In this article in British newspaper The Guardian, a national poll found that even though many people said they experienced “discrimination,” they still were not big fans of modern feminism. In part:
Granted, their sample size was quite small, if carefully selected, and this is Great Britain. But still, I’ve heard plenty of these ideas coming from Americans too, both male and female. What’s the opinion out there in Doperland?
My daughter-in-law is so against references to gender that she won’t even play “girls against the guys” in partnership games. No observance of Mothers’ Day or Fathers’ Day either. “Parents Day” is okay.
And yet she hates to have the word “feminist” applied to her. Like many younger women, she has a misunderstanding of feminisim. She thinks that all feminists support women working outside the home and devalue child-rearing.
That is so bogus! Feminists support choice for both men and women. Equal rights, equal pay, equal opportunity. Are any of you really against that?
I’m glad that many young women these days have reason to take their improved status for granted. But so often they are ignorant of what it took to get this far.
Imagine a world where women could not go to Harvard, Princeton or Yale or to the service academies. Imagine going to college and being locked in an all girls’ dorm at eight o’clock every night while the guys were free to come and go from their dorms as they pleased. Imagine a time when women couldn’t become rabbis or ministers, deacons or elders. Imagine women not being given social security credit for working at home when their husbands died.
If you want to know if a nation discriminates against its women, look at the composition of their ruling bodies – legislative, judicial and administrative. What’s wrong with this picture?
Just recently I read an article about how Walmart descriminates against employees in opportunities for advancement and pay for doing the same job. How can they still get away with this?
Women are now in law schools and med schools in equal numbers
as the men. That’s a long way from the reality of the 1960’s.
Do younger women think that they are stronger as individuals than their mothers’ generation? That is so naive.
Like post modernism and Political correctness, Feminism seems to have become a label for a set of loosely related ideals that you don’t happen to agree with. Its no surprise that people would be againt feminism without being at all hostile to the majority of the ideals it strives for.
I think that that is a perfectly consistent position. Feminism is about equality between genders. Your daughter-in-law would prefer ignoring gender alltogether. Its not that she wan’ts to go back. It is that she wants to go forward.
It’s interesting that the article seems to suggest that people have largely given up on the belief that their lives can be improved, with people taking an attitude that you have to grin and bear disparities.
I think this kind of fatalism is very sad, although it is common in most areas, where people have given up on the idea of mass movements, solidarity and working together to achieve things.
This is ironic because the feminist movement (and the previous women’s rights movements) have been genuinely very successful in changing women’s rights and abilities in the past 50 years. (In contrast, what has organised labour managed to achieve in the past 50 years? Industrial decline, casualisation and redundancies.)
It’s not that inequality doesn’t exist, it’s just that people think the best way to overcome it is day by day, little by little, rather than through large organisations, campaigns, and politics.
It also perhaps reflects an increased uncertainty in people’s identities: they don’t want to be labelled or placed in a group, whether that group is called “women” or “feminists”. Being a pessimist, I think this is due to a general loss of identity and the lack of people’s real control over their lives. And again ironically, this will promote further unhappiness, because identifying commonality of feeling and situation with other people is vitally inportant in understanding the world and why you are in the state you are in.
If these women were ready to identify as something other than feminists or women (e.g. as proletarian, as consumers, as colonialist oppressors), I would be more optimistic. But there seems a lack of self-reflection or self-definition.
… um … not really.
Ignoring gender altogether is NOT the goal of any feminists I have ever read/spoken to/heard from.
Of course I don’t know all feminists so there may be some who do wish for that. It is still inaccurate and misleading to say that this is what feminism is “about”. As the old saw goes, there are as many feminisms as there are feminists.
Many feminists say “Women are different from men in many ways, whether physical (can’t lift as much weight) or cultural (expected to do most of the housework) or social (are construed as “bitchy” while a man acting similarly would be “assertive”) or economic (have to take time off for maternity leave sometimes, which affects their career). Their choices and freedoms and opportunities are often limited by this. This should not be so.”
It’s picked up a bad rap, due to either P.C. things or due to the people who actively oppose it. I think most of the younger women who don’t like the term don’t know what it actually means.
