A tribute to my female forebears

I have a confession: For an embarrassingly long time, I didn’t think that we still “needed” feminism.

I was the oldest child of two oldest children. On my mother’s side, our female lineage was… well, “abnormal” has a negative connotation, so perhaps “exceptional” is a better word (although knowing what I do about these women, they would’ve rolled their eyes and gone about their day if they heard that term).

My great-grandmother was in the first graduating class that accepted women at a major Northeastern college. She raised five children while also helping to support the family due to her alcoholic husband’s inability to hold a job. I never knew her; she was long gone by the time I arrived, but I heard the stories.

Her eldest, my grandmother, fell in love with math and science early in life. She studied those topics as well as Latin in college, before being forced to temporarily end her academic career due to marriage. (After all, who needs a degree if you already have a husband?) Not that it stopped her — she worked in biological testing facilities and, when my grandfather and his cohorts were shipped off to WWII, she trained to become one of the (sadly, nearly forgotten) working on military aircraft. She went on to have eight children, and become a teacher and the primary breadwinner for her family. She was a woman of steel.

My mother was her eldest daughter, and she rebelled in a way that may seem almost comical to some. She…