Remember Shelby Knox, the subject of our 2005 film, The Education of Shelby Knox? Shelby was a feisty teenager from Lubbock, Texas that filmmakers Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt followed in their amazing documentary. The self-described “good Southern Baptist girl” who had pledged abstinence before marriage became an unlikely advocate for comprehensive sex education when she discovered that her town had some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in the state.
These days, Shelby writes for the Huffington Post and is very active in the young feminist community in New York City. According to the Huff Post, she is working on a book about the fourth wave of feminism and “plotting the revolution via Twitter, at @ShelbyKnox.”
We follow Shelby’s Twitter feed, and came across a blog post she wrote yesterday on the occasion of her 24th birthday, reflecting on the evolution of her activism and feminism over the nine years since she started calling herself a feminist, at the age of 15. Here’s an excerpt from her post, entitled “Musings of an Aging (Young) Feminist.”
Today is my 24th birthday. I read a quote recently by Imelda Marcos that really resonated: “My dreams have become puny compared to the reality my life has become.” The ten year old me or the fourteen year old me or even the sixteen year old me could never have imagined that a movie bearing my name would premiere at Sundance when I was eighteen and change the trajectory of my entire life. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that this birthday would mark nine years in the feminist movement, more than a third of my lifetime, or that today I would be participating in the second photo shoot in two months for another mainstream women’s magazine feature on the leaders of the next generation of feminism.
Read the rest of the post at Shelby’s blog, the Ms. Education of Shelby Knox.