Feminism is Not a Dirty Word

It may seem counterintuitive to say so, but: many Americans today are feminists. On issues from abortion rights to fair pay to professional opportunity to the need for collaboration in domestic labor, feminists have by and large won the public to their side. And you would have to dig pretty deep into the reactionary barrel to find someone who thinks women should not have the right to vote. By now, basic feminist ideals about equality between the sexes are hardly controversial, abortion notwithstanding.

Why is it then that people who subscribe to feminist beliefs and critiques so often recoil at the notion that they are themselves feminists? As far as we can tell, feminism has nothing to apologize for. No feminist has ever started a war or caused an economic crisis; that’s more than you can say for democracies and capitalists, though there is no price to be paid for claiming allegiance to democracy or capitalism. More to the point, that is far more than you can say for the increasingly rickety patriarchal order of things, with its very specific ideas about the proper place of women and its violent and exploitative means of putting them there.

We frequently hear that feminism is an unattractive thing to identify with because it is a movement for harpies and hippies and bra burners. It seems that the law of patriarchy which dictates that everything women do must be ritually devalued and diminished applies most stringently to feminism itself. But there is no reason feminism has to accept its definition from people who are hostile to it - we define it ourselves. Feminism, in fact, is for a lot of people! You have radical feminism, liberal feminism, anti- and pro-pornography feminism, Critical Race Feminism, and many others. There is a feminism for everybody.

Try saying it out loud: I am a feminist! You might find it empowering.