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I was from my earliest childhood presented with two distinct paradigms regarding a woman's role (or plight) in this world. There was that of my old-world grandmother Hermila Garcia Lopez, a Mexican unrighteously removed from her land by Poncho Villa's rebels as a child. She believed that one is born what one is and should not overreach or break station. And then there was that of my mother Minerva Mercedes Lopez Caples, a '70s "feminist" and "chicano rights activist" who would insist that whatever men were doing, women could do it better, and who would help my father create multicultural programs for universities and public schools around the country.

My grandmother was a proud woman and I failed to notice that she was indeed quite poor despite her regal demeanor, which "they" could never take from her because it was in her blood. Her genteel manner was infused with a dose severity that was the way of Northern Mexican women from her time and class, women who had learned to be harsh as a way of preserving some control of their environment and their men. Hermila ran her household like a CEO, and the one time my father suggested that we sneak in and clean it for her on her birthday while she was getting her hair done, we learned a very big lesson; my grandmother went on a tirade never to be forgotten, for we had dared to imply that she was running her house so poorly that her kitchen had to be cleaned for her. My father had indeed not thought it through very well; after all, she woke up at 4:00 AM just to make sure everything was in good order before the rest of us awoke, but he had been raised by a different kind of feminist for a mother. Hermila was even further horrified that they had involved me, la nina, in this debacle.

I could hear her scolding my mother for not raising me to know my station. I was to be taught how a clean house looks to ensure that the servants did it properly, but god forbid I should be taught that I should clean it myself. My poor mother would be philosophically opposed to my grandmother's absurd ways (especially when my grandmother herself had not had servants for some time), and grew contemptuous of her elitist attitudes made all the more absurd by lack of property, money and position. My mother was quite different...at least somewhat. I had a nanny, and I should be grateful for that. I believe that my mother considered herself a huge rebel because the nanny and her children became integrated into our family. Until I was three years old, I really didn't know the difference between Maria and my own mother, and it was her sons Churri and Lalo who taught me how to walk. My mother treated Maria like a sister, an intentional decision on her part to provide me with a model of sisterly affection.

I don't think that it was a normal practice for school teachers to hire nannies, but for some reason my mother could not break completely from her roots of nobility, and to her credit it was a good call for my sake psychologically. She was significantly more tender and light than her mother, and she could never earnestly embrace the misandry displayed by fellow feminists. Perhaps it was because her dad and her husband were abnormally decent and respectful to women. She instead focused on philosophical opposition to things like housewifery, joining the PTA, and baking. She refused to teach me how to do anything feminine—at least overtly—yet she couldn't help her own habits and upbringing, and unintentionally taught me to be super feminine, especially through her treatment of men. She was a master manipulator, coy and charming on the surface, but underneath those overt behaviors she was utterly subordinate. Whether she knew it or not, she had been raised to assume that the best she could get from the men around her is the respect of listening to her, perhaps a women could be lucky enough to not be dismissed completely- ultimately I never actually saw her attempt to insist on any particular outcome of her own choosing, in fact she was always defferential to my father believing his were the best choices. Whether this was a result of her humitly and loyalty due to her character or something she learned to due her being female, I'm not exactly sure. I, however learned to follow suit. In the short term she could evoke the most gentlemanly behavior from them, which I picked up on quite naturally, which was a nice skillset to have, yet, on matters of more importance, I always felt that I was stepping out of turn to overassert on issues involving men, which would affect my leadership abilities most of life. Counting on someone else to have good manners and consider what you have to contribute doesn't necessarily lead to the best outcome. My mother thought herself lucky to married to someone who would consider her opinion. She never took things to the next level however, so I learned how to get along with men often at my own expense.

No matter how hard she tried to be in line with this feminist movement, the fact was that she had always made her own money, had always had equal status to my father (they completed their doctoral programs together), and accomplished these things while being model tall and thin, beautiful, and—by virtue of her unshakeable propriety—stylish and well mannered. She could never embody the American feminist prototype, the white, middle-class woman who was throwing out her high heels and make up in favor of a genderless, or even masculine image. Her peer group of intellectual, liberal, progressives with whom she was attending school were on the elite tiers of society. At Hollands College she met her best friend, later my godmother, Sarah Agnes Marshall, who was the daughter of Judge Marshall from Charlottesville, Virginia. Sarah was from a respectable, progressive, genteel home herself and was every bit the proper southern lady, and it served her well. My mother did, in fact, work for what she had, for she lacked the wealth that her peers enjoyed, but was yet endowed with great intellect and solid breeding. Her private high school was all-girls and she learned essential behaviors of society women that were reinforced by Hermila.

