I’m Tired Of Feminist Cliches.

Shoshana Kaufman
11 min readMay 10, 2023

Newsflash: the world has changed ladies. And some old-fashioned ideas still hold.

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Not a feminist. Just someone who believes in commonsense notions of equality and fairness

I do not identify as a feminist. I am a white female born in 1960, so I was brought up with feminism and a certain amount of Baby Boom privilege. I was three years old when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. I studied Simone deBeauvoir’s The Second Sex in university (and loved it).

My mother was and is a feminist. A supremely hypocritical one. Another disclosure: I love my mother but I don’t actually like her very much. That might have colored my response to feminism.

Back in the bad old days

My mother hated being a housewife and mother. She dreamed of having a career. And she would have had one if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with me at age 19. She was training to be an x-ray technician at a local hospital. This would have been a very good career for her. She is emotionally detached and pathologically immature. This job might have given her a little more of a sense of reality. She would have had to deal with patients and would have had to exercise self-control, two things she was never good at in my childhood experience of her. She…

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Shoshana Kaufman

Mother, grandmother, teacher, wife, food lover, spiritual searcher.