My mother married my father in 1998, in a wedding hall in Chennai, wearing a sari the color of pomegranate. She was twenty-four. Two weeks later, she started a savings account he did not know about. She has never told him. She has told me twice.
She does not use the word feminist. She thinks the word belongs to people on television, or to my cousins in America, or to the pale magazine on her friend's coffee table. She thinks the word is loud and English and slightly rude. She thinks it is not for her.
Here is what she did instead: she raised two daughters who were never told to be smaller. She paid for my flute lessons out of the account. She sent my sister to law school when the aunties said medicine. She sat me down at fifteen and told me, in Tamil, that I was allowed to change my mind about any man, ever, and that she would come get me.
She did not need the word. She was already the thing the word points at.
She did not need the word. She was already the thing the word points at.
I used to want her to say it. Now I understand: she doesn't have to. Feminism, as she practices it, is not a vocabulary. It is a bank account she opened alone at twenty-four and has never spent from. She is saving it. She has been saving it for me.
The girls are talking. Get in the conversation.