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So I’ve just started reading “Living a Feminist Life” by Sara Ahmed and wow. She talks about when you know you’re a feminist and it got me thinking about when I knew I was one. So here’s a thread about that. If you have a story about when you knew then please share! 
I was in my final year at high school here in NZ. I was taking Art History as a subject. My teacher was a bold, beautiful older woman who wore the most outrageous shade of blue eyeshadow. Eighties blue. In the nineties. She was glorious.
I know that I was a feminist before this class but so much of what she taught me crystallised that. But one moment in particular really revealed to me what I was up against.
It was during our NZ art section. And she asked the class (all girls, a single sex school) who considered themselves to be a feminist, my hand shot up in the air so fast I didn’t stop to think. There I was proud to put my hand up in the air.
My teacher, who I worshipped, looked at me with sad affection. Then it slowly dawned on me. In a class of about 25 girls I was the ONLY one with my hand up. The only one.
I was bewildered. Why the f**k am I the only one I thought? What is wrong with these girls. I guess my teacher looked at me with sad affection because she was worried this might make me give up my feminist ways. Ummm nope.
But it did make me realise, for the first time in my life, that I was in a minority. It threw me. How on earth could you even be a woman without being a feminist. How could you not want equality? How could you think we already had it?
It’s the first time I remember being a feminist and naming it publicly. And in that moment that I thought would be solidarity, I was curiously alone - save for my teacher.
The very next year I went on to university. Purely because of that teacher I enrolled in Women’s Studies. The first cohort ever. I revelled in it. It literally changed my life.
The year after first year I went back and saw my teacher, she was still wearing her blue eye shadow 
. I told her I was doing Women’s Studies and loving it. Before I said anything she replied...
. I told her I was doing Women’s Studies and loving it. Before I said anything she replied...
I hope you didn’t do that because of me 
. She must have known that somehow she had a hand in that. I mean she really did. Her name was Ms Fullarton- I think! And she allowed me to grow to be the feminist I am today.
. She must have known that somehow she had a hand in that. I mean she really did. Her name was Ms Fullarton- I think! And she allowed me to grow to be the feminist I am today.
I often think of her, and wonder how the rest of her life went. She did go on to tell me that the only reason she taught nz art (ok I know this is very problematic re Māori art) was to cover the module on feminist art in NZ. She said she hoped it sparked something.
She wanted it to spark something for the girls she was teaching. Well, Ms Fullarton, you lit a fire in me so many years ago. The feminist flame was there, but you fed it the fuel. And that is how I grew into my feminist fire 
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