I was raised in a typical Brazilian family, conservative and authoritarian, where the father gives the orders and the mother, daughters, and sons obey without questioning, each with their well-established roles. But, from an early age, any injustice bothered me, especially those that happened within my own home. I would think: why does everything only have to be the way my father wants? Why is he, just because he's a father, allowed to be so aggressive? The fact that my father was an authoritarian and sexist individual led me to start questioning and intervening in the arguments between him and my mother, which made him highly critical of me. This worsened during my teens, when he didn't allow his daughters to go out for a walk, to attend parties; we could only go to school and church.

It was in church and school that I got to know and became involved with social movements. Finally, I found the answers to the questions I had. I understood where the inequality between men and women in my household came from, I grasped what sexism was and how it structured not only my family, but also society. In my family, rules were first defined by my father and then by my brothers, so I had to accept that it is men who make everything happen. When you try to subvert this order of sexism within the family, you face the first forms of violence. That's when you have to take a stand and decide whether you'll accept oppression or fight against it. I chose to fight.

In order to live the way I wanted, working, studying, and engaging in activism, I had to leave my father's house at the age of nineteen. He couldn't accept having a daughter who questioned him, especially considering my involvement with social movements. However, in activism, at work, and in unions, men, for the most part, behave like my father. They want to impose rules, disregarding women's knowledge and opinions. That's when I realized that feminist practice is essential in these spaces of struggle for social justice, as well as fighting against structural sexism within the family. This is a long and much bigger fight than we can imagine.

*This was written based on the story of Conceição Amorim.