Twenty years of columns, two books, and I froze completely the moment my own kid asked the question directly, over breakfast, with cereal still in her mouth.
My fourteen-year-old asked me, entirely out of nowhere over breakfast this morning, cereal still visibly in her mouth, what feminism actually means, a question I have spent close to twenty years answering professionally in columns, in two published books, in more panel discussions than I could possibly count, and I froze, genuinely, completely froze, staring at her over my own coffee like she had asked me to explain quantum physics rather than a subject I have built my entire career around.
I think the freezing itself is worth examining honestly, because it was not that I lacked an answer, exactly. It was that I suddenly had roughly forty different possible answers competing simultaneously in my head, the academic definition, the more personal, lived version I actually operate from day to day, the deliberately simplified version I might use for a general newspaper column, and none of them felt like quite the right one to hand a genuinely curious fourteen-year-old across a kitchen table on an entirely ordinary Tuesday morning before school.
What I eventually landed on, after a pause considerably longer than I am proud of, was something along the lines of feminism simply meaning that she gets to have exactly the same range of options, the same respect, and the same freedom to be fully, complicatedly herself that a boy her age automatically gets without anyone ever needing to fight for it on his behalf, and that the whole movement exists because, historically and still in plenty of specific ways today, that basic equality has not actually been the reality women and girls could simply assume for themselves.
She considered this for a moment, in the specific, slightly withering way teenagers consider most things their parents say, and then asked a genuinely sharp follow-up question I had not fully anticipated: whether I thought feminism had actually succeeded yet, or whether it was still, in her words, “a work in progress,” a phrase I am fairly certain she picked up from a school project rather than from anything I have ever said around the house. I told her honestly that it was very much still a work in progress, considerable progress made on some fronts, considerably less on others, an answer that seemed to satisfy her rather more than my original, more careful definitional attempt had managed.
I have been thinking about this whole exchange all day, genuinely unsettled by how much harder it was to actually explain something to my own daughter than it has ever been to write about it professionally for an audience of complete strangers. I think there is a specific vulnerability in trying to distill twenty years of professional thinking down into something a fourteen-year-old can actually use and hold onto, a considerably higher bar than simply writing something clever and well-argued for a newspaper column, because she is not just reading my words, she is going to carry whatever I actually tell her out into her own life and her own relationships in a way no anonymous reader ever quite does.
I think I am going to write her a proper letter, actually, something considerably more careful and considered than this morning’s flustered breakfast-table answer, laying out honestly what feminism has actually meant in my own life, its genuine successes and its genuine, ongoing failures, in language that is hers rather than borrowed from twenty years of professional columns written for an entirely different audience. I suspect it will be considerably harder to write than anything I have published professionally, precisely because it actually has to work, properly, for an audience of exactly one person I love more than any reader I have ever written for.
I mentioned this whole exchange to my own editor later in the day, half-expecting a sympathetic laugh, and instead got a genuinely useful suggestion, that I should actually write the piece for publication too, not simply as a private letter to my daughter but as something other parents navigating this exact same, surprisingly difficult conversation with their own children might genuinely find useful. I have been sitting with that suggestion since, uncertain whether something this personal should stay private between the two of us, or whether the specific, universal difficulty of trying to explain a lifetime of professional thinking to someone you love in language that actually lands is exactly the kind of thing worth sharing more broadly.
I think I will end up writing both versions eventually, the private letter for her alone and a separate, more considered piece for publication, though I suspect the private version will end up being the considerably harder, more honest one to actually finish, precisely because there is nowhere to hide behind craft or professional distance when the only reader who actually matters is sitting across the breakfast table from you, cereal in her mouth, genuinely waiting for an honest answer.
I think, in the end, this whole flustered morning taught me something I probably should have already understood clearly after twenty years of professional writing on this exact subject, that explaining something honestly to someone you love, with real stakes attached to getting it right, is simply a different and harder kind of writing than explaining it well to a general audience of strangers. I am grateful, oddly, for the reminder, however uncomfortable it felt sitting there over breakfast this morning, unable to find the words I thought I already had ready.
More from this author at Caitlin Moran, prat.uk.