The Before

Forty Fifty; Volume 83

My mother didn’t call herself a feminist. Neither did I, for a long time.

Not because I didn’t believe in the concept itself, I did, bone-deep, but because I didn’t have the language. Gen X, you know the deal. We didn’t exactly have the vocabulary handed to us. We were the generation that was told to be grateful, to not make it weird, to handle it. And mostly, we did. We put our heads down. We figured it out. And somewhere in the process of doing all that figuring, we internalized a lot that we’re still working to unlearn.

I read something this week about biblical patriarchy that sank my stomach. The women who live inside it and who believe we should hand back what generations of women fought to win. It’s upsetting for obvious reasons. But mostly because beliefs like these, just a few years ago, would have been considered beyond the fringe. At least to say out loud. And yet, here we are.

This isn’t the boiling frog. This is deliberate. An entire generation is being told the 1950s were the golden age. Yikes.

Midlife has a way of cracking things open. The patience you had for nonsense runs out. The performance gets exhausting. What’s left, if you let yourself look, is something closer to what you actually believe. For me, that’s meant arriving more fully at feminism not as an ideology but as a lived practice. Recognizing the fire I had always been told was “too much” not as a problem to manage but as one of the core things that makes me, me. That took time. A lot of it. A lifetime.

And now I’m afraid. For myself. For women and girls. It feels much more dangerous these days. And while there’s momentum around being able to talk, really talk, about our bodies and ourselves, I’m just not sure how long it will hold. We didn’t think they’d gut Roe until they did.

I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit lately, and she gives language to something I’ve been circling. Hope, she writes, is not a lottery ticket you sit on the sofa clutching. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

An axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

I keep returning to that. Because the girls coming up behind us — our daughters, nieces, the young women we mentor or follow or quietly watch — they are growing up inside this. They don’t have the before. We do. We were there when the language didn’t exist yet. We watched institutions fail, navigated systems that weren’t built for us, were the most competent person in the room, and still got talked over. That knowledge is not abstract or soft-focused wisdom. It is hard-won, and it is specific, and right now it is needed.

We can’t afford to be quiet. To assume someone else will handle it. To save our energy for later. Later is now.

There are a hundred ways to show up, and only you know which one is yours. Write. Vote. Tell the young women in your life what you’ve seen. Be visible in your own convictions. Read. Commune. Stay.

Audre Lorde wrote that our visibility, the thing that makes us most vulnerable, is also the source of our greatest strength. I think about that when I want to go quiet. Use it.

XO

Ali, Forty Fifty

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