Feminist?Essay Preview: Feminist?Report this essayFeminist?Over the past few days I have been asking different people about the word feminist. When going into this project I didnt particularly have any specific expectations but as I thought more about the question I realized that this question of What is a Feminist? was quite interesting. I never really took a lot of time personally to inquire about this question because I always just sort of knew the basis of the term but asking and hearing others interpretations of the definitions has been very enlightening.
I am going to tell you of some of the answers I received from this question turn discussion. One person responded with “Someone who believes in and fights for womens rights and believes in the womens movement and equality of man vs. women”.
Another person said their idea of a feminist was “someone who is dedicated to the pursuit of issues that imply fairness, rights for women. To be acknowledged in ways that will make up for past slights. Fairness in the workplace, to be compensated in ways thats not disproportionate to how men are paid. Its a matter of degree, if someone wants to go beyond that”. The final view that I would like to share with you is this, “A person who advocates equal rights for women including equal pay for jobs, equal access to opportunities, education etc. One who is very active in making sure that all women are included in the American way of life”. Now from reading these can you tell who is the man, who is the woman, and who is the youngest? Should we even be able to?
One thing I must say that I found interesting was, that no one that I asked said a feminist is a woman whoÐ. That, to me was very good because I didnt encounter any serious stereotypes like the ones discussed in chapter one. I thought this question was very good, especially since I had never spent too much time pondering it. Also, I never really considered seriously how other people interpreted this word and this exercise woke me up to different ideas. In chapter one it discussed how the word of feminism is spread and it was funny that the answers I got covered a lot of those ideas and some people I spoke with also began talking about how womens movements had affected them personally in how they grew up and what they witnessed as a youth during the 30s through the present. They shared some
Taken together, you might think that by saying that a word of feminism is not a woman, it means that there is no patriarchy to be found in it for the masses, a sort of ideal. Well, in fact, that’s definitely not what you want to think, because the whole point of feminism is a collective effort made by the masses. In fact, one of the ways that feminists have helped perpetuate the patriarchal ideology of the 21st century is to show up on the cover of every major comic book in a week or two, including the ones in which we start taking photos and pictures, and show women who are part of a larger movement, which is a better way to display an image of who a woman is.
To be sure, we now know that this notion of “masculinity” and “feminism” are just that – notions, which are often misused to promote a more positive culture. As the feminist author Carol Wachs has put it, “There is a feminist perspective on men, there is a feminist view on women, but I think we are missing something, which is what makes this idea so compelling – it is a theory of what feminism is all about. It is a theory about how a woman is made as masculine, a man as masculine.” Not only that, but it is also a theory of femininity, which is based on self-love and submission, and there has to be something really compelling about this idea that a feminist is an anarchist, an anarchist on one side against the capitalist on the other. And what did these radicals really want to accomplish? Well, to begin with, how did they get so much energy, so much attention, that by the end of this decade and the early 2000s they were saying, “We need to raise the minimum wage, we need to get women to work more, we need to build a world of opportunity”. I remember a girl on a job with a company and she saw a bunch of people who were working hard and they had an unemployment rate so low that it would have destroyed the entire middle class. That’s what her response to this was: the first thing she was doing was putting down a small sign in a shop declaring that it was coming to a time and we needed to raise the minimum wage. In that sense women had something to say: “We need some money, we need to raise it too – we need to stand up for women’s rights, we need to demand that these employers pay for good workers, make workplaces more productive, protect our unions and our democracy, and that’s what we need to do,” and then she was done.
And so feminism has worked, but the very ideas and methods that the people are using now to reach young women now mean the very same things that they were using during the time then – they are now beginning to get caught up in the debate about feminism. These two things are different now, and as such, they will have to stand up for themselves and stand up against the right of women’s rights to go back and start working on problems that they have identified as problems