Ummm… your daughters instnicts on this issue are not entirely “bogus”. The notion of what “feminism” is in a personal, political, philosophical or social context can cover a lot of territory. Having said this there are vocal and influential sub-groups under the big feminist umbrella that are not overly fond of “breeders” and consider staying at home to raise children to be distinctly second class work. Although numerically a minority this somewhat radicalized group and their perspectives are the true intellectual core of modern feminism.
Women are not stupid anjd can intuitively read a lot of situations better than any team of political or philosophical analysts. Many (obviously not all) women want desperately to stay at home to be with their children and resent being judged or subtly sneered at for making this choice. Modern Feminism may make the appropriate noises about supporting stay at home mothers who just want to be supportive wives and good mommies, but it’s heart is not in it, and women realize this.
In my thirty years of feminism I’ve never had a problem distinguishing radical separatism from mainstream feminism and I’ve never met a woman who didn’t respect the desire to raise children. To say that radical separatist feminists’ perspectives are the true intellectual core of modern feminism is absurd.
Having said that I agree that radical feminism has been trotted out as a straw man so many times that there are many people, women included, who buy it. It still takes guts to call yourself a feminist after all these years. People will still say crazy, stupid things about how you want to prevent women, who “just want to be supportive wives and good mommies” from doing that. In a way it’s nothing new. Feminists have always been demonized for what they haven’t accomplished as if we have failed and should, in all fairness, not complain about the small things when we haven’t fixed the big things.
I pretty much agree with refusal is talking about. Young western women are world-weary and jaded compared to their mothers. Me, I think it’s because of a million things that have changed in the last 30 years. There is an illusion of empowerment that protects many younger women from feeling affinity for women who have less. It’s a very me-oriented culture.
This issue of women rejecting feminism is covered in Naomi Wolf’s ‘Fire with Fire’ btw.
I certainly agree it is a ‘me-oriented culture’ but I think that younger women feel so DISempowered, that they just don’t bother. The world seems so scary: imminent environmental disaster, well-publicised violent crime, unemployment, atheism, it sucks the sense of violition right outa ya.
No, Melanie I agree with you. I guess what I should have said is that there’s an illusion of empowerment that makes it easier to handle the disempowerment over big things and insulate ourselves from them.
The other day in the Toronto Star this female reviewer gave Legally Blonde five stars (if you’re a woman) and two stars (if you’re a straight male) and then went on to expose the femisim of Legally Blonde 2. This is pretty much what I’m talking about. Do I need to waste energy sitting at my breakfast table fantasizing about how cool it will be the day a female reviewer can give her opinion without apologizing for not thinking of the male point of view? It sort of sums up a phenomenon I see where women would rather segregate feminism to a safe, girl-power sphere than pay attention to the reality of their situation. The reviewer points out that Elle fighting for animal rights in Legally Blonde is an allegory for women banding together to fight for children’s rights. I think she actually feels so empowered by this message of sisterhood that she doesn’t feel any conflict at all about the fact she’s apologizing for being a female reviewer. I guess what I’m getting at is that there is a misdirection in the glossy, girl-powery empowerment. There’s some kind of dazzle effect to it or something. I think it creates the illusion that feminism is a cinch. If this is feminism, why would young women feel they need it?
I don’t know anything about the state of feminism in the UK.
In the US, “feminism” has become so identified with the Left that, as the country has moved to the right, feminists have been left behind. The tendency of feminists is to look to the federal government as the resource of first resort for every real or imagined problem that they feel women should be concerned about. The decline of communism has partially discredited the idea that the government ought to run everything.
Add to that the strident vehemence with which hard-core feminists enforce their group think orthodoxy, and you have a group that it is becoming increasingly hard to identify with. Feminists are required, without any exceptions whatsoever, to be enthusiastically pro-abortion, fervently pro-Democratic, unanimously anti-military, and unshakeably committed to an “us against them” attitude towards men.
All the issues with mainstream appeal - equality of opportunity, the battle against sexual harassment, women in the workplace - have been largely achieved. As the movement becomes more closely identified with fringe issues like trying to change the labor costs in female-dominated job classes by government fiat, it is only natural that centrist women will tend to cease identifying with “feminism”.
Have a look at the Ms. messageboards for examples of the kind of thing that offends people into the “I’m not a feminist, but…” formation. Those people are crazy.
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, that is what I was saying. Zoe’s daughter dislikes references to gender and doesn’t call herself a feminist for that reason. I mean really if you dislike references to gender you probably simply just dislike the name feminist.
