Reason for hope: The young women and girls who are giving misogyny the middle finger |
When I was in Washington for the March for Life, I visited the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. The brick house was built in 1800 on a Capitol Hill street corner and burned in the War of 1812, only to rise again, phoenix-like, in 1929 as the headquarters for the National Women’s Party and hub of the American suffrage movement. I made this side trip because I wanted to see where the first wave of feminism had flourished into being. For all its flaws (hello, white feminism, meet your deeply rooted origins), the suffrage movement eked out women’s first rights and rose defiant against its contemporary anti-feminist culture, and the irony of its status among today’s anti-feminists was not lost on me as I padded through the house, its stained-glass windows making a kaleidoscope of light. Suffragist women were jailed, beaten, and force-fed if they went on hunger strikes to protest, and still they fought for the right to vote, a right that some anti-feminist women today, nearly a century later, want to repeal. For feminists, this was the moment things started looking up; for anti-feminists, it was the moment the world went to hell.
Inside, I planted myself in front of a door-sized ornate mirror decorated with a gold decal sticker of another frame. A small plaque beneath the mirror encouraged museum goers to take a selfie: “See yourself here.” I turned that phrase over in my mind as I stood there, staring at myself, face puffy with exhaustion, hips full with a too-steady diet of chocolate, and really thought about it. What would it take for us to make a shift as seismic as women’s first emancipation? The white marble busts of Alice Paul, Alva Belmont (who, if you don’t know, was not just the pocketbook of the movement but a woman with a wicked taste in feathered hats), Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton surrounded me. I may not have wanted their feminism, but I knew all of us today owe them a debt. If they were alive, I thought, we’d likely have much to teach each other.
Turning to go upstairs, my guide, dressed in full park-ranger attire, pointed out the seven gold-tipped, spiked poles mounted to the stairwell. They, the actual poles the women used to fly their protest flags, were taller than I, their surfaces slightly knotted and dinged. “You can touch them,” the guide, Lauren, said as we walked up the steps. “Rub off a little courage.” As I walked through the house, I admired the suffragist women’s knack for flair and pageantry. They knew how to make a dope sign. Often in the gold, white, or purple of the movement—or sometimes all three—the huge cloth signs balanced hope and demand, shame and surety. One sign, gold on gold, read in all capitals: “Forward. Out of the darkness. Leave behind the night. Forward out of error. Forward into light.” Another, purple on white, with a scalloped and fringed edge: “Mr. President what will you do for woman suffrage?” And perhaps the most famous, some of the last words Inez Milholland Boissevain, the woman on the white horse, uttered: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” It was the last sign I saw, though, that sent chills skittering up my spine—the good kind of chills that told me even these early feminists knew the movement needed to keep building, building, building to thrive. Framed behind glass, a watermark cracking down its middle, it read, “The young are at the gates.”
They say you can’t go home again. But if you pester the principal enough, you can go back to high school, which is almost the same thing. Since starting this project, I’d wanted to return to my old high school gender studies class, a place that had played a formative role in my own feminism. It’s likely that, in the early 2000s, my high school was one of a handful in the entire province offering gender studies classes. That’s since changed, thanks to a group of young women called the Miss G——Project for Equity in Education. (Julie Lalonde, whom we met in chapter two, was one of its members.) The project is named after a case study in Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s 1873 book Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls. Miss G——, a young woman of remarkable intellect, died, doctors declared, because she tried to compete with young men in the academic field. “Believing that woman can do what man can, for she held that faith, she strove with noble but ignorant bravery to compass man’s intellectual attainment in a man’s way, and died in the effort,” at least according to Clarke. The goal of the Miss G——Project was to implement gender studies electives in high schools across Ontario (and, ideally, spark similar curriculum changes across the country). After an eight-year advocacy and public awareness campaign, the project succeeded. In fall 2013 the first gender studies classes debuted across Ontario high schools.
I’d badly wanted to sit in on those first classes, and in January 2017 I finally got a chance. What kind of young women and men would sign up, I wondered? Would this new generation of budding feminists sense the fault lines across generations? How did students engage with these new feminisms, and how had the class changed in the fifteen years since I’d been a high school student?
On the day I arrived, freezing rain had slicked the sidewalks and popped my umbrella open like a muffin top. Pathetic fallacy: something I’d learned in high school. I walked up the front steps, paused. Reoriented to the office. Nausea swam through my déjà vu, a physical feeling that started at my toes and made my hands lurch a lopsided signature when I signed my name on the visitors’ log. Then Erin Crawford, teacher of the grade eleven gender studies class, appeared, carrying a clock (seriously—pathetic fallacy!), and her presence saved me from folding time in on itself like an accordion.
