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I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting. Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the meeting, and I begged her to let me go along.

Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind.

My mom was very much the product of a very paternalistic, deep-southern culture, but also a repressed feminist. Her way of being defiant was to raise us to be rebellious ourselves - basically, the opposite of who she had to be in her own life.

My mother was a single working mother; she started having children very young. There was a tension inside her about who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do and how she couldn't achieve the things she wanted to.

My mom was a big feminist, and when I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to have typical girl toys: she did not let me have dolls. Barbies were banned in our household. She read feminist books to me; my mom was a major feminist.

My mother liked to command me to do things I found scary. I always wanted to stay home and read. My mother only ever wanted me to get away.

My mother wanted a conservative, secure life, and she has been married to my father since she was 18... A lot of hard work went into that marriage and a lot of not getting what you want.

I rejected the traditional notion of 'women's work,' but I never thought of my early ambitions in a feminist way, exactly. Primarily I rebelled against apathy and limited education. I was rejecting a whole way of life that I thought trapped everyone.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.