Being a (female) feminist in the early twenty-first century isn't easy. No sooner do you put your head above the parapet to declare your allegiance to the cause than you make yourself a target for all the misogynistic trolls lurking anonymously in the electronic ether, fingers poised at the keyboards ready to make your life a misery by posting hate about you and threatening to rape and kill you. That this is actually happening, as opposed to something made up by misandrists with an agenda to push, has been highlighted over the last year by the online abuse suffered by feminist Caroline Criado-Perez after she successfully campaigned to ensure that the accomplishments of women continued to be represented on British currency, as well as violent threats made to British MP Stella Creasy, the academic Mary Beard and other high profile British liberal women. (To be honest with you, reading about just some of the abuse that they encountered - and, despite the intervention of the police and the invention of a 'report tweet' Twitter button, continued to encounter, to the extent that Criado-Perez felt the need to close her Twitter account - made me a bit nervous about writing this post and publishing it, let alone publicising its existence to the wider world.)
Hopefully, people like that are in a (very vocal) minority. But if it's unlikely that the people that you declare your feminism to aren't overtly hostile to you, then chances are high that they will be dismissive and/or derisive of your way of thinking. Close female relatives of mine roll their eyes at me should I try to begin to make any point about sexism or issues relating to gender, whilst I believe one of them to have once described my postgraduate research as being on 'feminism and other such rubbish' (a precis that was as factually incorrect as it was mildly insulting). Given that the feminism of the last 150 years has, amongst other things, given them a civil existence separate from their male relatives, allowed them to have meaningful employment and enabled them to bear children out of matrimony sans (most of the) social stigma, you'd think they'd be more open to the idea wouldn't you? But then again, if women such as Mary Berry, who would have experienced the limited opportunities of life as a young woman in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and the changes that second wave feminism would have wrought in it at first hand, can still claim that feminism is "a dirty word", why should my younger relatives who have never experienced the worst of it first hand be any different?
Just as frustrating as my relatives are the friends who tell me that they "are not feminists" because they "believe in equality" between men and women. These friends would not, as far as my acquaintance with them leads me to believe, describe themselves as being particularly politically right-wing. But in so implying that feminism and equality are mutually exclusive, they are articulating one of the right's favourite tenets about feminism: that the movement is all about valuing women over men.
That right-wing beliefs about feminism appear to have been unquestionably adopted by those who would eschew other right-wing dogmas shows how important it is for feminists to speak up on this point, to continually remind people that despite the progress of the last 150 years (for white, Western women anyway), women still don't have a civil existence that is the equal of men's. As feminists, the responsibility lies with us to continue to tell truth to power, to speak up whenever we find women being disadvantaged, belittled or limited in any respect. It's never been easy to do that, and in today's world, where, with a few strokes of the keyboard, vitriol can be swiftly poured into the eyes and minds of those that dare to voice their opinion, it becomes, in some sense, an even braver step to do so. But do so we must. Because we owe it to the women who have gone before us and fought for the freedoms that we do have now, and we owe it to the women who will come after us and will reap the benefits of the freedoms that we gain for them in the future.
That right-wing beliefs about feminism appear to have been unquestionably adopted by those who would eschew other right-wing dogmas shows how important it is for feminists to speak up on this point, to continually remind people that despite the progress of the last 150 years (for white, Western women anyway), women still don't have a civil existence that is the equal of men's. As feminists, the responsibility lies with us to continue to tell truth to power, to speak up whenever we find women being disadvantaged, belittled or limited in any respect. It's never been easy to do that, and in today's world, where, with a few strokes of the keyboard, vitriol can be swiftly poured into the eyes and minds of those that dare to voice their opinion, it becomes, in some sense, an even braver step to do so. But do so we must. Because we owe it to the women who have gone before us and fought for the freedoms that we do have now, and we owe it to the women who will come after us and will reap the benefits of the freedoms that we gain for them in the future.
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