When I was 7 I told my mum I wanted to be a nun when I grew up, because I thought that was the only alternative to getting married and doing hard, dirty housework all the time while your husband sat on his arse. I loved reading, you don't see women reading much, and I thought being a nun would be the way to keep reading after growing up, instead of cleaning things all the time.
However, although I had a sort of theoretical understanding of some feminist principles as long as I can remember (from my mum), it is only very recently, and not completely, that I have started to try to internalise that idea that I don't need to do more work than all the men in any given context. I just struggle so much with this, and it comes directly from my mum: she knows it isn't fair but that has no relationship to what she is actually going to do in any given situation. I find it very depressing that a whole generation later on can't progress this ridiculous situation. she is very catholic and there is a part of her that cannot ever hold back from putting herself at the very bottom of the pile. Except in a restaurant- which we hardly ever go to - I have never seen her sitting down in a chair while a man brings her a plate or a cup of something. Never.
things have changed as I have got older. i feel less throttled by the immediate rage of constant sexual harrassment (now I am too old for them to be bothered with me), but I feel a sense of barely contained panic about my daughters' eventual graduation to being objects of it. also I have a increased anger that my valuable time, which I am increasingly conscious of as a finite resource, is being dicked about with and appropriated by men, with an incredible sense of entitlement. I feel that keenly partly because I am older and have less time, but also because I have worked hard and am an expert in some fields and I feel like I deserve respect for this, in a way. Without wanting to be a dick about it, it is easier to be humble when you are young and you don't expect your labour to be treated as skilled, as you know it is not, and everything is potentially an opportunity to learn by doing the grunt work. Now it really wears me down that no matter how much top end I take on, the bottom end - none of it, at home or at work - gets taken away as I am assumed to be the class that rolls sleeves up and chips away at boring, dirty things till they are done.
Having grown up without having been sexually abused as a child or raped in war or anything like that, for me, the realisation came out of housework and still sits grimly, glumly there, a big ugly fetid toad on my life - the housework itself, and the resentment of it - like the one in Larkin's poem. roughly 3 times a year I will get so angry I throw things and it is always because I am the only person - the only person, in 10 years - who wipes the kitchen surfaces. No matter where I have been, no matter how disabled or immobile I am, what I have been doing, no matter how much work I have or what ever else I have done for the people in my house, I will never, ever, be able to walk into a kitchen and find it as clean as left it, or clean enough for me to start doing something without cleaning it first. I try to ignore it but there are days I get red mist about it.