of the pervasive inequality that exists in state and federal law, the very legal system that Gretchen understood better than the average straight guy who was too busy scratching his balls to vote.

Kelly and I were both good American girls, born in the land of the free, rewarded with Social Security Cards and easily obtained passports. Had I fallen for a lederhosen-wearing Bavarian named Matthias Schwarz, instead of a professor’s brat born within a mile of UC-Berkeley, his road to citizenship would be assured. Kelly, on the other hand, had no such opportunity. She could not legally sponsor the citizenship of the foreign-born person she loved. “If we’re not legally married, as Kelly put it, “our relationship doesn’t exist.”

FFI:

Equal Marriage NOW

Minnesotans United for all Families

An excerpt from The Radical Housewife, chapter one:

Our obstetrician explained that a first appointment focused more upon completing paperwork than much else; as proof, she handed my husband a stack of insurance forms and an official Fairview Hospitals publication entitled Your Pregnancy and You. On the cover, a hollow-cheeked supermodel pressed her lips to the downy head of a doughy-looking newborn. “But since someone left the mobile unit in here already,” she said, nodding towards a contraption in the corner of the room, “we could take a peek, if you like.” I assented eagerly. Dr. Farber switched on the machine, a combination of wheels, PCU, keyboard and monitor that resembled a plastic version of the robot Clonky from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

By the time Dr. Farber finished rattling off the list of things I could no longer enjoy (alcohol, blue cheese, ibuprofen, regular bowel movements), her hands had warmed up the tube of K-9 jelly to her liking. “Shirt up, now,” she ordered, and I obeyed. She squeezed a great dollop of lube on my stomach, then squashed down my innards with the sound wave wand as she watched snow undulate on the video monitor. “Ah,” she said, satisfied. “Here we are.”

Here, indeed: on the screen was the first picture of the baby I’d carry until the following February. It looked more like a salamander than a human child, with a fifth nub that was definitely a residual tail. The tiny creature writhed in its liquid home, thrashing about eagerly as the doctor pressed in firmly for a clearer picture. Somewhere below the bulbous, bean-shaped head we saw a soft flutter, like the quiet gray wings of a miniature moth. It was a heart. This thing was alive.

Not far from the Minneapolis office where we sat, on a grimy east-west throughway called Lake Street, are billboards featuring outsized photographs of babies. Some of these children open their mouths into gummy smiles; some gaze heavenward, their eyes round and damp with guileless gratitude. These billboards sell neither diapers nor formula; instead, they provide factual information. They announce that an embryo, from whence each of these babies came, has a beating heart 21 days from its conception.

It’s a fact. I can’t dispute it. Yet when my car rumbles down Lake Street, I shake my fist at those babies. I curse their sponsors, the Pro-Life Across America campaign, for reducing the explosive emotions behind a wrenching issue to the simplicity of a baby’s smile. On the far west end of Lake Street, closer to the gentility of Lake Calhoun than the chaotic halal markets of Little Mogadishu, stand clusters of bundled-up white women and men, their gloved hands clutching trifold pamphlets adorned with babies, but these babies do not smile; instead, they glower “j’accuse!” from faces streaked with blood, a dire warning to all who might enter the local Planned Parenthood.

In the United States of America, it is legal to terminate a pregnancy at nine weeks, to take action to stop the fluttering heart of this salamander-like creature I watched on the ultrasound screen. Medical terminology labels it embryo or a fetus. On the billboards, it’s a baby. There’s no room for that slithery, amoebic time in between that technology made visible to me, my husband, and our doctor .

In Exam Room 12, in a flickering series of black and white images, I too saw a baby—my baby. My husband squeezed my hand. Dr. Farber printed out a picture that I showed to my mother, my father, my in-laws. Still, the sight of this heart did nothing to change my lifelong support for safe, legal abortion, available on demand and without apology.

The abortion debate, like any other, pits chilly science against hotly contested theories, many so deeply felt as to attain near-factual status. Pro-Life Across America wishes us to understand the fact of a baby’s heartbeat proves the theory that nine-week-old wrigglers are conscious and sentient, however diminutive. Certain factions go back even farther, claiming that the fusion of two cells, spermatozoa and egg, require as much protection as a smiling baby.

I believe our fascination with where life begins has its source in our terror of how it ends. No person owns a memory of the dawning of her consciousness. To define the self, then, we must work backwards from life’s second great mystery: death. Our collective dread may have inspired the idea of an immutable soul that has the power to transcend that which we fear most. An unchanging soul at death, therefore, requires a unique soul at birth—or, as some believe, much earlier.

