Thank you Merle for your thoughtful response to this paper and for your open use of your own experience to convey how you understand the world. One of the effects of the Second Wave feminists' insistence on the idea that “the personal is political” is awareness that personal experience shapes how we see the world around us. People who grew up knowing hunger have a different view of food than people who were pushed to eat as much as their parents imagined they could hold. Learning a second language in early childhood made for flexibility of thought. Speaking a single language that was the same as that of all the people one knew made for a sense of certainty and commonality with one's group. For children of the Depression, money was something to be careful of not wasting. For those brought up in a consumer society, spending was fun and virtuous.
What is thinkable depends on the thinker's previous experience. When men have experienced growing up in male bodies with social expectations of what it is to be a real man, they think differently from women. And the reverse is true as well. We can explain ourselves to each other, but we can never experience exactly what another person experiences. So we rely on empathy and mutuality of interests to help us understand each other.
All of which is to say that your basic experience of gender equality in your family, overlaid by your later experience of gander inequality in your adolescence and young adulthood, has given you a rich perspective. And your willingness to recognize this in yourself and share it with others took courage and conviction.
What I find most interesting in what you wrote is your vision for the present and future. Having a worldwide epidemic makes it clear how connected we all are. If women are repressed and maltreated as part of
the culture in some places, how does that affect women in more open societies? Does it make us fearful? Do we have a responsibility to ask those places or those cultures to change their ways? What gives us the right to decide how others should live? Such questions come up around issues of female “circumcision,” rights to equal schooling, abortion rights, and equal pay for equal work.
Not having the answers, but paying attention to the questions, seems to me to open up a possible and necessary conversation. Thank you for doing that.