We walked down the same sticky linoleum hallways I’d walked down every day for five years (I went to school when there was still a grade thirteen). I was chatting away about how long it had been since I’d been back, when suddenly my insides dipped. We were passing it: the locker, my old one, the one that my teenage rapist had pushed me up against, his hand to my throat, warning me not to tell. In that instant, I thought: And still we question whether these young women and men really need gender studies—if they’re ready, if they’re interested, whether they’ll relate.
In the classroom, Crawford hoisted herself onto a desk, hanging the clock, while I looked around the room. The desks were old, with the same seafoam green and faded blue hard plastic chairs that I remembered, arranged in a fan. At the back wall, fluorescent paper letters demanded “Be the change!” They hung over a long, rainbow-colored grid of pictures of famous people captioned with phrases like “She happens to be a lesbian” and “He happens to be gay.” Another wall was decorated with posters the students had made. One said “Feminism is not a bad word”; another “Be happy, be comfortable, be yourself!” A few simply prescribed “love.” One stated “Love is love.” Posters celebrating transgender rights and trans love decorated every wall. On these walls, body shaming was condemned, feminism was intersectional, and both J. K. Rowling and Ani DiFranco held places of inspiration.
A poster asking “What is wrong with this picture?” featured a collage of magazine cut-outs showing hypersexualized men and women (Axe ads had their own special column). Another, tucked beside Crawford’s desk and taped to the blackboard, read “Feeling uncomfortable is a necessary part of unlearning oppressive behaviors.” On the way into the class, I passed a small alcove covered in yellow Post-its. A sign reading “Positive Posts” invited the students to leave some nice words. There were more than fifty, with short bursts of solidarity. “Smile.” “You matter.” “I love you.” “Shine.” “You are worthy.” The class credo had even spilled out into the surrounding hallway. Giant sheets of paper advised fellow students on consent, gender fluidity, and preferred pronouns; slut shaming, anti-feminism, and not staying true to yourself were all told to take a hike. It was Instagram feminism meets intersectionality, and damn, was it effective. Combined with a truly barrier-breaking, highly inclusive brand of feminism, the self-love side of this new feminism ceased to irk me. It seemed more about protecting mental health and real self-worth—valuable goals for high school students—and less about superficiality. It’s something I could have desperately used as a teenager. This was nothing like my gender studies class fifteen years ago; this was so much better.
The students shuffled in at 10:20 AM, a bundle of sweatpants and leggings, mostly young women, but also a few men, chattering giddily. Racially, they were a diverse group. Crawford opened the class by asking the students for updates on their independent study unit, a research project for which each student must investigate women’s rights in a particular country. Students talked about femicide, access to education, domestic violence, women’s legal rights, sanctioned rape, cultures of obedience, and more. One young woman summarized the problems facing women in her assigned country as such: “But it’s, like, so whack.” The comments made her classmates laugh and also bob their heads in agreement. Crawford stood up. Tall and lithe, she wore an eggplant hoodie, gray skinny jeans, and oxblood Blundstones, which she called “Blunnies.” Her hair was short and asymmetrical, and when she lifted her arm to gesture I noticed a small tattoo on her wrist. In a word, Crawford was cool. “I think in this class we’ve taken away our rose-colored glasses and thrown them out a long time ago,” she said, miming a toss toward the door. “But sometimes, it’s still like, ‘Holy smokes!’”
Next she handed out an infographic showing statistics on women worldwide. Example: “Women preform two-thirds of the world’s work, yet receive only 10 percent of global income.” When Crawford asked the class what struck them about the numbers, more than half a dozen hands flew up. They were particularly bothered by the wage gap and the implications of earning less, not to mention the idea of possibly picking up the domestic slack. One teen, her eyes rimmed with black kohl and a Monster Energy drink perched on the corner of her desk, remarked that if the wage gap didn’t budge, “like, change won’t happen.” The students were engaged, thoughtful, and daring. They were so much more daring than I had been in class at that age. While watching Sheryl WuDunn’s TED Talk on the Half the Sky movement to help women and girls, a conversation erupted over periods and the high costs of menstrual products. Crawford had just commented that many women in India drop out of school once they begin menstruating because they can’t afford pads and are ashamed.
“What do they do then?”
“Shove a towel up there?”
“Oh god.”
“Pads and tampons should be free!”
“Nobody wants to bleed everywhere.”