When she came of age, however, she still rather enjoyed the company of men, to whom she was never overtly subservient and who seemed to find her charming and highly respectable. She would do things that were outrageous by her standards, such as smoke and drink beer while engaging in intellectual debates with my father and his friends. But to this day I've never heard her swear...or fart. She did readily clean up after the all-nighters with artist friends while my dad slept in, but I had to learn to iron his shirts and do a certain amount of cleaning because she refused and he liked things done to a military standard of order. He felt women should do these things because they naturally did them better. My mother—who was maniacally orderly but not all good at cleaning—pretended to be shocked and horrified by this sentiment, but allowed him to train me to be the quintessential housewife. Personally, I think that she was taking an easy out so that she could work on her writing and still enjoy a clean space. They both found a workable rationale for casting me in this role by saying that someone had to take care of the house when they both had professions. I learned to clean very well (that is, in addition to the cleaning the housekeeper did), and to help my dad in his garden, from which he would proudly cook lavish meals. He was the one who insisted that I keep myself looking polished, and it was he against whom I rebelled when I went through my punk rock phase in the '80s. My mother even supported me when I refused to clean my room and wore torn jeans and ratted my hair. She thought that it was terrible that my father wanted me to be some kind of representative of the bourgeoisie, whom my mother found to be oppressive to the feminist cause. The truth is that I had immense admiration for my mother and hoped that I would be as successful and beautiful as her. The problem would arise between us when I later found that I could not be like her AND live her values because they were completely incongruent. I would have to revert to my grandmother's ways to bridge this gap, which would inadvertantly be disappointing to my mother.

No matter what paradigm I was living, be it the proper lady or the young punk, I was unconsciously predisposed to promoting and organizing people: parties, games, performances. I would sooner or later decide to raise money for something, or promote someone who had some kind of talent or genius. I would always want to look pretty, stylish, and eventually sexy. I would want to spend long nights partying surrounded by attentive males and artsy females. These traits became apparent when I was just six years old. I would spend hours creating a disco in my bedroom, or an opera starring kids from my neighborhood. I loved finding outcasts and nerds and giving them makeovers and getting other kids to appreciate their talents. I liked everyone and did my best to charm as many people as I could as often as I could. I would become exhausted form the intensity of it and retreat into my only-child world and read, listen to records, the radio, and when I felt isolated I would emerge to do it all over again. By fifth grade I had started a class newspaper and realized that I liked to write. I had no idea that I was a "type" for most of my life. I saw myself as unfocused and spent too much time feeling guilty for my vanity and my fascination with how people are the way they are. Through college I found myself volunteering for hospice, translating for migrants at the courthouse and Planned Parenthood, and tutoring jocks in logic and Spanish.

When I turned 21, I faced an unexpected personal crisis, when I started going to bars and there experienced true sexism that I had never known before. Until then, I had no idea that as a woman if I went into a bar alone to have a beer and read the newspaper, men would have a sense of entitlement to me. I had known what I wanted to do and experience as a person, and I was suddenly confronted with the reality of what would transpire on that path because I was female. Many past scenerios began to take on new meaning: the way that teachers had treated me, the way that I had been viewed by friends' parents, even my own parents due to my being female. I realized that I had a huge problem with some of this stuff, and I began to experience the level of anger that the women of my mother's generation had voiced. In fact, to be more honest, I was despondent and enraged, and I suddenly saw the oppression that had inspired the first wave of feminism.

