Recently I changed my bio on Instagram to include the word feminist. The feminist movement is something I identify with closely. In college, I have already written several papers on feminism, discussing topics such as feminists during the French Revolution and early American feminists.
So when I changed my bio to include this word, I knew I was associating myself with a whole movement, and knew a lot of the history behind the word and what feminists have gone through to get women to where we are at today. I felt pretty proud of myself, too, like I was somehow standing up for myself by officially labeling myself with this one word, on a platform that anyone and everyone can view. But, my best friend felt differently. When I proudly held my phone up to him to show him what I had done, he gasped and immediately tried to convince me to change it. I was so confused. What was the big deal? He knew I was a feminist, and what that meant to me, how could he ask me to change that? “Oh, no”, he tried to explain to me “I understand you're a feminist, and I totally agree with you, but I just don’t want people to hate you. Why don’t you just change it to equalists or something.” Equalist? Is that even a thing? Why would I change it from feminist to equalist if I identify as a feminist? He tried to explain to me that they are the same thing, but I'd never heard of it. After some research, I've learned its meaning. So, from what I understand, equalist is considered an umbrella term that covers all the genders, races and ethnic groups. So it is basically for people who don’t understand that feminism already covers that. It’s for people who think feminism is not only just for promoting the rights women, but think feminists want to promote the rights of women over men. Which is not what feminism is about. According to the Oxford dictionary, the word feminist is described as “A person who supports feminism” and feminism is described as “The advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.”
But feminism has grown to encompass so much more than just women’s rights. Just some of the issues feminism fights for are marriage equality, transgender rights, and society's dangerous views on masculinity. It is called feminism because it started out as a term associated with the women's movement in France at the end of the 1800s and it mainly focuses on women's issues, but what's wrong with that? There is a lot of women's issues that need to be talked about such as the wage gap, birth control and abortion laws, child marriage and female infanticide. Even if it was just about women's issues so what? Why should a moment's worth be determined on how much it benefits men anyway? We couldn’t have one movement talking about our problems without men getting offended?
So, I know people have problems with the words feminist and feminism. I understand the words have negative connotations in some people's minds. But does that mean we should stop using them all together? Should we rename the whole movement just because a couple of people gave it a bad name? I don’t believe so. Yes a few ‘feminists’ say they hate men or a few promote the idea of women being better than men, but that's not feminism. A person who hates men is referred to as a misandrist, and that is not in line with what feminism stands for. Besides every social movement or religion or political revolution has some bad eggs that try to twist its meaning and make it something it's not, but is it really these few extremist type people that turn other people off from the movement or is it the idea of social and political equality that scares them away?