The conversation evolved, touching on the stigma associated with periods and how more light needs to be shed on homeless women’s access to menstrual products. It’s not something I ever would have mentioned in high school, especially not in class and especially not in a class with boys. But these students dug in with aplomb. When the class bell clanged, they dragged their feet, still chatting. WuDunn’s talk on women who’d overcome oppression inspired them. One student with long blond hair remarked, “How they’re rising above—it gives me the chills.” She sat for a moment, thinking. A quick current shuddered through her. The chills. She grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. As I started to pack up my own stuff, Crawford told me about how she was the first person to teach the official gender studies course, HSG3M, in the school board district. Every year, about twenty students enrolled—not a big class, but an invested one. I was scheduled to come back tomorrow to interview the students about their thoughts on the class and feminism. We mused about what they would tell me, and I remarked that her class was so different from the one I’d taken. We agreed that was an incredibly good thing; feminism has to evolve.
I navigated the hallways out, dodging the teeming students. To complete my high school redux, I’d planned lunch with one of my oldest and best friends, whose family home sat across from the high school. She happened to be there and to have the day off. We used to head to her house almost every day at lunch, dodging across four lanes of traffic (this time, I crossed at the light), cutting through the apartment cluster we called the Red Bricks, then through the alley and into the shelter of her house. Once, we laughed so hard, mushroom soup shot out of my nose. It was that kind of friendship: the kind that fades out the bad parts of your day, and we both had many of those bad parts in high school.
I burst through her front door, rain clinging to my hair. “They’re so young,” I said, by way of greeting, peeling off my coat. I thought about it. “We were so young.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “I know.”
In March 2015, when This Magazine boldly declared, “Canada needs more feminism,” we were, quite literally, saying “fuck that” to the previous year’s heap-ton of messed-up stuff: the charges of violent sexual assault against Jian Ghomeshi, the Dalhousie University dentistry students whose private “Gentleman’s Club” Facebook group talked about using chloroform on women and polled which female classmate they’d like to “hate fuck” the most, the multiple rape allegations against Bill Cosby, and, yes, the rise of anti-feminism. This advocated for intersectional feminism, strong alliances with men, and universal child care. We challenged the idea that feminism needs one woman to be its brand ambassador, celebrated pluralities and grassroots movements, and cheered the power of social media. As editor, I was nervous about how it would be received—I, of all people, knew what a charged issue feminism had become—but it became one of the best-selling issues we ever did during my five years at the magazine (though I did receive a couple of middle fingers and one very angry monologue from a woman anti-feminist at that year’s Word on the Street festival in Toronto). The launch party, which featured talks from two women of color and a transgender woman, was packed.
The perception that young women don’t care about feminism stubbornly persists, but that’s an unfairly broad characterization. The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll reveals that young women, on the whole, are actually more likely to say they are either a feminist or a strong feminist. A full 63 percent of women aged eighteen to thirty-four embraced the f-word, the second highest out of all age groups; women aged fifty to sixty-four nudged them out of the top spot at 68 percent. The younger group was, however, far more apt to say it felt the current movement focused on issues that mattered to them. Nearly 60 percent of them agreed feminism had zeroed in on the right issues, and more than 80 percent agreed the movement was empowering—a marked difference from older generations. They were also the least likely to call it outdated, at only 16 percent. If anything, a closer examination of all the “Are you a feminist?” surveys shows that young women care deeply about feminism; it’s just that their feminism may often not resemble that of those who came before them. As discussed in previous chapters, that difference, when expressed in individualistic or even commodified attitudes, can be problematic. But, frankly, it can also be incredibly inspiring.
I created my own informal survey in January 2015 and largely promoted it, on purpose, through social media. I knew it wouldn’t be the most scientific study, but I didn’t just want to know the numbers; I wanted to know what women today thought about feminism. I wanted millennials, those who grew up with, and were now possibly even entrenched in, our digital culture, to answer me. To my surprise, the survey received over one hundred responses in the first few hours it went live. In the end, more than three hundred people answered, and most of them weren’t even trolls! On average, those who filled out the survey were close to my age: in their late twenties and early thirties. All genders responded (close to 15 percent of those who completed the survey were men, actually), but I was most interested in the answers of those who identified as women, transgender women, or gender fluid. The idea was to hear how women themselves, and particularly the age segment we seem to puzzle over the most, interacted with the f-word and what it meant to them.
