Susan McLean, ‘The Only Feminist in High School’
Two roads diverged in high school when a student
chose to study women’s liberation
to write her senior paper. Though imprudent,
that choice provided her an education
in bias, inequality, derision,
The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique,
historical erasure, long division,
and talent gagged and shackled by physique.
She swore off make-up, wanted a career
but maybe not a family. She read
Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer,
and gave a speech on beauty, which, she said,
turned women into objects and betrayed
their goals. She didn’t want to be a mom
or movie star. When she went out, she paid.
Though never asked, she boycotted the prom.
The boys were baffled and the girls disdainful,
for who would want to talk to, much less date her?
And what she lost was obvious and painful,
while what she gained was only clear years later.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “This poem starts with the opening phrase from Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken‘ and it records a turning point in my own life of the sort that his poem describes. Though I hope that feminists are not such a rarity among high school students anymore, the term “feminist” is still so loaded that I tend to think of it as “the new F-word.” At one level, it still mystifies me that looking for equal opportunity and equitable treatment remains so controversial, but at another level, every society has been built on unequal opportunity and inequitable treatment since recorded history began, so it is not surprising that each step away from that system has made some people feel that the world was ending.
“I learned long ago that what a poem doesn’t say is as important as what it does say, so the ending of this one does not specify what was lost or what was gained. I want the readers to think about those things, so I don’t want to tell them what to think. As for why I wrote this in the third person, these events happened so long ago that it almost feels as though they happened to someone else. I am and am not that girl.
“The poem first appeared in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”
Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean
Photo: “Two Road Diverged…” by wackybadger is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
