My mother is a reader, especially of fantasy: Anne McCaffrey and Nora Roberts and Mercedes Lackey. I remember reading her copies of McCaffrey's Dragonsong and Dragonsinger when I was maybe eleven or twelve. Dragonsong is about a young woman, with red hair like mine, who feels disconnected from her large family; Dragonsinger is about the same young woman proving she belongs in a male-dominated world. I can't swear that that was my first step towards feminism, but it seems likely. Lackey's The Fire Rose, The Serpent's Shadow, The Gates of Sleep all deal explicitly with feminism as it existed in the early twentieth century. I don't understand how my mother can be feminist in her choice of reading material (not that McCaffrey's works are feminist today, but I understand they were in the seventies) and not in her beliefs. She and I had a fight a couple years ago when she discovered that some of the fiction I write is erotic—the scene in question wasn't any more explicit than one would find in any Roberts title, though unlike in any Roberts title, the scene was queer. The only writing I've shown her since is the short story collection I self-published under the name Elizabeth Conall, dedicated "To my mother". I don't think she's read past the dedication.

My mother is an Irish Catholic woman, the mother of five. So was her mother. Just over half of my female ancestors are Irish women. Sixteen percent English—surely I, like every other person of English descent, am an English princess, though the trick is to prove it—eleven percent German, eight percent unknown. Nearly all the rest are European, though there's a couple percent of Canadians (whatever that means, since Canada like the United States is a Native American land overrun by predominantly white people) and one stray Patawomeck woman. "Martha Fox", history calls her, and "Pocahontas's sister", Spelman family tradition holds. I wish I knew her name. Paula Gunn Allen says that "if American society judiciously modeled the traditions of the various Native Nations"—the traditions that held sway over this land when "Martha" was born—we would be living in a feminist utopia (Allen, 1986). I want to identify with "Martha". But only one-fortieth of one percent of my ancestry is Native American, unless there are more Native women hiding in that eight percent unknown, and the vast majority of me is European in ancestry. What right do I have to identify as anything but a white American?

My mother is an Irish Catholic woman, the mother of five, who has said in so many words that if she were pro-choice she would be a mother of four or only three, and aren't I glad she didn't do away with my youngest sisters before they were born? That isn't a fair question to ask. The potential my mother's fourth and fifth pregnancies represented has been, at least in part, realized: my youngest sister is nearing fifteen. The potential represented by Savita Halappanavar's pregnancy was never going to be realized at all (O'Brien, 2013), and the Irish Catholic law governing the hospital in which Halappanavar died, the Irish Catholic law that regards Halappanavar's fetus as more important than Halappanavar herself—Irish Catholicism murdered Savita Halappanavar. My mother would be appalled if she knew I were saying this.

My mother the other day expressed her dismay that I'm taking women's studies courses. Feminism is anti-woman, she said; women's studies curricula, anti-man. Betty Friedan's "problem that has no name" is not a worry for her, apparently. Neither are the facts that she's financially dependent on my father, that her education past her bachelor's has been sacrificed to raise her children and to ensure my father completed first his bachelor's and now his master's, that statistics say her daughters on average will each earn rather less over our lifetimes than her son will over his. She doesn't subscribe to Naomi Wolf's radical heterosexuality (Wolf, 1992); for example, where Wolf is not proud of making her partner do undesirable male-coded tasks, my mother is content that my father do the male-coded tasks whether desirable or not, leaving her the female-coded ones, whether desirable or not. Mostly not. My mother hates to clean.

My mother and I are very much alike, everyone says; we think alike, we speak alike, we read alike, we look alike. She started me towards feminism, but she didn't lead me there and she hasn't followed. She thinks I'll give up my left-wing political views and settle down to be a respectable Republican once I have more life experience; she has thought this for six years. She thinks if she just tells me to pray often enough I'll do it. She's stubborn that way. So am I. Quoth a decorative wooden block in my mother's living room, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, I am my mother after all."


Allen, P. G. (1986). Who is your mother? Red roots of white feminism. In G. Kirk & M. Okazawa-Rey (Eds.), Women's lives: multicultural perspectives (pp. 18-24). New York: McGraw-Hill.

O'Brien, L. (Summer 2013). No peace in the abortion war. Ms., 23(3). Retrieved from http://www.msmagazinedigital.com/msmag13/

Wolf, N. (1992). Radical heterosexuality. In G. Kirk & M. Okazawa-Rey (Eds.), Women's lives: multicultural perspectives (pp. 43-45). New York: McGraw-Hill.