Call Me Feminist

            I read an interview with Juliana Margulies in Time Out Chicago and I was struck dumb by something she said. She said, “I was very judgmental of all those political wives that you saw standing by their man because I thought, Oh, my God, I went to Sarah Lawrence College. [Laughs] It’s not that I’m feminist so much as I’m a believer in equal rights” (http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/movies-on-demand/15167646/julianna-margulies-interview). Let me repeat a part of what she said, “It’s not that I’m feminist so much as I’m a believer in equal rights [emphasis mine]”. Now let me give you the definition of feminist according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “An advocate or supporter of the rights and equality of women”. Please tell me how being a “believer in equal rights” and being a feminist are mutually exclusive?

            The thought was percolating in my head that night when I had a conversation with my boyfriend. We were chatting about our day when I bring up this quote and how I found it absurd and ridiculous and he tells me “I am not a feminist”. After that all you could hear was my shocked silence. This is a man who is respectful of women and we have had many conversations where he voiced support of women’s rights, but yet, he was not a feminist. I tried to understand why and I admit I do not totally understand the why because it is incomprehensible to me, but basically it boils down to he did not believe all feminist thought. I tried to compare it to belonging to a political party, but that comparison did not work. He did not want to be labeled as a feminist because the feminists were not always right, or they were the ones screeching loud enough to have their crazy thoughts heard. At least, the ones he did not agree with.

            While on the phone with him I googled feminism and read him the definition from the Merriam-Oxford dictionary, which stated, “1) the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes and 2) organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests”. I then asked him if he believed in the ‘political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and he said, “yes” and I then said, “well you are a feminist”. We circled around the topic for quite awhile until I just had to get off the phone. Here was a man who often argued the nuance of a word with me, and yet, he could not accept that by definition he was a feminist.

            I started making phone calls. I called my friend Kris and recounted the conversation, but I added another layer to it. I am angry because no one will stand up and state that they are a feminist for fear of…what exactly? There has been a very concerted effort by the media, by the Christian far right, by organizations who want to see women stripped of their rights, by politicians who believe that regardless of a woman’s right to choose that she in fact does not have any rights over her own body or that of her unborn child, of a talk show host who thinks it is perfectly acceptable to accuse a woman of being a whore and a slut and by some women themselves who believe that feminism is contrary to their right to have a family. And we have all sat back and quietly let it happen. Now Planned Parenthood is under attack, my rights as a woman are under attack, women still make only x amount on the dollar, there is no woman president or vice-president, the United States still has less women in politics then some third world countries and that is ok? It is ok because there is no one standing up for women today. Let me rephrase that, it is ok because there are so few who are standing up for women today and when they state demands like, equal rights for women, they are ridiculed, shamed and shown the door.

            I have a friend who is a brilliant and gifted lawyer and human rights advocate. In law school she had a professor tell her class that they had to wear skirts on job interviews and that once they had the job they should do things, like bake a cake, in order to get ahead. My friend spoke up and said that her grandmother fought for the right to wear pants and she would not be wearing a skirt to her interview and, oh yeah, aren’t we in this day and age past this? I will not bore you with the shit storm that ensued, but suffice it to say the law school was not happy with her, my friend that is, not the professor. In fact the professor got away with saying such blatantly sexist things-and she was a woman.

            I called another friend who works and is a mother and wife. She pointed out that maybe people are not willing to say they are feminists or stand up for feminism because feminism has failed. She is right- the glass ceiling still exists, women, even in America today, do not have equal rights or the same equal opportunities as men. I pointed out that women’s rights are gradually being stripped away. The legislative changes that are being proposed and have been approved are shocking. Yet, who is fighting against these changes. Women’s voices have been silenced.

            I have to argue though that there have been positive changes thanks to feminism. Now we have the right to wear whatever we want. Most of us do not remember the days of being required to wear skirts, but my mother does. I have lived through some of those changes. When I was a girl growing up I was odd because I played kick ball with the boys while all the other girls did demure things on the playground. When I was growing up there simply was no WNBA or Women’s Professional Soccer League. If you were to have told me that I could grow up and play basketball professionally I would have told you that it was not a possibility. I have to believe that, while of course the women are paid on average sixty percent less then their male counterparts, they owe their ability to play to Title IX. I was born just as Title IX was implemented, and so I do not think I personally felt the results. Except, I look at the women coming out of high school and college today with such athletic ability and they were helped by Title IX. One of the controversies surrounding Title IX is that it is detrimental to men’s sports in high school and college. While, I do not want to see things taken away from men to be given to women, women’s sports in high school and college still receive way less then the men’s. How is that equal?

            I am a feminist. It has been a long and varied journey and I will admit I have been pissed off at feminists. While, I have been angry at some of the views that they espoused, it does not mean that I am not a feminist. It does not mean that underneath it all I do not believe in equal rights for the sexes. I am a Democrat, and occasionally Obama says or does something that I do not believe in or I disagree with, but still at heart I believe in democratic principles. The principles of feminism hold true, but somehow the message has been distorted, destroyed and lost.

            I am going to figure out why. I am going to ask questions, shout on the rooftop, and overall make a nuisance of myself to figure out why. I need to know why in the nineteen nineties while I was in women’s studies classes I found a community of amazing women, and a few men. When I was in school in the beginning of the 00’s the program had changed and was called gender and women’s studies and I was in an amazing community of gay, lesbian, bi, transsexual and transgendered people, and some men. Outside of the program in the nineties people generally would engage with me and discuss feminism without anger or fear. Yet, outside of the program in the 00’s my thoughts were met with disbelief, disgust and anger.

            I started to shrivel up a bit and I kept those thoughts to myself. I worked at a job where it was appropriate to address the problems that women face internationally, yet at the same time all of the people in charge all the way up the chain of command were men. So, at work I could figure out how to bring gender justice to Iraq, but not to my office. Outside of work I stopped talking about it.

            Now, I’m enraged and I want to talk about it. Over the last year of school I encountered so much ignorance, apathy and anger about feminism that I was shocked and appalled. These were the people who were trying to work in the non-profit industry and they could not talk about feminism with out, figuratively speaking, turning their heads and spitting. I started arguing and I kept arguing until I had to pull out my inhaler take a breath, and then I kept arguing. Maybe arguing is the wrong word-I kept trying to educate. I wanted people to understand what feminism meant and what the benefits were.

            It all circles back to the conversation I had with my friend, the one whose son likes his toenails painted and that’s ok. She asked where are they? Where are the feminists? Occupy Wall Street is a clear movement (granted I do not know if they are clear on what they are doing), but there is no Occupy Gender. Why and where are they?

            That is what I hope to figure out. I hope that you, as my friends, can see that if you believe in equal rights for women, then it is ok to be a feminist. Nobody is going to stone you to death, well, at least not in America. So, please, stand up and be counted as a feminist.

LostontheMoor by Kandy Christensen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.