The author describes in this cultural autobiography her self-discovery process through which she has gained a strong sense of self as a woman.  For her feminism is a cultural ideology that dictates her daily life.

I was born on the gulf coast of Texas in 1951 and raised in the land of the "good ole boys." My father's family had been immersed in the Catholic religion for generations and my mother converted to Catholicism when she married my father. Our large family's traditions, holiday celebrations, customs and values were tied to and defined by the Catholic religion. I attended Catholic schools from elementary school through college except for the public education experience I had during high school. I decided, at the age of six, that I wanted to become a Catholic nun, because that was the only path defined for me, as a woman, if I wanted to embrace my religion and spirituality.

Being raised in a small, conservative southwestern town shaped me in many ways. My family was known and respected in the town and I was recognized upon sight as being a member of my family. I could walk into banks and stores and call people by name, feeling accepted as a part of the community. Along with this warm close, small community came rather narrowly defined models of roles for men and women and expectations for behavior. The Catholicism of my childhood clearly modeled rather rigid roles for men and women.

I had a sense, rather early on, that I did not quite fit the standards for feminine behavior and dress. I was a tomboy who was the most gifted athlete in our neighborhood games of softball, baseball, football and basketball. As the strongest, fastest, most coordinated sportswoman, I was usually the first chosen when teams were calling sides. Playing dolls, for the most part, was boring to me; instead I loved attaching roller skates to my tennis shoes and skating endlessly around my driveway with the neighborhood girls. I remember when my mom allowed me get leather cleated shoes to play softball with the girls' team. I loved them so much that I slept with them on my pillow at night. I was bewildered when, after one season with the softball team and my beloved "cleats," my mother never allowed me to play softball on the team again. Now I understand what drove her decision. My mother kept trying to direct me to the sports that were "ladylike" and socially acceptable for girls. So I ended up on the swimming and diving teams every summer.

In high school, I "tried out" for the basketball team and made the team. However, my mom felt this was not very acceptable and pressured me to fill my afternoons with ballet dancing and art lessons. I was OK with that at the time, because I did love dancing and was also artistically inclined, especially drawn to music and acting. I now realize that my mother was battling some secret, unknown enemy: the tendency I had towards "masculine" (athletic) behavior had to be curtailed and controlled. I threw myself into music, learning to sing and play the guitar and formed a singing group of four young women who performed at assemblies and throughout the town. I sang with both the women's and mixed choirs and was cast in several plays and musicals during my high school career. As a result, my athletic pursuits took a back seat during my high school and college days. The implicit message about "acceptable" feminine behavior had been successfully implanted. I understood that I had to act and dress in a carefully prescribed way in order to be an appropriate woman and be attractive to the opposite sex. My mother's job was to create a woman who could catch a man. Being linked to a man in marriage was essential to the social acceptability my mother saw as paramount to happiness, and even to survival itself. So, I did catch a man and married at age 20.

In my family, males were raised with power and privilege, taught how to function in the world and given freedoms the females did not have. The females were to be sheltered and "taken care of" by males, taught not to "worry their heads" over business, financial, or legal matters. Women dieted to stave off the worst thing that could happen to them (fat).  They developed a sense of taste and style in clothes, and dressed well. Women learned how to interact socially, make "small-talk," wear makeup, look pretty, raise the children and keep a beautiful home. Men were raised to do the "manly things:"  make the living, take care of legal/financial matters, keep up the cars, mow the grass, "go drinking with the boys," and barbecue outdoors.

Interestingly, my mother was the more dominant, controlling figure in my family. She tended to enact a "mother" role to my father who was more passive and easy going.  He often played the role of a "little boy" and sometimes a rather naughty one. My mother always served my father's plate and, as he grew older, she controlled his diet for sugar and fat to increase his lifespan. she was the matriarch who carried out the discipline and decided how things were to be. She was a powerful woman in this sense and often quoted a saying that "I could do anything I wanted to do badly enough." Her position of power in the family was a saving grace in the complex depiction of sex roles of my childhood. Somewhere in the confusion a seed was planted that women are powerful. For this, I am grateful.

