Melissa McEwan from Shakesville recently asked her readers "what classic stereotypes about feminism did you once believe?" I gave this quite a bit of thought over the last few days and realized I had enough material for more than just a pithy comment. Like Melissa, I didn't grow up with a lot of negative connotations surrounding the "F-word." If anything, I have more now, knowing that feminism has done a crappy job addressing the needs of all women, not just middle-class, white ones. However, I'm not willing to abandon the label just yet.
I've written before about wanting to. Right now I'd say I'm aging out of it -- at I'm aging out of the feminist blog world, which has been the domain of the under-forty set, though I guess you could say that about a lot of online spaces. And why should I be a part of something that has historically erased trans women, women of color, and working class women of all races?
I feel as though I'm part of a generation of women who were "born into" feminism. There's a fair amount of privilege in that statement alone: born into it. Who gets to claim it? But with that comes the responsibility to improve upon it, to learn from past mistakes. So as long as the opportunity is still there, I'm not ready to jump ship.
As for the original question, that I have no negative associations with the word feminism, makes it sound like I grew up in some kind of woman-loving utopia, but that was hardly the case. I have no positive associations with the word either, at least until my late teens, because I never heard the word "feminism" spoken except as part of a history lesson. It was in the past; all those rights have been won, etc. I read Susan Faludi's Backlash and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth when I was around seventeen or eighteen, and those books gave me permission to call myself a feminist, but it never felt like a subversive act. My click moment was more a "well, duh, of course" moment.
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