Today is graduation day, and after four years together we will soon go our separate ways. Before our parting, I want to say one thing. If one day you have children - and some of you will, and some of you won't - I implore you to raise your daughters as empowered and affirmed human beings.
Empower your daughters to be accepting, not just tolerant. Show them and those around you that you will not tolerate religious indoctrination of hatred against LGBTQ people and their supporters. Because you know that people aren't born to hate - they are taught to. Fight for marriage equality, for benefits equality, for adoption equality, for insurance equality, for equality of all people. Advocate for your daughter's right to love whomever she wants, and to be any gender, or lack of gender, that she identifies with.
Advocate for your daughters (trigger warning: issues of sexual assault). Because many people in the small Ohio town of Steubenville mobilized to support football-playing rapists, rather than the victim of a brutal - and viral - rape. And because the media stood behind the boys too, lamenting their ruined football careers and praising their good grades. And because the victim was criminally harassed for drinking too much, for asking for it, for "being a slut anyway." Advocate for your daughters because victim blaming is omnipresent in our society, and its presence not only inflicts violence, but also prevents and intimidates survivors into not coming forward with their story. Educate your sons that a woman's body is not theirs to take.
Empower your daughters. Because vendors at the National Rifle Association conference sell an "ex-girlfriend" shooting dummy that bleeds when it is hit. Because the Republican party removed provisions of the Violence Against Women Act that support undocumented immigrant and LGBTQ victims of domestic violence - so only some women get to deserve the protection of their government from violence on their bodies and their lives. Fight for them because domestic violence and dating violence are cemented into our culture and used as an excuse to not intervene.
Empower your daughter to make her voice heard. Because we still exist in a political reality where women are not permitted in all cases to access the birth control that is rightly theirs and access an abortion that is meant to be a decision between them and their doctor. We still have a political arena where, when a young women advocates for her right to birth control, Rush Limbaugh calls her a slut and tells his crazier-than-him radio listeners that she just wants the government to pay for her to have sex. Be involved, because do not for a moment forget that women in 2013 are not given the same pay for equal work.
Teach your daughter that she is affirmed and loved. Above all, empower her to teach this to others. Teach her that feminism is not a dirty word. It is an empowering word - a word of freedom and a word of liberation. It is a word that I take pride in, with the legacy of my mother and my grandmother and the guidance of the six incredible feminists whom I have the privilege of calling my best friends. It is a word that I will use for the rest of my life to stand up and say without waver and without fear that I deserve to be a full human being in the eyes of my country, my community and my world. It is a word I implore you to teach your daughters -- to prove to them that they don't have to stand for objecthood, for disrespect, for inequality. To prove to them that you will stand by their side, through thick and through thin, to fight for the equality that should have always been theirs.
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Alexa Petersen graduates today with a degree in political science and peace and justice studies. She can be reached at alexa.petersen@tufts.edu.
