ourselves can free our minds. Then I picked up my phone and dialed.
“I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse.—I ATTENDED A SEMINAR on Wednesday afternoons, where I noticed two
women, Katrina and Sophie, who nearly always sat together. I never
spoke to them until one afternoon a few weeks before Christmas, when
they asked if I’d like to get a coffee. I’d never “gotten a coffee” before—
I’d never even tasted coffee, because it is forbidden by the church—but
I followed them across the 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