I will never forget the sight of this tiny heart’s flutter, yet I wonder: was there a consciousness swirling about that pinpoint-sized brain? Were there thoughts? Emotions? Scientists know that farm experience emotions, yet millions are slaughtered daily to satisfy our hunger for their meat. I could not rationally argue that a nine-week-old blob in my belly contained the mental powers of the average full-grown pig, so what makes the blob a more valuable object? But does it have a soul? This agnostic vegetarian dares not guess.

What I do know is when my infant son came home from Fairview Riverside Hospital, he did not smile. His wet mouth twisted as he screamed without regard for the poor, anxious heart of his mother. No billboards announced to me Hang in There, Mom, It’ll Get Better!, and nobody stood on the sand-crusted snow bank outside my house in Sorel boots, much less rosaries, handing me pamphlets of support. A heart can set things in motion, but cannot finish the job.

Lacking the framework of faith, I seek not perfection, but balance. When I looked my blob, I understood him as the culmination of countless events and choices, the sum total of my years on the earth. My years, and no one else’s. I also saw a creature that drew sustenance from me and me alone. He lived on my blood, my nutrients, my oxygen, my energy: all of it mine. If I died, so did he. His tail could not wiggle outside the safety of my womb.

I gave him life. I also gave him meaning.

When does life begin? I suspect it is a process requiring a complex engagement between both the being and its world, much like a story requires a reader. Otherwise, the words remain only a series of unintelligible scratches on a page. If we accept that a story has different meaning for a different reader, we may understand that no person will approach either their soul, or a zygote’s, identically.

I see that you are interested in women writers telling the secret truth that parenthood is sometimes soul-sucking hard work.

‘All Joy and No Fun: The Parent’s Paradox’ Author Scores Book Deal

HAVE I GOT A BOOK FOR YOU!

In my book, I too reveal painful truths about parenting, but I offer something that readers can do about it! (hint: it involves scads of government money. Yep, I’m a pinko and a damned good one.)

This hilarious, informative, passionately defended, and FINISHED book is a political memoir called The Radical Housewife. Its 70,000 words describe a decade of feminist parenting by a Minneapolis-based liberal committed to destroying the myth of American “family values,” one dirty diaper and Palinista at a time.

Contact me at theradicalhousewife (at) gmail (dot) com for a proposal and first chapter.

YEEEEEEEE-HAW!

Lisa Belkin, she of 2003′s infamous “Opt-Out Generation” piece, wrote an essay in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine that’s eerily echoing the finishing touches I’m putting on The Manuscript.

You read that right: FINISHING. The end is in sight. I should be done by Matt’s birthday, which is next Wednesday. I will have to buy him something extra wonderful to thank him for his patience, support, and confidence when I had none. Anyone got a line on a Favre bobblehead for the birthday boy?

Back to Belkin. In “Living to be a Parent,” she writes that a gaggle of academic psychologists want to revise Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs so that parenting sits at the top. THE TOP! Belkin complains that this emphasis on “parenting,” both as a verb and as a crowning achievement in life, is what’s responsible for all the spoiled brats who entered college last week with helicopters in tow. “They are more dependent,” she writes, “expecting trophies just for trying and texting their parents to ask for advice about what to eat for breakfast.”

I take a different perspective in The Radical Housewife, the book. I’m not worried about the Yale frosh who don’t know how to put quarters in the laundry machine–he’ll be fine. I’m worried about what happens to all the other kids out there, the kids who don’t have a chance to get to Yale because the rich folks with the means to place “parenting” at the center of their lives have diverted funds away from them.

It’s a competitive culture, in case you haven’t noticed. Resources are not allocated evenly. The haves hoard, and the have-nots are stuck. In my kids’ school district, the only schools that consistently make Adequate Yearly Progress are the ones that receive no Title I funding anyway. In plainer terms, the better-off the family, the better-off the school, the better-off your future.

And while this seems obvious, I’ll mention it anyway: putting parenting at the center of your universe is only going to make all you middle- and upper-class parents (like Belkin and other NYT subscribers) MORE anxious, insecure, and miserable, which leaves you (and me) even more vulnerable to swallowing this Mommy Wars bullshit.

Chew on that while I finish my book.