Of the women who answered, 88 percent said they identified as feminists. Though I didn’t give them the option of choosing the degree to which they were a feminist, these variations emerged anyway. The word “feminist,” I acknowledged, can be loaded. Tell me more, I asked. Why do you identify with it? Some of the answers were so short and to the point, they made me laugh. “I believe in equality for women, duh,” said one twenty-four-year-old. A twenty-eight-year-old responded, “Equality yo,” and a thirty-four-year-old offered possibly my favorite answer: “Next.” It really should be that simple! I also appreciated the bit of snark I received: “I believe in equality and I know what the term ‘feminist’ actually means,” said a thirty-year-old. Some were emphatic and fed up, for example: “Because gender equality is not a reality. I’m sick of accepting the status quo,” said a thirty-seven-year-old, and, “The idea of not standing up for my own rights to equality, not to mention the rights of women and girls around the world, is reprehensible,” said a twenty-nine-year-old. Women talked about reclaiming the word and taking it back “from people who have twisted it or turned it into something negative.” They talked about the importance of intersectionality and elevating long suppressed and oppressed voices within the movement. And they talked about the importance of doing more than just using the word: “Feminism is an everyday life practice, not an identity to slip on and off whenever it suits you,” observed a twenty-nine-year-old.
By far, though, the most common answer I received relied on the dictionary definition of feminism, with many young women born in the 1980s, ’90s, and ’00s asserting they believed in feminism because they believed in equality and equal rights—no elaboration necessary. At the same time, some of the more interesting answers came from those who were grappling with the term and what it meant to them. In some cases, these women actively positioned their use of “feminist” or “feminism” against perceptions of the wider movement, both external and internal. There were a lot more of these answers than I anticipated, such as those included below, all from women under forty, across the LGBTQ spectrum:
“I consider myself a feminist in the original meaning of the term: absolute equality in work, life, and relationships as well as complete control over one’s own body. I do not advocate aggressive blaming or finger-pointing at the opposite gender, and I do not believe in women perceiving themselves as perpetual victims of the patriarchy. Sisters need to do it for themselves.”
“Yes to equal rights, pay, treatment. Not picket signs.”
“I haven’t completely unpacked that yet. Injustice and inequality infuriates me. What infuriates me more is how passively we all accept it. Rape culture and sex shaming are so deeply ingrained in all of us and I want it to stop.”
“I do, but I didn’t always. I find many people who identify as feminists go to the extreme to identify women as victims or do not acknowledge the intersectionality of gender. After all, white women only have so much to complain about; we need to be listening to our sisters of color.”
“I believe in equality, although the term ‘feminist’ is starting to annoy me.”
The uncertainty revealed many things: a fear of doing it “right,” a retreat from the traditional political expressions of feminism, a frustration with the trappings of the word, a need for a fuller commitment to intersectionality, and worry over whether they could take ownership of a term they felt was historically rooted in fights outside their everyday experiences. But nowhere did I sense a complete ignorance of what feminism meant, nor any sign that post–Mad Men–era women had collectively hit themselves on the head and suffered mass amnesia. They knew the political actions from which they benefitted. Though today’s feminists may have shifted their focus to different issues, many of which reflect our modern, messy anxieties over gender, and some of which can be considered trivial, they had not, as is sometimes suggested, forgotten that it mattered. Young women have spearheaded some of today’s most energizing campaigns, utilizing social media and technology to connect, share, and discuss on an immense scale. Some of us like to dismissively call this “slacktivism,” that catchy portmanteau of “slacker” and “activism.” Pop science writer Malcolm Gladwell disparaged it in his 2010 New Yorker article “Small Change,” in which he argued, “We seem to have forgotten what activism is.” I think we’re underestimating how powerful and courageous a loud, expansive, public conversation on feminism can be, particularly at a time when we’re so averse to dropping the f-bomb.
In spring 2012, a group of Duke University students who enrolled in a class called “Women in the Public Sphere: History, Theory, and Practice” underwent a feminist awakening. While they learned the history of women’s activism in the US inside the class, outside there was a renewed focus on sexual assault on the Duke campus and much discussion about the university’s party culture. The move to defund Planned Parenthood was just getting started. Rush Limbaugh had called Georgetown University law student and birth control advocate Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.” As a result, classroom discussions were lively, in-depth, and intersectional. “But,” wrote course instructor Rachel Seidman in a later analysis, “when my students tried to talk about these ideas outside of class, they were often shut down by their peers’ refusal to engage or by accusations that they were ‘man-hating feminists.’ Deeply frustrated, they asked, ‘How can we make any progress on any of these issues if we can’t even talk about them?’” As a solution, the students decided to open dialogue on campus through a social media “PR campaign” for feminism.