The family culture concerning sex roles was reinforced by the religion that was interwoven into the fabric of our family life. In Catholicism, men hold all positions of power, and as the male hierarchy ascends from priest to bishop to cardinal to pope, the power increases. It seems that the higher the position held by priests, the "holier" they are, and therefore, power equals holiness. The only position a women can hold in Catholicism is that of a nun, and nun's lives are usually dedicated to service, not leadership. Nuns do not make decisions, nor do they speak from the pulpit. Though it has happened more frequently in recent times, they are seldom appointed as heads of committees or organizations. They teach the children, sing with, accompany or direct the choir, and clean the sacristy. Only males are allowed to be altar boys and any time the topic is raised to consider women for the priesthood, the patriarchal hierarchy of the church immediately rejects the idea and suppresses discussion of it.

I attended a Catholic college which could have reinforced more of the same sex role stereotyping described above. The quality that made this experience distinctly different was that it was a women's college. Women held all positions of power in college government and organizations. There were no males with which to compete in the classrooms and we learned to trust our instincts, our intellects, and to speak our minds. Women there were expected to develop careers while becoming self-reliant and financially independent. It was a time of social upheaval during the late sixties and early seventies. We demonstrated and had moratoriums on campus, where we were given opportunities to speak out for what we believed. It was still the Catholic Church, but it was more a powerful women's community than anything else.

I married before my senior year in college and lived off campus with my husband for my last year. Actually, I "graduated" from being taken care of by my father to being taken care of by my husband. I felt cut-off and alienated from my women's community and was alone a lot while my husband worked long hours. Getting married activated all the old tapes about how a woman should be. I set about learning to be a great cook, decorating the apartment while keeping within our budget, and playing the support role to my husband in his new career even though I was going to school and student teaching full time. I lived this life for years and thought I was happy. I was gifted with two children and loved my maternal role. I stayed home to raise them, but a restlessness was growing in me. I became more and more unhappy, feeling somewhat imprisoned in my existence. I knew I had everything that anyone needed to be happy, and yet, I didn't feel happy. I had a close relationship with a woman friend, a relationship that supported my true self, and I began figuring out who I was.

I lost this relationship of eleven years when this woman married and moved away. I grieved the loss of this friend and this relationship which was the only safe place that permitted me to live and speak my truth. I soon began psychotherapy and spent five years working through childhood wounds, learning to love and accept myself. About four years into therapy, I remember the day when I realized that I felt like I was an actor playing a role in my life. I knew I could not continue the charade.

It was not long after that I met another woman friend with whom I could be myself in a way I had never experienced. She was thoughtful, intelligent, intimate, and spontaneous. I felt comfortable, alive, and free in her complete acceptance of me. When her husband took a nine month consulting job in Philadelphia, she and the children decided to go with him and enroll in an alternative, progressive school called the School in Rose Valley. After they relocated, she would call me sometimes and describe her children's experiences in this school. I had always had a vision of the kind of education I wanted for my children and had never found it in Texas. We began to formulate a daring plan for me to bring my children, enroll them in the school for one semester and stay with her family. My husband's company was going bankrupt and he would soon have to find another job and relocate anyway. As unlikely as it seemed at first, the more we talked, the more I wanted to have a travel and educational experience for my children and me.

I packed us up and drove to Pennsylvania with my friend and her family, who had come back to Texas for Christmas. My children had not yet been accepted in the school and I stepped out, knowing it was right and trusting it would work out. As soon as I walked onto the campus and spent time in the classrooms, I knew I had found the type of education and community that I had envisioned for years. I fit in a way I had never fit before. The interviews with my children went well and it was obviously a perfect match all the way around. By the time the semester ended, we had become a part of the school community and could not walk away from this experiential, whole child education nor the community that supported it. We loved the beauty of the place, the people, the seasons, and the shared living experience with my friend's family. Eleven years ago we all decided to stay in Pennsylvania and to live together, making our home in this place that seemed perfect for us and we are together to this day. I would identify this school community as my secondary culture.