If the kids are back to school, that means I am back to what is known around here as (dum-dum-dum) The Manuscript. Everyone who asks what on earth I am going to do with myself now that my youngest is in all-day kindergarten is told that I am finishing (dum-dum-dum) The Manuscript.

So now I have to do it. Shit.

To get back on track, I’ve been rereading my old work, including chapters, columns, and miscellaneous essays. Below is something I wrote for the 25th anniversary issue of the Minnesota Women’s Press that I don’t believe I linked to here. I was challenged to present my feminist vision for the next 25 years, and not surprisingly, it involves caregiving. Here it is:

25 years ago, despite the determined efforts of Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly, women were out of the home and into the workplace in then-record numbers. The women’s liberation movement was a success! Wasn’t it?

Today, think-tankers bemoan what New York Times writer Lisa Belkin dubbed “the opt-out revolution,” the gradual return of educated women back to the realm of unpaid home work. Does that mean that the women’s movement was a failure?

Two questions, one answer: maybe.

I’ve often felt that second wave feminism of the ‘70s made a big mistake when it failed to urge men out of the workplace and into the home. After all, the need for caregiving remains constant no matter the gender of the worker. 20^th and 21^st century mothers with careers must entrust their children to workers who are often paid as little as hamburger flippers—workers who are, almost without exception, other women.

What will it take for our culture to value caregiving? Imagine the impact if Brad Pitt quit the film industry to watch six small children while Angelina Jolie earned the family millions. Like anything else in American life, caregiving will earn respect once more men do it.

Our tasks for the next 25 years are the tasks of our foremothers. First, we must pass a federal Equal Rights Amendment to combat pay inequity and other discriminatory practices that conspire against the moms who want paid work. Next, we need the social revolutions of the last century to come full circle with a paradigm shift in American masculinity. We’ve already destroyed the notion that women are biologically unfit for work; let’s teach our sons that men can care for children and elders as well as women do. Only then will our society be able to intelligently debate how to balance work and family.

photo: Elliott pushing his cousin Hadley around at the Minnesota State Fair, August 2010.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Ryan Lavery is about to booked for the murder of David Heyward, whom I suspect is only faking his death to exact revenge upon his wife (and Ryan’s ex) Greenlee. You didn’t think I was going to give up all of my housewife pleasures, did you?

Excerpt from chapter six, “The best feminist in the world”:

[In the early spring of 2005,] the following letter was sent to every major pharmacy chain in the Twin Cities:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing because I am hearing alot in the news about pharmacists being able to deny a prescription to a customer because of their beliefs. Is this your company’s policy? I’m worried about what this might mean for my family. It seems somewhat unfair.

Sincerely,

Sharon Black

Both CVS and Walgreens wrote Mrs. Black quickly, informing her that the corporation did agree with her that it was a bit unfair to refuse to fill a customer’s legally obtained prescription, but these companies felt obligated to allow employees to act on their sincerely held beliefs. Interestingly, Target Corporation demanded to know the location patronized by Mrs. Black before they would offer an answer. Whether this was an attempt to identify Mrs. Black as a crusading phony or a hot-to-trot slut with a year’s supply of Ortho Tri-Cyclen, I didn’t know.

“Has no one pointed out the obvious?” E sighed. “If you don’t believe in the Pill, maybe a career in pharmacy isn’t right for you, idiot!”

“I don’t believe in Viagra,” K offered hopefully. “But that’s probably just because I’m a lesbian.”

“As someone who hopes to have hetero sex when I’m old, I’m for it,” I said. “But if a guy can control his sexuality with Viagra, a gal has the right to control her sexuality too.”

E brightened. “Viagra is not for procreative sex!” she shouted, as our alarmed waiter dropped a plate of tater tots on the table and ran. “A religious nut would deny the Pill should also deny an 80-year-old man his Viagra! He’s not planning on being a father!” She scribbled these thoughts in her notebook, the place where she cooked up her best plots. E was, in fact, bypassing me for the Best Feminist title. That’s easy to do when you’re not constantly distracted by pregnancy-related constipation–the Grumpy’s appetizer menu was wholly fiber-free.

I told E and K the story of panicking at my own pharmacy several weeks before [during a scary second trimester bout with the flu], certain that my pharmacist would yell across the store that this SICK, DISGUSTING PREGNANT LADY was trying to procure CODEINE in a twisted attempt to GET HIGH and DESTROY HER BABY’S BRAIN!!! After all, we’d heard of restaurants refusing to serve obviously pregnant women wine, whether in the glass or in the soup. “You’re absolutely right,” E said. “It won’t stop with contraception. They want to regulate everything about our lives.”

