Hey friends, my name is Jessie Shields and I was raised by a family of what were supposed to be strong women. A lovely woman outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania decided to adopt a Chinese baby as a single woman who “didn’t need no man”. To help herself out with all the late night wake up calls and babysitter bills, she moved in with her mother into a delightful suburban home to jointly raise this one-year-old baby, baby me! I grew up rather inconspicuously, just hanging out under shady trees in my front yard playing Go Fish with my grandmother. She’d take me to play tennis, or to play basketball, or to swim. My mother would come home at night from working a full day, and heat up macaroni and cheese for us all to eat while we watched that night’s rerun of the Brady Bunch. Void of the father and abundance of children and sassy nanny, that’s just who my family was.
I was educated in the Quaker system, whose primary tenet of education was equality. My family was just another family in a large metropolis of well-educated liberal people. As I broke into my teenage years, I started to dress in shorter shorts and I learned a curse word or two. Because I was notably less rebellious than my peers, I leaned heavily upon the tri-generational stronghold of my family to keep me on a straight path. Then I met a boy and fell in love. Instead of teaching me how to light a joint or replace vodka with water, he taught me how to mow the lawn and do my own finances and set mouse traps and change the microwave light in my kitchen. I knew how to do my own laundry and how iron and how to cook elaborate meals and what fluid is most effective for cleaning baseboards, but I did not know how to do other adult skills.
Turns out, neither does my family. We have a finance guy, and a lawn guy, and a bug guy, and a tree guy, and a light guy. My mother’s speed dial is as follows: me, my grandmother, the subway lost and found, and handyman Greg. One day, there was heavy snow outside and so I got dressed to go and shovel it. My grandmother told me to get undressed because it wasn’t a woman’s work. Shovelling a white fluffy substance not a woman’s work? This was a foreign concept to me, but I accepted it. We had a male neighbor anyway. A while went by and our shower needed to be recaulked. Again I decided to go to the store to repair it, but I was told it wasn’t a woman’s work. I accepted it. I believed that my family was made of trailblazers, both single women tackling the world as complete individuals. Nothing was off limits to them, including having a fatherless child. Some leaps like creation are not hard, but light bulbs are. I was always told that my family was fearless, so it was disarming to see how phased they were by non-traditional gender roles. My name’s Jessie Shields and I was raised in a female household, but we did need men.
So here I am Hamilton College. I’m just a girl, and I do know how to do my own laundry. I can cook, and I can iron, and I can finally shovel snow. I’ve heard of something called feminism and I think it sounds pretty cool. While I think I’m still confused about what is and isn’t a woman’s work, I think it just means everything. I am a woman and I am ready to work, so I am ready to do everything.