Together, the class recruited a diverse cross-section of their family, friends, and acquaintances, giving each a black marker, a small whiteboard, and instructions to finish the sentence “I need feminism because . . .” Each posed with their answer for a photo, which the students used to launch the campaign “Who Needs Feminism?” On the morning of April 12, 2012, they plastered the Duke campus with campaign printouts and wrote an op-ed for the school newspaper. “But as these posters remind us,” students wrote, “the goal of equality is not yet achieved . . . It takes a lot of people to change a stereotype.” Online, students created Facebook and Tumblr pages to share the photos. They were not prepared for the reaction. Even now, wrote Seidman in her analysis, “Who Needs Feminism? Lessons From a Digital World,” they have no idea how the campaign became so popular so quickly.
But soon, women and men from around the world were sending in their own photos. Buzzfeed, Mashable, and Huffington Post called. Good magazine named the campaign its Good Gone Viral national winner. High schools and colleges around the world have now participated in their own versions of the campaign. In 2013 Oxford University organized a photo shoot and more than five hundred people showed up. Today, years after the class graduated, the Facebook page is still active. The conversation has moved past “the already converted,” as Seidman put it, and connected many people who’d never otherwise meet to discuss feminism.
And that isn’t the only example of social media getting loud. In Canada, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported became a global phenomenon within twenty-four hours, with nearly eight million people taking part in the conversation, many of them young women. (I wonder if Antonia Zerbisias, one of the women who first sent this hashtag into the world, and also the former Toronto Star journalist who’d ridiculed fourth-wave, intersectional feminists, realized that many of them were the ones carrying on her hashtag.) The hashtag #MMIW was created to draw attention to Canada’s many missing and murdered Indigenous women and to pressure the federal government into launching an inquiry. Toronto teens Tessa Hill and Lia Valente started the online We Give Consent campaign in 2015 to get consent into Ontario’s provincial curriculum. They won. The hashtag #YouKnowHerName trended after Canadian courts enacted a publication ban on Rehtaeh Parsons’ name, the Nova Scotian teen who died following a suicide attempt after she was mercilessly bullied when a photo of her rape was shared around her school. Saying her name was a way of honoring her and keeping the conversation about cyberbullying, rape, and consent going. And then there’s #YesAllWomen, the global movement that arose after the Elliot Rodger killings and also in response to the reactive #NotAllMen chorus. It continues to underscore women’s daily experiences with misogyny. These online conversations aren’t the only way young women are engaging with feminism, but it’s time we stop discounting them. Perhaps what’s truly outdated is thinking that these conversations don’t make it offline into real, live action. Thousands of young women are practicing their feminism every day in their communities and in their lives. I know that because, despite all the women I’ve met who say feminism is passé, I’ve also met a whole helluva lot of young women who say it’s not.
I returned to my old high school to meet with a few of Crawford’s students and hear more about their lives as teenage feminists. I met them in the library, a huddle of feisty, thoughtful sixteen-year-olds in plush red chairs, positioned at the back of the two-tier room, next to the manga. The group who volunteered to chat with me was diverse, including two young women of color (Victoria and Areeja), two young white women (Kaitlyn and Josie), and one teen named Sam who identified as genderless and prefers the pronoun they/their. (“There’s male and there’s female,” Sam told me, placing one hand to the far left and one to the far right. Then Sam stretched one arm far to the back. “Then there’s me. I’m, like, outside getting McDonald’s.”) When the term started, Sam told me, Crawford had asked the class to raise their hands if they were a feminist. The only person who did so was Sam, whose mother is the president of the board of directors of their local chapter of Girls, Inc. Even so, Sam once recoiled from the word, too, particularly when Sam’s mom tried to send Sam to a Girls, Inc. summer camp. “I told her, ‘I don’t want to go to a quote-unquote feminazi camp—especially since I’m genderless.’ I didn’t want to be surrounded by girls because I knew I’d get called ‘she.’” But that wasn’t what Sam experienced at all. “One, everybody called me ‘they,’ and that was great. Two, I learned more about what feminism is. It’s not what some people might think it is. It’s not all about ‘women are better than men.’ It really is about equality and raising girls to believe they are equal—they are strong enough.”