It was in a sociology class on  "the work women do" in society that goes unrewarded, unregarded, and largely unnoitced, that I was became aware of previously unconscious knowledge of myself. Even though the professor stood right there and pointed to very specific things of value—the building of familial and social ties for starters—I found myself contemptuous that I should be expected to do these things just because I'm female. Looking back now it's bizarre to me that I could have been so out of touch with my own nature to not have realized that I was already doing these very things from such an early age—and enjoying doing them! This reaction of mine had nothing to do with reality; it had to do with conditioning and intellectual constructs that had me lying to myself to my own detriment. On some level, I knew this but I couldn't put words to it because no one had taught me to see my own gifts, and I hadn't been taught to identify these gifts as meaningful contributions or as essentially feminine. My mother had not built familial or social ties; in fact she did her best to break them. It was her career she sought to build, and her career was embedded in a paradigm that involved the fight for justice. Justice for ethnics, women, gays, and the poor. In public she was successfully challenging the establishment hard and fast, but behind the curtain she was unconsciously building a new kind of community. She could not value doing so because she was not aware that she was. She only saw the fight, the fight with white men who just didn't get it.

One afternoon, she and I were standing outside sharing a smoke. I was in college and she was teaching classes at the same university at the time. My father had passed away about five years prior and she was exhausted from carrying the torch without him. She confessed this and said that she needed a break. She was essentially asking me for permission to take one. I explained to her that those things were never my issues. Although I was proud of the institutions that they had created, and their promotion of multicultural education, bilingual education, diversity in textbooks, I was inclined to believe that life is too short to be doing something that you don't love. I had heard as much from my father on his death bed. I assured her that he would have wanted her to be happy and that she wouldn't be letting him down. With my blessing she decided to talk to the chair of her department and let her know that she was no longer interested in teaching the courses, all the while bracing herself for a seemingly inevitable shutdown of the programs around her. Later that week, my mother gave me the great news that she no longer had to teach the courses and there were several teachers interested to fill the position. It was at that moment that my mother realized that after 20 years of fighting for these causes, the fight was over and they had won. They were now part of the curriculum of teacher education. Not only at her university but unversities nationwide. She herself had written the grants to fund these programs because the university wouldn't spend resources on something in which they saw no value, and now her chair was telling her that without these programs the university's teacher education program could not compete. They were absolutely necessary.

It would be a decade and a half later that I came to realize that in my middle class, liberal reality I had somehow been naturally predisposed to becoming a different kind of woman than what the post '70s feminist movement of my mother's generation had expected. I majored in philosophy, which was unusual for women, and my advisor did his best to discourage it because (while he ogled me) the classes were simply "too difficult." I became a philosophy major anyway and ended up getting excellent grades. The chair of the department wanted to recommend me to Stanford for a PhD. But my identity was all over the place and I had too many personal issues to work out before I could consider teaching 20-somethings the meaning of life and the true nature of God.

After much contemplation, I decided that I needed to become a cop. It was the only way that I could find balance because it was an occupation whose culture was considred in every way antithetical to the values that I had been taught embrace. With much difficulty I became a sheriff's deputy for two years, and learned some of the most important lessons of my life. Although I can do what men can do—often quite well—I don't want to. I want to hold babies, clean things, put on makeup, be sexy, wear dresses, bring people together, heal, love, and all the things that make a woman feminine. I even enjoy propping men up in their masculinity, which I found was the best thing I did as a cop for my male colleagues. I didn't want to lead the charge; I wanted to support and bolster and back up those leading the charge. Although, I still found ways of organizing parties, such as a Christmas party for the children of the communty. I loved doing it, the Sheriff's Office was happy with the success of the event, and my sergeant was happy to have someone do it that wouldn't complain. People started to enjoy the event and would contribute because they liked helping me. One female deputy tried to convince me that I should be angry that they dumped the job on me for being female, but I couldn't be upset by it. I liked it too much.