Okay…so that I may be disabused of the “absurd” notion that one of the reasons younger women are disaffected from calling themselves “feminists”, is the core “male as oppressor” paradigm that informs much of feminist theory in academia, please describe for me what “mainstream feminist theory” is in fairly specific terms so that I can know better.
This sums up quite nicely why I’m one of those young women who dislike (nay, find it insulting) being mistaken for a feminist. I’m republican, pro-life, don’t hate or love the military, and I think guys- as a whole- are pretty ok. I don’t feel that feminism has anything to offer me beyond the possiblity of pay equality, but that fight has been going on since before I was born and doesn’t seemed to be much closer to being won…
Required? Since when? In what rule book? That’s an assumption made by society, but one that is entirely untrue. It is completely possible to be a feminist and be Republican, pro-life, patriotic and inclusive of the male gender. I myself fit two of those descriptions, and I’m a feminist to the core. I believe in recognizing, respecting, and accepting differences in gender while not seeking to make women more like men or men more like women. I believe in equal treatment and equal pay, but more than anything I believe that all women deserve to be treated as human beings, not as playthings, pawns or puppets.
[And for the record, the term pro-abortion is lame; I’ve never met anyone who was pro-abortion, but merely pro-choice.]
The reason why is that the word “Feminism” has been hijacked by far, far, left academics who have changed it from being a struggle of men and women being treated as equal human beings, to one of gender and racial power structures in which woman have been forced into a position of submision by the constant threat of male rape.
This is why you get so many women who say “I’m not a feminist, but…”
Behold the power of any label. No matter the original intent, the common sense fire for justice, most of 'em are usually corrupted just as thoroughly from the outside as inside. Zealots and even passive dweebs can warp commonsense excellence to their own pathetic ends. Pick your comfy label.
I’m a life-long, proud, pragmatic feminist from birth. No woman in my family was born sheltered from life’s blows. They worked; by god they worked. In the home, raising children, nursing the sick, loving their men and still taking part in community life. Weak? HA! Some of 'em handled complex routine (and emergency) financial concerns as a matter of course. People do what they have to do to survive. And that includes women.
When that contribution is discounted, everybody loses. That’s feminism. I remember, too vividly, the days of being denied credit in my own name because I was a woman. No other reason needed, with no legal recourse. Being hired for work I’d sweated blood for, then being told I’d only fill in until somebody “who really needed it” applied. Responsibility, drive, will, need, dedication: all were subordinate to the body I was born into. Changing the status quo doesn’t have to mean victimization, pay-backs or becoming the enemy. Sometimes it can just mean balance.
Being a strong woman doesn’t mean burning bras or hating men. (Eerie how the accusations blur in crossfire, huh?) It’s granting basic respect for the work women do. I’m within two remembered generations of being able to vote, drive and hold property in my own name. There’s a blurry but real line between comfy spin-labels and actual rights. Spin shouldn’t obscure that. Changing the status quo doesn’t have to mean victimization, pay-backs or becoming the enemy. Sometimes it just amounts to balance.
Veb
shrew, I’m with you on calling out Shodan on that “pro-abortion” crap.
Honestly, any woman who doesn’t believe that a woman should have the unequivocal right to make informed decisions about her own medical care, is NOT a feminist, and cannot be until she changes her opinion on that subject.
If an individual is against abortion, she doesn’t have to have one. To be a feminist is to recognize that the movement is about freedom for all women to shape their own lives according to their own values.
The same thing applies in other issues as well; If a woman doesn’t want to stay at home with her children, she doesn’t have to. If a woman wants to be a sex worker, or a porn star, she should be free to choose that path.
Feminism is about MORE choices for women, not fewer ones.
I am a feminist, because I believe everything I posted above, and because I also believe that women should recieve equal pay for equal work, have equal opportunities and experience equal partnerships.
If you’re curious about the demographics, I am 23, Canadian, and queer. And yes, I love my mother. 
Precisely. Anyone who expresses even a doubt about abortion for all cannot be a feminist.
At a stroke, you have eliminated almost half the US population.
And you wonder why feminism is being marginalized.
Feminists are, more and more, given to statements like “No one who voted for Reagan can be a feminist!” And thereby almost automatically condemning themselves to being a minority.
Regards,
Shodan