“I didn’t raise my hand,” said Victoria. “I don’t really think I thought about it ever. You pick up on little things that people do to put down girls. You don’t really think you need to do anything about it. It just happens all the time so you just go with it. Being in this class and being aware of what happens to women everywhere—I am a feminist.” Kaitlyn added that the stereotypes about feminism had also stopped her from raising her hand that first class, but the more she realized the word is not “what people have made it,” the more she changed her mind: “I would say that I identify as a feminist now.” Areeja agreed. She had always questioned the “girls are supposed to” thinking she heard, but until she got to class, she said, “I never questioned it too much.” Now, she’s more confident in her opinions. Josie, who played on the boys’ hockey team for six years growing up, and was the only girl on the ice, said that she always identified as a feminist but never understood why it was important to voice it out loud. Plus, there was a stigma. Still, if asked that question today, she and the rest of the group would all raise their hands—at least, if they were in class.
“Although has anyone noticed that when you tell somebody you’re in the gender studies class they give you the look?” asked Sam, demonstrating a facial expression that conveyed disgust for all things losery, a look I perfected during my high school years but have never been able to effectively pull off since. Sam called it the look of “Oh, really?” The others murmured assent, and stories emerged in rapid fire.
“A friend was like, ‘Ugh, really?’ Are they teaching you that there are two genders?” said Sam, referring to an internet meme that pokes fun at the assertion there are more than two genders.
“That’s the number one question that I got,” added Josie.
“Or that it’s a girls’ class,” said Victoria.
“Or it’s like, ‘You actually like that class?’” added Kaitlyn. “Stuff like that.”
When I asked them what issues are most pressing for them and their peers, and how increased awareness of feminism might help tackle those issues, the group didn’t hesitate. Slut shaming. Sexual harassment. Consent. Josie, who told me it was the first week she’d come to school without makeup on since grade six, felt that girls in the school were taught not to complain if they were assaulted. “A guy can come up to me and grab me by any part of my body, and that’s okay because he wants me,” she said. Victoria smirked, “It’s flirting.” If sixteen-year-olds were encouraged to dismiss this kind of stuff, Josie wondered, how would they react when they were older? She added that she was thankful she’d never been harassed or assaulted at school. She let the words hang in the air for a moment and then reconsidered. Actually, she added, that kind of behavior was so normal at school, she had experienced it; she’d just never known to call it that before. Someone once grabbed Sam’s crotch to “see if I had a dick.” A teacher once said it was okay for students to ask Sam about genitalia because the students might be curious. Sam had been called a “special snowflake” a lot.
Then there was that Instagram thing. The year before my visit, they told me, a group of male students from the schools in their region started posting nude photos of girls online. Everyone was talking about it. Girls were named and rated and called fat sluts. Victoria spent a lot of time blocking on social media people who were following the account. Eventually the ringleaders were caught, and it fizzled out. But boys at the school are still constantly asking girls for nudes and then sharing them as soon as they get them. The group was disappointed by the administration’s response, which, they felt, was often to simply delete the photos. Girls were told not to send them. Fair enough, they said, but what about the culture of pressure, of learning consent and respect? What about that?
Victoria added that she’d been the target of slut shaming. “It happened to me. I had a bad reputation in grade nine,” she told me. “People would yell ‘slut’ to me in the hallway. No one ever stood up for me. Because I had a bad reputation, they had no respect for my body. A guy would talk to me and be like, ‘OK are you going to send me nudes?’ Or people would come up to me and just grab my waist. Even though I did do dumb things it didn’t mean that anyone could touch me. I was just supposed to take it. If I didn’t, guys would get mad at me: ‘Oh, you’re ugly anyways—you’re gross.’” Then she said something that made my skin prickle: “And like it was my fault.” On some level, it seemed, she still hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that she’d deserved it. My mind flashed back to the “positive posts” that decorated the entrance to the gender studies classroom. Suddenly, the little affirmations of “You’re worthy” and “Love” scrawled on the pale yellow squares didn’t seem the least bit hokey. They seemed vital. This, I realized, was a feminism of healing.
The most important thing many of them had learned in gender studies, they agreed, was that things can change, even if it starts out on the tiniest of scales. I’ve learned this, too: once young women start engaging in feminism, amazing things can happen, whether they’re aiming big or small. Victoria, like others in the gender studies course, has started to live by a creed she’d learned in that unique classroom: Little things do matter. “When you speak up, just in little groups,” she told me, “or in response to things that you hear in the halls, it does make a difference. Even though they may not change the way they think or believe, you may get them to start thinking about it.” In these small ways, the group agreed, you can make progress. Just then, the bell rang out through the library. We’d lost track of time. I was supposed to have met with a second group, but there had been too much to say. They could have talked for hours more.
As they packed their bags and headed to lunch, Sam lobbed out one more thought, an endnote to the conversation: “Consent and respect, my friends!” They all nodded. Consent and respect. And then they walked away, each back to their own friend groups, soon swallowed up in the crowded hallways.
