As my friends and I moved through the ‘March for Women’s Lives’
today, dressed in our uniform hoodies and New Balances, cell phones
and crumpled bills in our pockets, we spontaneously started rapping
Salt & Peppa lyrics from our middle schools years: ‘If I want
to take a guy/home with me tonight/ain’t none yo business!’ We were
fourteen again, giddy and dancing along Pennsylvania Avenue. Older
women dressed in bright pink T-shirts with fanny packs sensibly
filled with water bottles and snacks smiled at us lovingly,
elbowing their friends and pointing at the newbees. After a few
verses we unconsciously segued into ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T’ by Aretha. We
belted it out. We danced among the beautifully wrinkled veterans.
We became, once and for all, our mother’s daughters.
I am 24-years-old and I have long been searching for a way to
feel whole within the women’s movement. When I found a copy of
Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
on my shelf as a young girl, signed to my mom and me (a present
from my dad), I was embarrassed. I thought feminism was ugly, that
it meant shunning my Barbie epics and Belinda Carlisle.
But when I hit adolescence and every young woman I knew fell
apart (eating disorders, teen pregnancy, relationship abuse), I
felt too alone not to seek a movement, a community, an ideology
that could explain the seemingly automatic disintegration. Hip hop
spoke to my outrage, but females were all but invisible in the high
school ciphers I witnessed and surely weren’t on the radio in
force. Feminism still felt like my momma’s revolution, but I knew I
had to get down with it somehow.
Today, for the first time really, I did. Today I felt
recognized and protected. I felt moved and hopeful. I felt strong
and respected. But most profoundly, I felt very much a part of
something… 1,000,000 women — wrinkled and rapping alike — away
from being alone.
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