Born To Run. By Andrea Askowitz

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Bonnie Askowitz and Hillary Clinton

Bonnie Askowitz and Hillary Clinton

This story by our teacher was just published in Manifest-Station.

MY MOM has spent her entire adult life volunteering for the Democratic Party. She’s also an artist and was also very active in the women’s movement. She was the president of the local chapter of National Organization for Women and the head of the Miami Women’s History Coalition. 

 

 

 

She campaigned for equal pay for equal work and worked so hard for the Equal Rights Amendment that I can still recite the language: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The amendment died in 1982. I was 14.

My brother and I grew up under women’s lib, which meant there were no distinctions between chores. There was setting the table and taking out the garbage. There were no boy colors or girl colors. I had a purple bicycle, my brother had yellow. There wasn’t even a distinction in clothes. My mom tells me that at three years old, I only wanted to wear my brother’s clothes, so in every picture from that era there I am in beige corduroys and a brown T-shirt that said, “Keep on Truckin’.”

 

Click here to read the full essay in The Manifest-Station

 

ANDREA ASKOWITZ is the author of the memoir My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy and the editor of Badass True Stories. She is also the co-host, teacher and co-producer of the podcast Writing Class Radio. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, xoJane, Brain, Child, and other places.

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allison langer

Allison Langer is a Miami native, University of Miami MBA, writer, and single mom to three children, ages 12, 14 and 16. She is a private writing coach, taught memoir writing in prison and has been published in The Washington Post, Mutha Magazine, Scary Mommy, Ravishly, and Modern Loss. Allison's stories and her voice can be heard on Writing Class Radio, a podcast she co-produces and co-hosts, which has been downloaded more than 750,000 times. Allison wrote a novel about wrongful conviction and is actively looking for an agent. Allison is currently working on a memoir with Clifton Jones, an inmate in a Florida prison.