Minnah Stein held up a colorful drawing of a woman with a very big head. “This is Marie Antoinette,” the sixteen-year-old told me. Her smile stretched wide as her hand dipped to grab the next drawing. “And this is Catherine the Great.” When Stein was little, she loved the book Lives of Extraordinary Women, written by Kathleen Krull and illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt and first published in 2000. “I drew all the women in it,” she explained. Around that same time, her parents would bring her with them to the voting booth, explaining why it was so important to vote and what the suffragists had done so she could have that right. They told her how hard it had been for those early feminists: the violence, the beatings, the jail time. “Feminism isn’t just a label that I put on myself,” she told me. “It’s part of my core beliefs. It affects who I am, the decisions that I make, and how I interact with other people. Feminism is something that I was taught, but now growing up it’s a choice I make to practice every day through my thoughts and actions.”
Stein founded the organization EMPOWER U to help other students in Sarasota County, Florida, take a stand on the issues that mattered to them. For Stein, that issue is sexual assault, which she calls one of the biggest civil rights issues facing youth today. She easily rattled off the statistics for me: one in five girls and one in sixteen boys will be sexually assaulted in college; it happens in our elementary, middle, and high schools at the same rates. Two years earlier, she said, she held a pledge drive at all the high schools in her county, encouraging students to stop sexual assault in their schools. Last year, she screened the documentary It Happened Here, which tells the stories of five young women who were assaulted on their college campuses, throughout high schools in her county—a total of more than 1,500 students. That’s not to mention all the volunteering she does.
When I asked her how she keeps motivated, Stein responded that she has ambassadors at schools across the county who help her spread the word and get things done. Even so, it wasn’t like they were talking about the f-word 24/7; it was simply an ethic by which they lived. Besides the occasional remark at a debate event (the very classic “Girls can’t do X because they’re girls”), she stressed that she hadn’t even experienced much sexism in her own life. But that wasn’t the point. She wasn’t trying to improve only her own life. “My friends and I don’t sit around and talk about how we’re feminist and all the feminist things are going on,” she said. “We support each other in our feminist views, and I think that’s something that’s really important. I think some of that is because we’re still young and as we start to get older, we’ll start to see sexual discrimination more and more, especially in the workforce and the colleges. Maybe that is what leads to being more vocal about identifying as a feminist. When you see things like this happening, you want to get involved and make sure that you can help stop it.”
And she’s far from the only young woman who’s getting involved. In Toronto, Kasha Slavner took six months off school to travel around the world with her mother, Marla. They documented the adversities people faced worldwide as well as how they triumphed over them. Her idea was to tell these stories through a feminist lens but also through a teenager’s viewpoint. Kasha raised funding for her documentary journey, called the Global Sunrise Project, through crowdsourcing and in-kind sponsorships. When I spoke to her after the film’s completion, she told me that the response had been so great that she had decided to delay university so she could ride the momentum and keep working on the project. The idea for the project first sparked when, at fourteen, the organization Canadian Voice of Women for Peace selected her as a youth delegate to attend the United Nations for the fifty-seventh annual session on the Commission on the Status of Women. Surrounded by eight thousand men and women who were passionate about women’s rights, she realized that almost every issue could be tackled through a feminist or gender-equality lens. “I was seeing people from almost every kind of community in the world, every continent, both rural and urban settings,” she told me. “And the fact they were so knowledgeable and passionate about the issues was really inspiring—to learn from them and hear their stories and what drove them. I felt really empowered coming back from that.” She’s never missed a UN Status of Women session since.
Although young women like Slavner and Stein are extraordinary and raising awareness on a large scale, I also spoke with many other girls and young women who were all practicing feminism in their own ways—working, through routine actions, big and small, to shift the conversation. When I put a call out for interviews in 2016, I was inundated with responses. For days, my phone buzzed frequently with new email notifications from girls who were eager to talk about their views on feminism and the issues affecting them. In the grocery store. While I was in kickboxing class. Out for drinks at a Harry Potter–themed bar (yup). I got the sense that these teenagers were thankful for the opportunity to parse their feelings on feminism and to have someone listen enthusiastically to the concerns they had about issues facing them and their peers. I heard from women all over the world. I spoke for nearly two hours with a young blind woman in Brunei who wanted to start a feminist club, even though, she said, such a thing was unheard of. An Indian teenager going to school in Dubai told me about heading and co-founding a forum called Fem that holds talks and competitions related to gender equality, as well as campaigns that focus on different themes. She had faced a lot of flak recently, she shared, because she’d decided to make a career in biological research. People had been telling her it would harm her marriage chances. “My success,” she told me, “will be my rebuttal.”