“Would a pharmacist be able to deny the drugs that treat HIV?” K asked. “Because the person who needs them is a sicko gay pervert and he deserves to die?” She paled.

E looked up from her notebook. She had a determined, patriarchy-smashing smirk on her face. “Oh, it’s on, ladies,” she said. “The new CVS in north Minneapolis opens in two weeks and we will be there.” Best Feminists do not debate; they decide. E’s troops could only chew on tater tots and await their instructions.

Our marching orders were to round up all of our friends, print up a batch of signs and appear at the new CVS on the date she assigned. I allowed Matt to take Elliott for the morning, but I recruited my sister and her three-year-old son to join us. Like Elliott, he was a good recruit for any action involving stomping and yelling. This morning he was more sluggish than usual, preferring to snuggle into his stroller while he snacked on the donut holes I provided. I waddled over to the crowd and flipped over my sign for E’s approval. In black sharpie against a yellow background, I wrote: NEED THE PILL FROM CVS? THIS COULD BE YOU! I rubbed my chubby, overalled belly for effect.

[unfortunately, the glare on this photo obscures the top half of my sign, but trust me, that's what it said.]

“Holy shit,” E said. “Shannon, you are the best feminist in the entire universe.”

I thought so.

Excerpt from chapter six, “The best feminist in the America”:

I was born in 1971, a great time to be a feminist baby. It was the Free to Be…You and Me era, and my parents were two baby boomers who, while not quite flower children, took to heart the political upheavals of their generation. We wore that record out. In our house, all people were equal and everyone had unlimited potential.

Outside of our house was another matter. Outside of our south Minneapolis bubble, the world didn’t look quite as free as Marlo Thomas promised. As much as I adored Princess Leia (and felt the first stirrings of heterosexuality whenever Han Solo smirked), I didn’t fail to notice that she was the lone girl in a literal universe of boys. Despite the big-ass weapon she wielded on the Tantive IV, she was still captured and imprisoned, wholly dependent on a hot space cowboy to rescue her. Little did I know that by the third movie she’d hardly be clothed.

Free to Be…You and Me provided a much-needed inoculation, but it failed to protect me completely. In one of my greatest regrets in life, I passed on the chance to study the drums in fourth grade because I dared not be the school band’s only girl. Instead, I took up the clarinet. I played it semi-happily for three years, unhappily for another three, then gave it up forever, despite my guidance counselor’s advice that music would look good on my college applications. All the while I listened to Gina Schock bring the thunder on my Go-Go’s albums, slapping out the beat on my thighs and wondering what she had that I didn’t.

In ninth grade, I talked my dad into letting me take a six-week crash course in guitar at the local Schmitt music. Included in the cost was rental of an imitation sunburst Fender strat with an amplifier the size of a large toaster. As the only female in the dingy practice room, I felt the disapproving stares of my all-male class every time my “Smoke on the Water” came out wrong. The male instructor said I needed to clip off my the nails of my left hand in order to hold the chords correctly. Trimmed nails?! Was he insane?! I was a fifteen-year-old hetero GIRL, for god’s sake! I wasn’t free to be anything, and that included a girl with short nails!

After the session I didn’t re-enroll.

I mention these musical failures because when Riot Grrrl appeared in the early nineties, I burned with jealousy when I saw what the women of Bratmobile and Bikini Kill were able to do. These women were my peers–nerdy, silly, college aged kids with a passion for feminism and punk rock. What did they have that I didn’t?

GUTS. And the shame I’ve felt from my tremendous lack of guts has haunted me ever since. Finally learning the drums in my mid-thirties helped, but those years I could have spent rocking are gone and they are not coming back. No one wants to go to the Turf Club to watch a band of Riot Moms, least of all me.

[In 2004 I become pregnant with my second child. Matt and I both fainted with joy when the ultrasound at twenty weeks revealed she was a girl.]I wanted a little ME. I wanted to succeed where my mother, often through no fault of her own, failed. My daughter would learn the drums. My daughter would know that wearing makeup is a choice, not an obligation. She would study physics and engineering and be granted tenure at M.I.T. Or she would study at Yale Law just like her idol, former president (!) Hillary Clinton, and she’d storm her way through the Washington establishment until her appointment to the Supreme Court.

My daughter would be so immune to patriarchy that she would be not only the best feminist in America, she’d be the best feminist in the WORLD!