I Grew up in Southwest Virginia and I Grew up a Feminist.

Growing up in southwest Virginia was an experience I’ll never forget or ever want to change. It was full of shoe-less summers, winters by the fire, and a few early mornings spent waking up somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains. Luckily, even though I was constantly surrounded by everything that was considered remotely Southern Virginia, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the major stereotypical ideas of Southern Virginia. I realized after years of living there, that I was surrounded by feminism.

My mother, also a self-proclaimed feminist, raised me and my siblings to view people and nature as something to be treasured and respected. My father did the same, just in a different way. My father is a pure-bred Virginian redneck, a term I use lovingly. He is everything that you would expect someone from Southwest Virginia to be: a dippin’, camo-wearing, whiskey drinkin’ hunter. But he never once lived up to the stereotype that most people would think a man in that environment would; instead, he’s a feminist (although, getting him to proclaim it might take a little provoking).

If you knew my mother, I think you’d understand when I say that marrying my mother says a lot about who my father is as a man. I think anyone who deals with a nature-loving feminist for that long has to agree with feminism or he’d be long gone. And coming from Southwest Virginia, I’ve encountered plenty of those camo-wearing hunters who think the opposite and think a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Some of those people are even related to me. Thankfully, my father has the best of both worlds and he raised us so that we could see that the combination of Southern values and gender equality exists.

I have never really experienced oppression first-hand and I think a lot of that is because I was raised in a household where anything disrespectful was not tolerated. The idea of racism wasn’t allowed near my house and when an uncle came close to muttering something racist around us, he was kicked out faster than you could blink (literally). When it came to something sexist or disrespectful, they were immediately asked to apologize and after the awkward guilt trip, they never said anything sexist again. And I didn’t realize how lucky I was until I left home for college and saw that, along with the change in accents and the emphasis on hunting, the acceptance and ignorance of sexism changed as well. Being out of that comfort zone made me see how much sexism did exist, especially right in Southwest Virginia.

I think being from Southwest Virginia and the fact that I sport camouflage at least once a week is one of the reasons why people are so shocked to discover I’m a feminist or that I’m from a long line of feminists. I always get the “Really? I would never have guessed” or the whole awkward “ Oh…that’s cool”. Their reactions entertain me time but irk me as well, not because I’m embarrassed to be a feminist but because of how they have perceived me. They expect me to have those southern ideals and for me to see the man of the family as the patriarch merely because of where I was raised (they also expect me to have an outhouse as a bathroom and a pig in the backyard, which proves how much they can assume about me). Sure, I was raised to love camping and venison, but I wasn’t raised to see women as anything less simply because I grew up in the mountains.

It saddens me to think that people create stereotypes about those who live in the south or in more rural areas, and it saddens me even more to know that some are often true. Every once in a while, you will get those ignorant rednecks…but you’ll also come across people like my father, who is proud to be a redneck and a feminist. Now, I can’t help where I was born but I can start making a change in those stereotypical views and ideals that surround my home. And hopefully, I’ll be half as influential as my parents were.