What ordinary things make you feel positive about feminism?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I hope it's ok to start this thread - I wanted to because I was thinking a lot about violence and rape and all the awful things that happen, and frankly, I would like to think about some of the positive stuff too. I'd like to remind myself of the dads and sons and brothers and male friends we've got who do 'get' feminism, and the women we know who 'get' feminism and use it to make other people's lives better - it's not always a pitched battle or a lonely thing.

So, I want to know, who are the ordinary people in your life who make you feel proud to be a feminist (they don't have to be perfect!), and what ordinary things do you do, that you're proud of, that you do because you're a feminist?

I'll kick off: my baby niece makes me so proud to be a feminist. She is wonderful and gorgeous and clever (naturally ... she is not much over a year old ). But what makes me feel really proud of feminism is that she's growing up as the apple of her parents' eyes and the whole family thinks she is wonderful and can do anything - that's something we ought to be able to take for granted but women didn't used to be able to, and women in other part of the world can't.

And my brother makes me feel proud to be a feminist, because without feminism, I don't think he would have been able to take on the role he does as easily as he does, and he is really working hard (I know it's hard, he and his wife say so) to share the parenting.

For me, ordinary things I feel proud of - I've not completely managed to buy all books by women this year, but the majority of the books I've bought have been books by women, and I like this as a little feminist thing I can do.

What about you?

She really is brilliant LRD She really, really wanted to go to university and was devastated that I would give that up for children (she had 5 children and never had the opportunity to go to uni or have a job outside the home). She really didn't know it was possible to go to uni and have a career once you had children.

Just thought of another one. I took the DC to a 21st birthday party a couple of weeks ago. Because of the structure of our company, it was quite a big crossover between work and family.(Not my family, I was invited through work)

I have had compliments about my DC from colleagues since, but they seem to fall in to two categories.

Firstly how confident my DD is, and secondly how kind my DS is.

Which is lovely, and accurate, and coming from a broad range of people.

Disregards the numerous shocked opinions I also got about the amount my very skinny children actually do eat

I'm glad we can have great tv programmes like Mad Men, which make the sexism of the 50's and 60's look ridiculous.

I'm off to work now - to my part-time professional job, where many of my male colleagues also work part-time, and my boss is a woman.

LRD woman doesn't mean exactly "man with a womb". It's much worse than that. It was wifman in Old English (wife comes from the wif root) and gradually the pronunciation altered to "woman", although we kept the original pronunciation in the plural. According to my etymological dictionary, the *wif root comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning either "shame" or "pudenda". So woman= shame/ pudenda +man.

*lady on the other hand has a much nicer etymology - "one who kneads bread" (although I suppose it does mean that even far back in the past women were expected to do the cooking!)

I haven't been able to find any reference to gentlewoman being used in reference to prostitutes. (although interestingly, gentle comes from a PIE root meaning "beget, produce" - think of generate, genus, genesis, all from same root)

I like a pint (or three) and I buy rounds.

I find that the wine for tasting is generally offered to whoever named the wine when ordering.

Can I shift the thread back to the ordinary things? DH works PT in a professional post and is a PT SAH Dad for a 3 year old. He has a job share, also a PT professional and a PT SAH Dad to 2 small boys.

They've never had any comments, either at work, or from their respective families, about their decisions to work PT or to be their children's primary carers - both mums work FT. It's good to see that this is less unusual than it would have been say 10 or 15 years ago, but it would still be nice to see more PT job opportunities for dads - DS has benefitted hugely from seeing so much of him.

Alexpolismum Thanks for the etymology explanation, I'd never come across that and it's highly distasteful.

I think (as many others seem to) that in common usage "lady" has connotations of appropriate behaviour etc and that woman is just more generic and the equivalent of man. Person is even better of course, if I can avoid it I'd use a non gendered term.

Interesting point about calling meetings to order; I think I'd just say "colleagues" or "quiet down now folks" or similar.

I've just seen an interesting debate about Julian Assange on Facebook, around how we shouldn't allow the extradition to the US business to allow us to be distracted from the rape charges. Lots of quotes from his lawyers etc. The debate is between about 6 people, 5 of them male, all abhorred by his actions and shocked that it's not being paid proper attention.

A female poster on the debate made a comment about how refreshing it was to see men publicly expressing such views, to which one replied that rapists being scum was pretty self-evident. Makes a good change from the Uni-Lad-Wahay! type banter normally associated with male students.

MN often makes me feel positive, because it's full of women who are kind and supportive to other women and who think in feministy ways, even if they don't identify as feminists.

The Olympics (still thinking about them, sigh) make me feel positive, because there was 2 glorious weeks of women being paid attention to for what they could do and not just how they looked.

(On a side note, I saw a clip of Chris Hoy hugging Victoria Pendleton and telling her what a great rider she was, and that made me feel positive too, that it's not just women recognising women, but also men.)

My partner recognises how hard it is to be a woman, recognises sexism when he sees it and very rarely indulges in it.

Regarding paying bills and tasting wine, it's something I've REALLY noticed recently in London that the person serving puts the bill directly in the middle, or offers the bottle of wine to both people.

I love this thread :)

My DH is a very big hairy (gorgeous :) ) Glaswegian who used to be in the army and likes to ride large motorbikes. He is also currently thinking about giving up work to see more of DS while I become sole breadwinner.

His boss, on retiring, told him in 1960s Wales there was no way he'd have been seen even pushing a pram, let alone becoming a SAHD - it would have been utterly inconceivable. I think of this sometimes to remind myself how far we've come in what is really quite a short time :)

This might sound odd, but the fact that people are surprised that I don't drive. It used to be taken for granted that the man would be driving. Now it is not.

I know it's ridiculous to link to a thread in this section, but otherwise you might miss this one and it made me so happy, I can't risk that. Here we are, make sure you click the links:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1542906-Bic-makes-pink-pens-for-her

Stuff like that, where random people on the net (well, you know, even more random than MNers) are saying funny, silly, feministy things and taking the piss about of idiotic sexism ... it makes me happy.

alex - I stand corrected, and, oh my lord that's horrible.

But to be positive - I do love how loads of us have great feministy men around. I like feministy men.