by Shruti Swamy

Far from a generational divide, the author, as a young feminist, finds sustenance in the ways the women in her family handled their more limited life choices.

The author's grandmother, Baa, at her house in Mumbai.

It’s hard for me to imagine what my grandmother’s youth was like, spent in rural and then urban India. At 16, she was arrange-married to a man she had met once years before, at 17 pregnant with her first child, by 21 the mother of three young children. There are few pictures of her from that time, so I’ve made them up for myself; Baa on her wedding day in hot, heavy clothes; Baa working in the green fields through her first pregnancy, chewing ginger for strength; Baa with another baby in her arms, cooking dinner for her family.

I had been thinking of her when I first read in the New York Times about a perceived generational divide in feminist responses to the Stupak amendment (“In Support of Abortion, it’s Personal v. Political”). Feminists who remembered a time when abortion was illegal expressed an urgency to take action that they felt was lacking in later generations. Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote that long-time feminists like NARAL Pro-Choice President Nancy Keenan tend to view reproductive choice “in stark political terms—as a right to be defended, like freedom of speech or freedom of religion.” A later blog post for Newsweek quoted University of Maryland assistant professor Kristy Maddux, who specializes in historical feminism, saying younger women “don’t have any reason to believe that it matters if they go out and protest. Instead, they talk about their positions to friends and neighbors.”

In these discussions, I am caught again and again by the word “choice,” referring to a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, and in a larger sense, to afford to women the same choices and freedoms as men. My grandmother, as a young woman, had few choices. She could not choose to stay single or childless or not work to support her family. And yet, she managed to change her life by staying in school—while many of her peers dropped out when they got married—and even made it through college. Years later, my mother also made a choice that she was not allowed to make when she enrolled in a prestigious engineering school in India where the student body was less than one percent female. And now, like other women in my generation, I am the beneficiary of the struggle of their choices, standing in front of so many more open doors.

It’s a temptation to say that too many choices have left young feminists apathetic, an unwritten implication hovering over these articles. I sometimes long for my understanding of what the sixties was like—a time when movements and marches were overwhelming and effective, and issues were urgent and full of moral certainty. Now, yes, we must fight for reproductive rights, but also for same sex marriage, and against global warming and the war in Darfur—all complicated and inextricably linked. Like activists who came before us, we must make the hard choice of which issues are the most urgent; while the idea of a feminist movement, or what it means to be a feminist, seems more fractured every day.

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