Raising a Child in a Feminist Manner: Women's History Month 2019

In this post introducing Women’s History Month, I would like to start at the beginning of a girl's life when she is socialized to be a girl. My subject matter is the most important female in my life. That is my daughter, R. Her name means queen. She is gorgeous! Yes, she is physically pretty, but I mean her soul, her kindness, and her smile and laughter can cure mild bouts of depression.

According to Wikipedia, “Intersectionality considers that various forms of social stratification, such as class, race, sexual orientation, age, religion, creed, disability and gender, do not exist separately from each other but are interwoven together.” In raising my daughter, my partner and I are using an intersectional view of feminism, and are conscious of the different aspects of her identity, such as sex, gender (sex and gender are different things), race, ability, sexual orientation and more. To do this we have had to raise her slightly differently which I will explain.

I first want to mention the issue of race because I just came from writing a lot about that last month for my Black History Month Series. My daughter was adopted. My partner is white, I am biracial, and my daughter is black. A family with people of all different colors feels completely normal to me since that’s like the family I grew up in. I designed an entire syllabus on black history and culture starting from the Middle Passage to the present. We started with watching 'Roots". Next we watched a DVD series called 'The African Americans' with Louis Gates Jr., which has several DVDs featuring different parts of black history, and I got my partner to read a good book on the Civil Rights movement called 'We Shall Overcome' by Herb Boyd. But as the baby came the “class” I designed had been put on hold. There are things my white partner will not understand because he is white and didn’t have a lot of experience with black people (even though the only woman he dated before me was black). And unfortunately, because my color is noticeably different than my daughter’s, she might receive different treatment than me. We have been thinking about this. I think I will be talking to black friends about different issues, as well as how to do her hair, and if there is anything I am missing or need to know about the black experience since I grew up around more white people. But now, as a 2-year-old, she doesn’t know race. Isn’t that wonderful! So refreshing!

She also doesn’t know gender. How beautiful! People learn gender quickly. Its because right from birth people start treating boys and girls differently. I knew ahead of time I was not going to treat my daughter based upon what was between her legs (all this was probably planned out a long time ago whilst daydreaming in Women’s Studies classes). I heard on NPR that children learn gender at 3 or before. Many children know it before because adults stress it. We have gone out of our way to not stress it, but I knew she would be put into the gender of female sometime, and sooner than I wanted, since she goes to daycare. R. may mean queen, and that’s generally female, but she’s not female in gender, even though she is in sex, until she tells us at a mature enough age to understand. She can express “both” or no gender. So, I can’t help when she learns gender, but I’ll share some ways that we are not pushing gender down her throat. I don’t want her to feel pressure to fit in the gender female if she is not comfortable with it.

Some of the things I have done is shop for unisex clothing and shop in the “boys” and “girls” sections of the store. She wears a lot of “girls” clothing for two reasons. One is because that is what people buy for presents, which we are thankful for, and the other is because I like more of the girls clothing. A lot of the boys clothing has sports, racecars, or superheroes on them. I like boys’ shirts that have dinosaurs, robots, space, and the like, and like clothing that’s not all pink. And I really like plain clothing, but that’s hard to find in children’s clothing. Because I identify as female, I can’t help but have an eye for stereotypical girls’ clothing more, so it’s been a conscious decision for me to sometimes choose the “boy” item I don’t prefer just for balance.

Another thing I do is when we see people out the window, or in public, if they are adults, I call them “people” and if they are children, I call them “kids” or “people.”

I have done the same think with her toys. They are little “people” instead of being differentiated by gender, or what are stereotypical gender attributes, because there are no penises or vaginas on her plastic toy people that I’ve noticed (not that that makes your gender). I differentiate by saying one has brown hair or a green shirt. One day one of my daughter’s workers was at our house (she has a couple workers because she has a developmental delay- see, we can’t get away from an intersectional perspective if I present my daughter as a whole being) and she was referring to a toy that obviously had no gender, as “he”. This has always been a pet peeve of mine- just like when people say “mankind” instead of the inclusive “humankind”. This proves we live in a patriarchy when male is the GO-TO.

