old fashioned feminists
Her shoes were blue. Her dress was not. She wore her hair bundled atop her head in a muted scarf; her lips in a kind of pout that wasn’t really a pout at all but a ‘what do I do with my mouth when it’s not forming words’ sort of set.
She called herself an “old fashioned feminist” and I made a note to find out exactly what an old fashioned feminist was – how the one generation different from the next. If it differed at all.
She said something about reading fiction against the whites of people’s eyes and then began to talk about beauty. And the woman. About how we are different in ourselves when we are different to others. How we are not like men. Or men are not like us. Whichever way it goes.
A woman loses her youth and her waist. Her bosom grows with the rest of her. People forget what she use to be. Sees only the now. She assumes the cheerful, matron-like image projected upon her. The nurturer – and nothing else.
“Women,” said this woman, this author “realise life is finite in a way men cannot. Maybe it’s the menopause. The time clock our bodies are always fighting against. The realisation we must have children soon and that life really isn’t equal… we know that we will die when men are still running around playing games and pretending they’re still at school.”