I went on patrol a lot and had success in that capacity as well, but I never wanted to be just like the men. I never wanted to be as crude, and I certainly saw things differently in doing the job of law enforcement that set me apart and made me an asset. Most of them wouldn't have noticed or cared, but the smart ones did. My sergeant called me "Miss Sarah" and he appreciated that no matter what kind of jokes he told, I just wasn't offended. I guess even I was a little surprised that I wasn't, but my focus was on the life and death matters of the job. I wanted to prove that I could be trusted with such responsibilities. It soon didn't matter what kind of politics these people had or in what role they cast me. I found myself defending their ways to the liberal elite with which my family associated and into which I had married, to no avail. I also found myself being cast as an uppity feminist by a large group of men and women in the Sheriff's office. I simply couldn't win with either side. Yes, there was a person or two who could dicuss with me these various issues, and thanks to them I would know I wasn't crazy. I was intelligent, flexible, enduring, and forgiving. After the end of the second year, I had learned what I needed to learn about myself. I was an integration of contradictions, but more importantly I knew that in survival mode I had the conviction of a soldier, that I could go into the most dark and masculine place within to protect the citizens I swore to protect. I also learned that the world didn't need that from me. The world needed me to be who I already was: a wife, a mother, a supporter of the children, women, and men in my life. In short, a builder of community.

I began to focus on my new business, the nonprofit that I started, raising my children, and creating relationships between the students at the university and the businesses in town. I threw parties and enjoyed fashion so completely that I acquired a highly social lifestyle and brought it with me to Seattle. After some time I began to meet some amazing women. Women my age like me. Women who have an immensely feminine demeanor, can do what the men can do, but find value in being utterly female. How they came to be this way is as varied as the women themselves, but the one thing they all have in common is a desire to bring people together and build social ties. They insist that it's an important thing to do and are not shying away from the things it takes to do so. I was so happy to find these women when I moved to Seattle that I have been absorbed in building these friendships and cultivating a reality around this "new" culture.

I have heard occasional gossip that there are those women who find us silly in our dresses and high heels. At times even our generosity is seen as some form of gullibility or naivete. I think those attitudes made sense during my mother's era of feminism, but now they are outdated and counterproductive. The men know we can do what they can do, and we have seen that emasculating our sons does not necessarily make them kinder or more successful—quite the contrary, actually. The fight absolutely needed to happen. I remember watching the men in my father's generation degrade their highly educated and competent wives right in front of their friends and children. I was lucky that my own father found this appalling and intolerable. He would without hesitation chastise his friends for such behavior. Thank God for that, because when others tried to tell me that I had unrealistic expectations for the men in my life, I knew in my core that I didn't.

It's true that everyone had their personal issues, but they had respect for each other. I later came to see that it was a kind of dignity found in those who have a code to which they adhere and is expressed in everything, including their table manners, their attire, their handshake, their attentiveness, and their sense of responsibilty for the welfare of others. I have left a couple of men in my life because of those ridiculous, lowbrow behaviors they insisted on coddling, and these were men who should have known better because of the examples and education they had. Perhaps it was the testosterone, or perhaps Generation X was just a messy segway to a better generation of men. Hermila and Minerva never would have put up with it, so how could I?

The truth is that this is no new brand of femininity. It's not even a new language. What's new is that I'm old enough to know who I am within versus the abstract types idealized or villified in the sociopolitical dialogue of the moment. Women have always been the glue of society, whether overtly or quietly. I'm fully aware of the disdain for things feminine when our natural inclinations are seen as frivolities, and the gifts of these things are unseen even though it's these frivolous activities and preoccupations that hold up so much of society. I have the mother and grandmother to prove it. When I reflect now on what those women endured to get the collective moving into the world that I know inhabit, I cannot be so arrogant as to assert that modern women have something better figured out. We have the luxury of finally getting to be women and enjoy it. My mother caused her mother pain by not seeing the importance of her old world ways and regrets it heavily. I have in turn shared my resentsments toward my mother for being part of a movement that de-feminized us and emasculated men. But now, I'm better than that, better than one who stands on the backs of someone else's effort and wisdom while not seeing the benefit to me. I will embody my grandmother's ways and will get dirty and fight the way my mother did for people who can't. But I will do so knowing that the world I live in is quite nice thanks to them. My daughters don't have to know and feel so many ugly things, with which even I am too familiar.

I was never so moved as when I attended a luncheon for the Washington Women's Employment Education fundraiser in 2004. The organization takes in women who lack the skills and education to have a job. A woman comes in and they essentially ask her what job she would like to have and work backwards from there. Wherever her education left off—no matter what level—they begin there and teach her all the way through until she has the very job that she said she wanted. By the time she's finished she has lifted up a whole world of people in her family and associations. This organization was founded by business women on the east side and continues to do mind-blowing work right here in our community. There is no doubt in my mind that one woman can heal the world. There is a value to being loving, pretty, kind and soft. In fact those words describe the very first memories I have of my own mother.