This is noticeable if you observe people play with children. Animals and unisex people, when we wouldn’t be able to know what gender they are, are called “he”. I would rather call something “it” or “they”. (Did you know “they” can be used as a singular pronoun. The purpose it is gender neutrality. I have even seen people on many occasions anthropomorphize things that have no humanity such as a ball or car and call them “he”. This kind of behavior androcentric at least, and sexist at most, even though that’s not the intention of many. I corrected her in a kind manner saying something like, “I’m not trying to correct you. You can, and you have a right, to do and talk, to other children the way you want, but we are trying to raise R. with a viewpoint that isn’t patriarchal, and that doesn’t perpetuate the male dominated system. And to use male or “he” as the default does this. So, if you wouldn’t mind not doing this with R. Thank you”. She took this very well and had never thought of it, like most people. That is why people should study feminism, because they may not realize they are perpetuating a patriarchal system that treats women as lesser than. The problem with so many issues is people need to, excuse my French, but get woke the F up!

Another issue with toys and gender is there are “girls” and “boys” toys. Even at the store there are girls’ and boys’ sections. The majority of toys my daughter has are from other people. Some of them are pushing a female agenda, but I think toys are getting better in general and there are so many gender-neutral toys. But because some of her toys are sometimes more on the “girl” side, I wait to see what people are going to buy her for her birthday or the holidays (and people have been very generous, so I haven’t had to buy many toys). Then I go out of my way to buy a couple cars and a dump truck to balance out her toys. I also have made toys for her, which I might feature in another post.

Sometimes I can’t help but say she is so adorable and cute, because she is. The messages we give her are important! I want her to have a sense of self-esteem, and I don’t want her self-worth to be based upon her looks, like girls and women are taught. So, we do praise her for stereotypical girl behaviors or characteristics like kindness, empathy, or gentleness, but I would encourage a boy to be like this as well. A lot of the time we also tell her she is smart, or she is strong. Once she was being a little rough with her toys and I started to try to get her to calm down, but then I realized what I was doing, what I was trained to do, what most people are trained to do. People wouldn’t stop a little boy from being a little rough, so I let her be a little rough as well.

And one more intersectional issue is sexual orientation. Some people would say why are you thinking about that now. Well, people start to, even at the age of 2, joke that a girl and a boy together are boyfriend and girlfriend, but never say the same thing about two little girls or boys. R. is bi, as a neutral point, until she tells us otherwise. We are not raising her as heterosexual. Unless you make a point to do otherwise, you are raising your child heterosexual in this society, which supports a heteronormative worldview.

We have not come across issues with this yet, but once people start to say, "When R. grows up, her husband blah, blah blah," and such; we will say, “Yes, or her wife. Do go on, but we wanted to be inclusive, letting you know R. is not being raised heterosexual.” My partner is straight, but we met through a same sex couple he went to college with so he already knew some things about being LGBT, and because he has such a mild manner people have thought and asked if he was gay. He’s confident with who he is so this doesn’t bother him. He knows enough for now, how to not raise a straight child.

Now to wrap this up. Why are we raising our daughter a little differently? One, is we are living our beliefs. And two, is we are setting her up for having positive self-esteem, self-understanding and acceptance, as well as self-expression and self-exploration.

We are helping to create a child who thinks outside of the box; perhaps who smashes the whole damn box, and can not only understand her intersectional issues and how she fits in the world as a female, or male, but also understands others. And in this understanding herself, and being inclusive, she is also going to mix her natural compassionate and empathetic side with these attributes to hopefully work towards creating a more loving society.



I thought this was a funny thing my daughter did in the hospital a day or two after she was born. Naturally. By herself. I now like to think that she was perhaps making a comment about the patriarchy. Good girl; or boy!

This is Feminism in Action!