Educated

street and into a café. The cashier was impatient so I chose at random. She
passed me a doll-sized cup with a tablespoon of mud-colored liquid in it, and
I looked longingly at the foamy mugs Katrina and Sophie carried to our table.
They debated concepts from the lecture; I debated whether to drink my
coffee.
They used complex phrases with ease. Some of them, like “the second
wave,” I’d heard before even if I didn’t know what they meant; others, like
“the hegemonic masculinity,” I couldn’t get my tongue around let alone my
mind. I’d taken several sips of the grainy, acrid fluid before I understood that
they were talking about feminism. I stared at them as if they were behind
glass. I’d never heard anyone use the word “feminism” as anything but a
reprimand. At BYU, “You sound like a feminist” signaled the end of the
argument. It also signaled that I had lost.
I left the café and went to the library. After five minutes online and a few
trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books
written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers—Betty Friedan,
Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir. I read only a few pages of each book
before slamming it shut. I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never
said it aloud.
I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the
books of the second wave for those that preceded the first—Mary
Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. I read through the afternoon and into the
evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt
since childhood.
From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy
and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was
motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be
one was to be a decider. To preside. To call the family to order. To be the
other was to be among those called.
I knew my yearning was unnatural. This knowledge, like so much of my
self-knowledge, had come to me in the voice of people I knew, people I
loved. All through the years that voice had been with me, whispering,
wondering, worrying. That I was not right. That my dreams were perversions.
That voice had many timbres, many tones. Sometimes it was my father’s
voice; more often it was my own.
I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery
pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John