One of my best friends is a facilities manager at Boeing. She travels all over the world and oversees the construction of Boeing facilities from start to finish. She is a petite, designer clothes-wearing girly girl. She smells good and likes to giggle and pull my hair, yet, she has huge responsibilities in her job. She is also very kind. She will never spread gossip, or tell your secret. In fact if you watch her long enough you will find that she keeps friends that no one else can keep by following a simple code. She keeps her promises, she forgives easily, and she watches her words about others very carefully. The more time spent in her company, the more I want to be worthy of her friendship, so I work to be better in my character. Simply by knowing her I have consciously changed my habits and the way I speak about others because I see how well it works for her in her relationships to be this way.

Another one of my friends is being recognized by the Puget Sound Journal for her philanthropy. She used to be a CFO, she now owns a restaurant and is on the board of SIFF. She is a glamour doll if there ever was one. High heels everyday, blowouts twice a week, and the cutest, most contagious girly laugh. She hugs and kisses everybody, but can run a business better than most. Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen her be remotely masculine.

I could list several other just like this—women who are self-made, effective community leaders, builders of society, and utterly feminine. Knowing women like this I wonder why I was taught that being cheerful and polite would be detrimental to my progress as a woman? Oh, that's right...because somehow these traits were seen as unintelligent by virtue of them being feminine. So the women of the '70s withheld them and taught their daughters to withhold them. We've been withholding them long enough that now we're starved for them. I'm finding that men like women who like being women, and there are women who seem to be coming home to themselves in this way. In the case of my friends, they may not even realize it, but they have single-handedly elevated our entire peer group to be kinder people. That includes the men.

I am awed when I reflect on the kind of woman my grandmother had to be, the sense of social responsibilty she had, the beliefs she carried about her position as a woman of society even after her family was run out of Mexico and they had to find refuge in Texas. She pushed her husband to work two jobs to make sure my mother went to a proper private school so that she would learn her proper place in society. My mother thought all of this embarrassing and pretentious, but I am grateful considering what has become of Mexico. It was my grandmother's influence that won in the end. It was never about having or not having money for her. It was about her sense of responsibilty. That she saw it as a fundamental role of hers as the woman of the house to keep her people in their proper place was the thing that would pull me into a place of clarity regarding my own power as a woman in my family and community. My mother's generation did the dirty job of withholding their gifts so that we would learn to appreciate them from a new place. I know women now who embody the type that my mother was trying to raise, someone a little more gender neutral than me. She makes as much as her husband if she has one, and is indifferent to having kids and probably talks a lot about politics. This was not my mother (although she tried her best to be just that), and it's not me, although it almost was. But I would have missed out on a very rich life of family and community building. I would have been ashamed of my longings and perhaps would have been tight and bitter in my disposition for being someone unnatural to my predisposition, someone contrived into being from a sense of right. I'm finding that our real selves lie somewhere in between something innate, something nurtured, and something contrived to suit the times. To ignore the innate is to starve the being and yet expecting it to flourish.

A year ago a male friend referred to me as a person who is the "center point of light," one who attracts others into her orbit. He seemed to find this trait quite meaningful. I'm still not exactly sure in what way, but since then I have been asked to promote countless events and fundraisers and am moderately successful at it. I have helped lift certain people, causes and businesses out of obscurity, and have been told with gratitude that this is a good thing. Often people want to know what, if any, money is involved for me. I consider this question somewhat tedious and overly masculine in its concern, so I usually don't answer it. Money doesn't motivate me the way it does others. (Don't get me wrong; I really like it.) Relationships, however, do. I guess that's because underneath it all I am a feminist of a feminine nature. I have yet to understand the full capacity of this feminine power; I will spend a lifetime investigating it. Thanks to the women before me, I have the loving support of a husband and the best friends I could ever have imagined. I know that 20 years ago this would not have been my experience. I would not have felt so free and safe to be this kind of person, for being a woman would have gotten in the way.