Roll Call

Let's face it: being a woman and a feminist can be rough. While it isn't easy to write about the challenges and frustrations we face, we do seem more eager to jump to the pen with those things. So let's focus on a different truth: being a woman and a feminist? IT ROCKS!!!

Because the world ought to see just how much it rocks, I put this before my fellow bloggers: write an entry about an occasion where you had a FANTASTIC experience with your feminism or your womanhood! Did you attend a powerful protest? Put an authority figure's foot in their mouth? (I don't know about you, but I love that.) Have a successful debate in which you opened someone's mind? Did you just experience a miscellaneous, empowering moment in which you had to stop and tell yourself, "Wow! I love being a woman!"

Out with it! Tag "AGA Roll Call: Something Positive"!

I've been thinking about this issue for weeks, now, and debating about how to raise it here on AGA. Ultimately, I decided, that it was important enough to include, even if no one chooses to write about it, as an old-fashioned (dare I say that?) consciousness-raising.

Since I moved, I've noticed a phenomenon that my friends tell me is far more widespread than I'd realized. In public- bars or coffeeshops- an older man, say, in his 50s or 60s, will be hitting on a girl who's clearly underage, or just barely into her late teens/early 20s.

What's a day in the life of a young feminist like, from start to finish? Not a special day, not a day your autobiographer will write about, just a plain old, average day.

Take notes on a day in your life, or reflect on a day at day's end. You can make a checklist that goes hour to hour, you can be more creative and spin a line or two of prose for each hour that passes. You can tell us all the things your body does, and/or all the places your head and heart go. You can pick a day that started like any other, but brought you to an unexpected place: a morning that begins, for instance, with walking the dog, checking email and packing a lunch can culminate with the loss of a friend, or with something happening in your neighborhood that makes the morning's seemingly dull activities take on new meaning.