During that time my husband and I were separated and we learned that we were happier apart and did not want the same things in life. I felt like a bird let out of a cage.  After I pushed through the initial feeling of panic to freedom, I slowly developed financial independence and learned to handle my own legal and financial matters. I began making my own decisions and felt like I had finally grown up and was an independent, strong adult.

Around 1992 my friend and I decided to attend The Michigan Women's Music Festival to experience a women's community for a week. What we found was a matriarchal society and culture, envisioned, created, and run by women. Only women could attend. It was a completely safe place for women, so hidden back in the woods of Michigan beyond dirt roads and farmlands that we had difficulty finding it the first time. We were immersed in an alternative, alien culture for an entire week that was like traveling to a foreign country. In this place, almost every woman reported having a singular but similar experience. The experience would go like this: a woman would be walking along a moonlit trail in the woods at night alone and suddenly feel fearful because she was alone at night. In the next instant, it would dawn on her that she was safe here and that there was no reason to be afraid. Relief at this thought would flood her until the next moment brought anger that all women must carry this fear. Care, vigilance, and observance of certain sets of rules are the only guarantee that women and children can be safe in the world. All too often, even when women follow all those safety rules, they still get hurt.   Every woman knows there is no absolute guarantee. The feared entity is not a monster or ghost, but men, the kind of men that prey on women and children. To have to live with and cope with this fear is an infringement on women's rights; it is wearing on their psyches and impacts their ability to move freely in their world.

In this matriarchal community I attended a seminar that riveted me and revolutionized my thinking about feminism. Kay Lee Hagan, a feminist speaker and writer, spoke eloquently of the internalized oppression of women and the need to educate all women of this fact. She spoke of the patriarchal world, where men inherit privilege and power. She pointed out that men control the economy, politics, and own most of the property in the world. I realized that this is true. She taught that feminism does not advocate the domination of women over men, but seeks the equality of women and men. In order for equality to occur, women would have to understand that they had internalized their own oppression, unconsciously accepting and supporting it. She also stated that men would have to be instrumental in bringing about this equality and that this revolution could not happen without their help. Men and women would both have to be educated and then form an alliance as co-educators of others concerning the rights of women.

As I listened, the images of my life ran through my head like a movie. I saw my own oppression and how I had unthinkingly accepted it for much of my life. I began to feel both angry and powerful; the anger was over the infringement of women's rights taking place every day. I began to understand how my family and the Catholic Church had unfailingly placed men in positions of power, while women were subjugated and placed in subservient positions. It remains true even after the women's movement that women are still paid significantly less than men for the same work. I realized that my husband and I had enacted the conditioning concerning men's and women's roles in our marriage. I had relinquished my power and freedom to that relationship without any realization of it. I understood for the first time why I became so unhappy in my marriage and why the relationships I had with my women friends had been my salvation. I had survived by receiving the strength of the women who had cared for and supported me. I also understood how the inequality had been damaging to men, who had been robbed of feeling their feelings, of expressing those feelings, and of the privilege of being vulnerable.

At that point I decided that educating people about feminism, which I now understood as bringing about the equality of men and women, is the most important contribution I could make to the world. I identified with women's culture and women's issues, embracing them as my own. It seems that everything came together for me in that week. My underpinnings were shaken and then reshaped with insight and the strength of embracing an ideology and moving forward.

Writing this cultural autobiography has helped me to formulate why I associate so strongly with women's culture. As my life stories poured out, I could see how all the experiences of a lifetime came together during a point of profound awareness in my life, an epiphany. This awareness began developing during my psychotherapy but did not completely synthesize until a few years later when I was immersed in a women's culture, listening to a great feminist teacher. The association I felt with the women's culture was intense and remains that way still.