I heard from a young woman who was in the process of starting a girl-only model UN club. She was tired of the boys always talking over and interrupting the girls in her school’s current club. Another young girl living with a physical disability talked about the need for intersectionality and why it must expand to focus more on those with disabilities. Many of the girls I spoke with named slut shaming and rape culture as the issues they’re most urgently fighting. Body image came up frequently. Reproductive rights were high on the list of issues they wanted feminism to meet head-on. They talked about transgender rights and defying the very construct of gender. One seventeen-year-old in New York told me she was going to be the first woman president, but then, laughing, said she hoped it wouldn’t take that long. “The future of this is bright,” she said, speaking of her generation. “I think it’s an unstoppable thing.” They were hungry for change.
These young women inspired me. They made me think. And they challenged my own biases around our new generation of feminist activists. These girls and young women are all giving misogyny the middle finger. They’re doing it on their own terms. And in all the many reports I read, historical accounts I unearthed, and conversations I had with women of all ages, perhaps my favorite definition of feminism came from a fourteen-year-old girl in central Indiana who was too nervous to tell her mother she was a feminist. “I was thinking about this before,” she paused and let out a long mmmmmm. “What is feminism?” She went quiet, thinking. Suddenly, she smiled broadly as she landed on it. “It’s about uplifting those around you.”
Bingo.
Thank goodness my own answer to the question “What does feminism mean to you?” has evolved in the fifteen years since I first discovered it. And yet I think back tenderly to that young girl. I smile at her spiked hair and her wide-leg pants, purchased from the boys’ department, of course, with money from her summer job as a camp counselor for kids with special needs. I laugh at the way she thought to defy beauty standards with safety pins in her ears and various found objects, including little plastic Barrel of Monkeys toys—I joke not—in her hair. But it’s not a cruel laugh. I want to hug her when I think of the way she stayed up late writing poetry, chatting with friends on instant messaging, and burning mixed CDs filled with riot grrrl music, searching the depths of her young soul for the answer to the question “What does feminism mean to me?” These might be big questions for a young girl to ask, but then again, she’s not precisely a girl anymore, is she? Certain things have a way of making you grow up, of making you realize feminism isn’t a word or a theory but a way of living, of seeing the world as the place it could be. Idealistic? Sure. But ask her and she’d say: only if you stop working to make it happen. So, as much as her feminism—my feminism—was clumsy and narrow, as much as she needed to learn and be challenged and grow, I cherish her. I respect her.
That is, ultimately, what I want for the feminist movement, in all its pluralities, to do for the young girls and women who are discovering it: cherish and respect them. It’s imperative for the feminisms of our future to draw a hard line against racism, ableism, classism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia—all the ways in which we promote hate and preach division. But we cannot smooth over our intersections; we must acknowledge those differences, make those shushed voices loud, and seek to remedy our mistakes. We must act. But what if we acted compassionately as well as courageously? What if we leaned into our discord with love and respect and trusted—trusted—that feminism is a constantly evolving politic but we can get to the right place together. Yeah, sure, this sounds like a Hallmark card for feminism, something you’d find tucked into the “Get well soon!” rack with little doodles of blooming flowers, halved fruit, and other euphemisms for vaginas drawn all over it. But there must be a way, I figure, to talk amongst our differences, to make the movement accessible and welcoming for newbies, to connect and disagree, and through this political force, to uplift all of those around us. So, yes, maybe it sounds cheesy. But is it unattainable?
Back at the Belmont-Paul museum, another old protest banner provided a potential answer. It simply read “Failure is impossible.” It was a reminder not to underestimate women. The early suffragists faced a violent anti-feminism not so different from today’s attacks. Back then anti-feminists distributed postcards that depicted suffragist women as ugly, overweight, and generally prone to having gigantic schnozzes. In these cartoons, they beat policemen with their umbrellas. Women were painted as actual fluffy cats in hats, complete with draped suffragist capes (a suggestion that granting women the vote was about as useless as giving it to Mrs. Tabbykins). Yet another, in a series by the same artist, Walter Wellman, showed a wavy woman who said of her demand for the vote: “I believe in a reduction on the tariff of Paris gowns.” The artist helpfully added a bit of creep to the blood boil: “I’m just sixteen. Yours for votes.” Silly, vapid young women! Oh, how these naysayers must have been surprised when women won, toppling voting restrictions like dominoes across the country. And today, the young are at the gates still—promising that, this time when feminism rises, it will listen and make change for everybody.