There’s a Microchip in My Head that Won’t Stop Planning a Wedding
It Keeps Trying to Undo the Feminism
Danielle and I took our assignments seriously. It was the first week of kindergarten and our teacher had just finished tracing outlines of our bodies on butcher paper. Armed with old coffee cans filled with acrylic paint, our job was to transform the figures into who we wanted to be when we grew up.
A few hours later and covered in pink and white paint, we proudly surveyed our work. Our mothers, on the other hand, were horrified. Danielle wanted to be a princess and expertly painted a tiara. I wanted to be a ballet dancer, and my painted tutu reached over the edges of the paper and dripped onto the gym floor.
“How do you know what a princess is?” asked Danielle’s mom, a Ph.D. in higher education, trying to keep her voice measured. “Same question!” my mother barked, not trying to do anything special with her voice at all. It was 1975, Danielle and I were five years old, and our mothers were convinced they had failed.
Our families had done everything they could to protect us from traditional gender roles. My father was a chemist and my parents dragged me to his lab early on to watch chemical-filled beakers change colors, draping white lab coat over my shoulders, strapping huge goggles onto my face and telling me that…
