Dear POTUS: Why do I have to be someone’s daughter for you to think I deserve rights?

In the last four years, President Obama has done some great things for women: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, expansion of women’s health services under the Affordable Care Act, support for Planned Parenthood. And I was happy last night, in his State of the Union address, to hear him push for Congress to vote on the Violence Against Women Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act.

But I was disheartened by his reasoning for why Congress should do these things: “We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence.” [emphasis mine]

My worth as a woman, and as a person, is not imbued by my relationship to someone else. I should not be granted rights and protections because I am somebody’s wife, mother, daughter, or sister. I deserve those rights and protections by virtue of my status as a person and as an American citizen. (NB: Immigrant women absolutely deserve those rights as well, but let’s save that for another post.)

It’s also tremendously insulting to the women who serve in our Congress and Senate, and assumes that the default for a legislator is male. Believe it or not, some of those women vote on equal rights legislation because they want those protections for themselves (Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Virginia Fox notwithstanding, who as traitors to their sex last night actually shook their heads while President Obama talked about the Paycheck Fairness Act).

President Obama actually used that phrasing twice last night. The second time was when referring to the newly lifted ban on women in combat: “We will draw upon the courage and skills of our sisters and daughters, because women have proven under fire that they are ready for combat.” Is the strength of the incredibly brave women in our military really so important because it comes from someone they’re related to? I’d think the achievement of these women is extraordinary because of what they, as individuals, have gone through. Disappointing, also, is the focus on women’s ability to serve in combat roles to protect the United States, without mention of the United States failing to protect these women from unprecedented levels of sexual assault while serving in our military branches and academies.

I’ve noticed this trope time and again in President Obama’s speeches and decision-making. He has used this “our wives, mothers, and daughters” phrasing many times before. But focusing on the women and girls in one’s life when considering the consequences or benefits of a decision has not always helped women. President Obama cited concerns about his daughters having access to emergency contraception when going against the science- and evidence-based recommendations of the Food and Drug Administration to make Plan B available over the counter to girls under the age of 17.

Boys and men are frequently implored to think of abstract women in relation to themselves – what if she, the woman you’re harassing or thinking of raping, was your sister, your girlfriend, your mother? How would you feel if someone did that to her?

Well I am someone’s sister, someone’s girlfriend, someone’s daughter. But I don’t think that I should be able to walk down the street without being cat-called or followed or assaulted because someone suddenly realizes that I could be their sister, their girlfriend, their mother. I should have the right and the freedom to walk down the street unmolested because I am a person. Because I am a woman who should have all the same rights and bodily autonomy as that man who yells as I pass that he wants to touch my breasts and then calls me a bitch and follows me home when I have the gall to ignore him or call him out on his misogyny.

So please, Congress, don’t deign to grant me rights because I could be a woman that you know. Grant me those rights because I am a woman, and because that alone is enough.

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Feminism is in my blood

On my left shoulder blade sits a tattoo of a yellow rose. Both of my maternal great-grandmothers were named Rose, and I’m named after one of them. The yellow rose is also my mom’s favorite flower. Above the rose, in Hebrew script, is the word haisha. Woman.

When my mom first saw the tattoo she was pretty furious, even though she hadn’t been too demonstrably upset by the other two I’d had inked previously. But she seemed to calm down a little once I told her that she was the reason I’d gotten it.

You see, my mom is the reason that I’m a feminist. And my grandmothers, and my great-grandmothers, and I wanted to pay tribute to all of them for forming the core of my identity.

My Nanny Rose, the one I was named after, was a suffragette. Born in 1897, she was educated in school through the eighth grade, but was offered a job on the first day of ninth grade and never resumed her formal education. She became a bookkeeper for a toy train company, stopped working for a while to raise my grandmother, and then returned to bookkeeping about 14 years later. My grandmother reports to me that Rose “never had any question that women could do anything” and raised her accordingly.

The other Rose, my maternal grandfather’s mother and my brother’s namesake, went to work in the defense plants at the onset of World War II. She was actually a Rosie the Riveter! She had no formal education as a girl in her native Russia, but eventually learned to read and taught herself English in order to pass the citizenship test in 1938. One of my paternal great-grandmothers was one of the founding members of Hadassah, the Jewish women’s group.

Nanny Rose’s daughter, my maternal grandmother (also Nanny), became a teacher. In those days, teaching was considered an ideal profession for women because they could be home in the afternoon along with their children. She only stopped working for two years after my mother was born, and then went to graduate school for her masters and PhD while still teaching high school, and later college.

Nanny was a contemporary of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, becoming active in the feminist movement and as a feminist academic around the time The Feminine Mystique was becoming widely read. Nanny wrote her PhD thesis on “The Changing Role of American Women.” In the 1970s she became the Director of Career Development at the City University of New York (CUNY), counseling young women on career opportunities. She was also active as a member of the CUNY Women’s Coalition, which won a major lawsuit against the university for discrimination against women in their recruitment, hiring, promoting, and retaining of female faculty.

After retiring and moving to Massachusetts, Nanny started volunteering with a local rape crisis hotline. As part of the training, she says, they were instructed in “what to tell girls about how to avoid being raped.” She asked, “why don’t we just instruct men not to rape?” So she started the Real Men Don’t Rape campaign. She did some fundraising, had billboards put up in the area, had a Letter to the Editor published in the New York Times, and distributed informational packets to local high schools. These types of campaign are far more common now, but this was 25 years ago. About 10 years ago, Nanny gave me her copy of Transforming a Rape Culture, which really opened my eyes to so much history, and to ongoing activism to address the rape culture and crisis. I consider this one of the most transformative moments in my feminism.

In her own right, my mom is an ardent feminist, and was a trailblazer for women in the legal profession. As a young, pregnant associate at a BigLaw firm in 1982, she and another pregnant associate advocated for the creation of a standard maternity leave policy that would allow women the flexibility to care for a newborn, and still return to work. This was ten years before the passage of the Family Medical Leave Act.

I don’t recall my mom ever sitting me down and telling me about how to be a feminist, apart from always being told that a girl can do anything a boy can do, that my gender shouldn’t hold me back from any career I want, and that pro-choice was absolutely the way to be. But she leads by example, lives her values, and always supports me in whatever activism I want to do. Thanks to her encouragement, and being raised knowing about my family’s activist history, I waged my first ever campaign at the age of 13, getting every kid in my middle school to sign a petition to Nike protesting the use of child labor in their manufacturing.

Recently, Gloria Steinem emotionally said at an awards dinner that she is “living out the unlived life of [her] mother.” I feel so lucky to have been raised and influenced by women who found fulfillment in their own careers and their own lives, such that there are no dreams left for me to take up on their behalf. It does feel like a lot of responsibility to live up to their accomplishments, sometimes, but I hope to blaze my own path and be an effective advocate for the next generation of feminist change.

But I feel so fortunate to know, also, that feminism is in my blood. In January of 1982, the Palm Beach Post published an article, entitled “For These Women, Feminism’s A Family Tradition.” It’s all about my mother’s, grandmother’s, and great-grandmother’s activism in the feminist movement, and how they were then advocating for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. The original copy of that article is one of my most prized possessions.

I’m still a few years off from trying to have a child of my own, but I have sometimes wondered whether I would even want to have a daughter. It’s so hard to raise girls these days, with the media environment, hypersexualization of young girls, and rampant levels of violence against women. But now, reflecting on all that the women in my family have accomplished, and how each has contributed to the next generation a strong, passionate feminist who fights for her rights politically and in her own professional world, I think I’d like to give it a shot.